22 years old.
Order of the Phoenix member.
Occupation: Trainee Nurse at St. Mungo’s.
FC: Lee Sung Kyung
A laugh that fills a room and a warmth that can defrost even the coldest of people, she is the sunshine, pure and bright. Her desire to help heal the world, to right the wrongs that have been done to it, drives her like an inexhaustible fuel. Green living. Animal welfare. Gender equality. She will leave this planet a better place than the one she was born into. Her kindness extends to the hospital ward, ever a welcomed presence by colleagues and patients alike. A lollipop in her mouth, sugar on her tongue. There is an infectious energy to her met by an undercurrent of glowing intelligence. But do not be mistaken – she may be nurturing but, like the sun, dare to cross her and you too shall be scorched.
Lily is a trainee nurse at St’ Mungo’s meaning that she spends most of her day (and often night too) on the ward shadowing nurses and surgeons. She enjoys the job despite its long hours. Her medical knowledge makes her an important member of the Order of the Phoenix, often having to attend to people during their protests. She is vocal with her views and, despite the anonymity of the organisation, is proud to tell anyone who will listen that she supports them.
Lily didn’t have many people to fashion herself after — not personally in Northern England, where the most fun was had in tipping cows over. She was precocious, and so she found life there rather droll from the very beginning. Lily busied herself with books — and once everyone pissed off to bed, she listened to news that she thought concerned her on the television. There she was, huddled in her bay window, attempting to figure it all out at a tender middle school age. The aughts had barely begun, and there wasn’t much talk about what it meant to be the woman she would become — so, she just thought she was gay. It didn’t seem to be all that strange; English society was normalizing it, in her eyes. People weren’t being branded criminals for who they were anymore, finally. But that didn’t keep northern folks from being ass backwards, so she endeavored to keep this bit of herself private — just for her family and the person she would love one day. Folks in the country weren’t very showy anyway; they weren’t interesting, and they didn’t have secrets. They didn’t make displays of themselves. That was what Lily knew, and understood. So she didn’t ask for much.
And she spoke simply, because that was what she knew too. She told her parents she liked boys. Easy enough. They furrowed their brows. But they said nothing. Petunia cocked her head. But she said nothing. And so the pattern began. Her hair began to grow out, because that was the style then — the style of people who marched to the beat of a different drum, she supposed, but a style nonetheless. She knew nothing of herself, truly, until she saw her self-discoveries as a closed chapter and began contemplating other subjects, like her ambitions. For many years, she thought she would be a lawyer, and frequently spoke of the law school she would attend. Would it be Cambridge, or Oxford? She was aiming high, and the cupid’s bow of Petunia’s mouth always turned upwards whenever it was brought up. As if she were snarling at it all.
As a future lawyer would, she studied relevant court cases like mad. One in particular changed everything. The news spoke of a court case involving a man and a woman who had wed, but weren’t allowed the pleasures of marriage — the woman wasn’t being recognized as a woman, as she was. Because she had been born as something else. And something in Lily clicked. The next day, her parents and Petunia went out to the shops, and, having feigned sick, she stayed home. She wanted to do something. She snuck upstairs, and into her parents’ bedroom — and tried on her mother’s clothes. Her shoes. None of which fit, of course, but something else did — something inside of her. All the questions that rattled along in her head, that didn’t quite identify with what she had spoken of herself with such childish certainty, ceased. She knew who she was. She knew it.
So, she came out, all over again. Her parents’ brows furrowed further. Petunia’s head nearly cocked right off. And again, they said nothing. Lily’s hair continued to grow, masking the sharpness of her face that she wanted so desperately to hide as her baby fat shed itself right off. Her buttoned up shirts went away; she opted for shapeless sweaters that gave the mystery of a figure not even girls who had been born what they wanted to be had at her age — but she needed the comfort of that mystery, even if it meant nothing to anyone else. Her parents were Tories, and proud ones at that; the more she watched the news, the more she knew how displeased their political leaders were at the turn of events in the inner cities, with people of a different kind rising up and forming their own pseudo-unions. Why were they silent? Even if they hated her, even if they spat at everything she wished to become, she wanted something. Even Petunia did nothing but smile, but not the kind that reached her eyes — the kind that was congenial at best. We can get married alongside one another now, she said, as if it was some fairytale come true. But it wasn’t. It was a horror movie. So she had to escape it, before it took her. And so, on one of her walks far away from home, she met the boy with long hair by the river.
Petunia would tell this all differently, she knew. That’s where the rift truly formed — a difference of opinion. Petunia would claim that Lily was the favored child when all was said and done, that she had proven herself special and upset the balance. They were meant to be ordinary. Country kids. Petunia would also say that Lily had her allowances before everything went to shit. She was never the simple kid that her parents’ lives were built for, after all. But they adjusted. They let Lily wear what she wished. Petunia never referred to her as her brother, once she learned what it all meant. Her hair grew long, past her shoulders and into wisps at her back. And no one batted an eyelash. All three of them — they stayed quiet. That was where the damage was done. No one said how they felt, so no one ever knew. Until it all came spilling out, an unpleasant mess.
It was the fact that she could ask for more of the world — that reconciliation turned the whole fucking boat over. And she hadn’t convinced herself of it; it was the boy who lived on the other side of town, the one who seemed rather strange and lonely, who brought it to light. The one who Lily sought to meet nearly everyday, freeing herself from the confines of a life that, even pre-Hogwarts, she thought too simple to contain someone of her multitudes. She had so much inside of her, when it felt like her sister and parents had nothing — like they were hollow, inside and out. This was a few years before Hogwarts, before she even knew it was a possibility. It took some time before the boy really showed himself, though Lily gave him chance after chance.
They would sit against a tree trunk, side by side, and say nothing. She didn’t want to talk; she wanted to allow him to speak, for it seemed like he had much to say. He never said a word in school, just brooded all day, every day. She wished to help him. But one day, she came down to the river furious, frustrated — and in tears, in spite of herself, because she hated being one of those people who cried when she was angry. She exploded, because she hadn’t asked much of the world, but what she asked got her shoved into lockers at school and threatened just about everywhere else. Gone were the days of wanting privacy; she just wanted to be herself. And Severus smiled as she ranted, for the first time in the short period that she’d known him. It seemed as if he was waiting for her to provide some honesty too, and she had been the one to cave first. Lily explained that she was different, that she didn’t care what other people had to say about it. Immediately defensive, because she expected a negative response if she was to get any at all. She’d only gotten nothing at home, and she’d told no one else — only become the child with the strangely long hair in school who no longer seemed very boyish, and that was enough to receive taunts. But all he did was shrug. He said it didn’t matter. He was rather apathetic in general, Lily noticed, but at least he had an opinion. At least he expressed a feeling. It was enough then.
Her sister grew bitter about the whole thing, and about the letter that summoned her to a new school in a new place, so Lily’s walls built up, far tougher to get past than anything she had constructed when she first understood herself to be transgender. It was a combination of everything, everything, that made her the defensive yet loving soul she would fully become years from then — even if there were only whispers at age seventeen. Petunia had been hiding the letters she’d been receiving from Hogwarts, hiding a part of Lily that she didn’t know Lily was already aware of. You think you know everything about yourself, she would sneer afterwards as she taunted her with an envelope, having made her nearly miss the registration date. You think you have it all figured out. She wasn’t going to college. She wasn’t doing much of anything, besides wishing to be courted. Perhaps going to secretarial school. Lily didn’t want to be bitter back, and so she felt sorry for her instead.
Her father roughed her hair up, said I would expect nothing less from you.Even then, Lily stiffened at that statement; it didn’t seem entirely kind. But her parents packed her things, said she could go — asked her to perform what she could for them. They seemed pleased. Petunia interpreted her parents’ reactions to this quirk that stood in Lily’s spirit as favoritism. But Lily knew, it was nothing of the sort. It was an oddity that they picked at, something that implored them to place their younger child beneath a microscope to discover what exactly she was, and why exactly she could not be happy with what she had. She felt it with every piece of clothing, hand-picked by her from the shops, was stuffed into her suitcase. This was a goodbye of sorts. This was a send-off to a place that could deal with her, handle her — a place for odd people, like her. She didn’t belong here.
School was the sanctuary that she needed it to be, and that was because she made it so. She proclaimed her new name, stuck to it, and left herself open to the possibilities of Hogwarts, for all of its newness to her. She was loud, and she was bold, and she was courageous — and it was not often that a country mouse was anything of the above. Lily seemed to come with everything in tact, which made her stick out like a sore thumb amongst her same aged peers. This, she surprisingly found, brought with it a decent amount of admirers and true friends who actually enjoyed what she had to offer. This was new to her, having been of her beginnings. Other than Severus, she hadn’t made a real friend back home — not one. Perhaps her new relationships were what caused the drift between them. She never figured it out for sure, and stopped thinking about it after a while, because it did nothing but cause her grief. But he’d empowered her by just being there, and as their friendship dissipated and she found new ones to hold onto, it was a fact she never forgot. Even as her friendship with Severus came to pass, however painfully, she always remembered that he had given her the knowledge that home was only a temporary discomfort — even if she had to return every summer during her school years, having nowhere else to go. She could leave when her schooling was done, and be anything she wanted to be.
It was when she stepped into the counselor’s office that she decided she would attend the Gryffindor School and not a moment before. All summer, she was convinced she’d be in Slytherin and finally start her path to law school like she’d always intended. But something stopped her. This is your school, the vice-chancellor bellowed to them all on their first official day. And it was her school. From that moment, she was sure she fit there — that it wouldn’t be like home, where she caught hell for just being herself. But she still remembered home, and she thought of all the other people in the world just like her who had similar homes that they couldn’t escape. There was no Hogwarts for them, no sanctuaries for them to see shining on the horizon. So she settled on studying medicine instead, sure that was where she was needed most. The world was changing, but not fast enough for transgender people, who needed it to change now. She could affect that. She could affect everything.
As the years went by, and her quirks balanced out, she understood that she was built unapologetically herself, brimming with fieriness, but somehow also easily driven to stress smoking. It was an odd dichotomy, but one that stood in her for as long as she had begun to know herself — though, truthfully, that hadn’t been long, considering she knew nothing until that fateful night spent watching the news and mulling over a court case. She was certain of who she was, but constantly anxious about what that could mean, and if it always had her at a precipice — if it was to never provide her stability, simply on the basis of her identity, and how people back home felt about it. At Hogwarts, it was shrugged off, for the most part. People had odder histories, and she wasn’t the first with her kind. Transgender people had come through the place for centuries, and the school had rules to protect them. She was nothing special.
But she was still a northerner, and she knew of the real world, and what it could do. Lily never cared about what people thought — she endeavored not to, after realizing that she would never know how her parents truly felt about her, because they refused to be forthcoming, and how that would tear her apart if she harped on it for the rest of her life. But she cared about people’s thoughts affecting her quality of life. The few friends she kept close to her vest became keenly aware of Lily’s Blue Period, the few weeks which she spent with a cloud over her head, smoking more than usual once she became old enough to grow an affinity for cigarettes — in her case, sophomore year — because the school year was about to end and she’d have to head back home, into purgatory. Not hell, because it wasn’t openly unpleasant. Just limbo.
She solved this in her later years. She was a quick study, keeping her grades in order — so she busied herself with goings on in society, and what she could do to help herself. She went underground, got her proper identification with the name she had chosen on her first day at Hogwarts, and fudged it all — her age so she’d be able to work in the summers, commuting between the city and the country, at least, minimizing the time spent with her family. She worked, and worked, and worked. As hard as she could possibly work. Another Gryffindor student had an in with a doctor who would give her hormone medication without having to jump through the hoops of bureaucratic bullshit. That held her over until her wages earned her enough to fly to the States, where the best gender reassignment doctors were.
She changed bits and pieces of herself. Things that were no one’s business. Those who knew her at Hogwarts saw a slow physical progression, as she dragged things out over as many summers as humanly possible to avoid the family of it all. But the core of Lily had always been the same, so not much changed. Not her friends — and not how she loved. It was her friends who taught her affection, who made her come out of that prickly shell — who sculpted her into something softer, more welcoming. Her true self. The world had made her prickly, hot to the touch. But she came through on the other side, changed. People would be awful for the rest of her life, she knew. But she didn’t have to be. She could be better than them, provide the kind of comfort she’d needed when she was young. She could weep for the family approval she had lost, but she could have a future filled with love. She could be giving, and she could allow herself to be the kind of person she hadn’t had when she most needed it. And how fulfilling that felt. How right.
When the vice-chancellor asked her to join the Order, having picked her out and tracked her progress from her very first day, it was as if she’d found her life’s mission. Some members of the Order were more physical than her, to be sure, but she identified strongly with the organization’s activism and is at the forefront of that branch. Having recently graduated, the Order is her most immediate connection to school and the friends she considers so dear to her, and she wouldn’t trade it for the world. Though it can at times bring a ton of stress into her life, it has proven that she made the right decision when she chose Gryffindor, for it has given her the sharp tongue and mind she needs to survive in this world of chaos.
Sometimes, she wonders if her friends contemplate if she has a death wish. She certainly acts as if she does. She’s constantly concerned with being on the front lines, chest puffed out. Armorless. But Lily does not know how to be immobile, to celebrate in stillness. Even if this evil ends, and they win, she will always have her head over her shoulder, waiting for something else on the horizon. Winning once is not a permanent solution. Her fists are always curled, waiting for the next fight. Even something in her nags that her friends don’t fully understand what she’s been through, that she’s in it all alone. That is her vice, and it is one that she was born with. It is one she has grown further into, having been through what she has been through and seen what she has seen. Having fought nearly all of her life, for something that other people out there are convinced she should not be able to have — that she is simply sick, and needs the help of a doctor of a different sort. And that in itself is endless: waiting for the doctors to come along, waiting for the government to catch up, waiting for her sort of life to be considered normal. Of course doesn’t know when to quit. When to stop moving. When to quiet her voice, let others speak, and just breathe.
Dorcas: Dorcas and Lily have been close since their first day at university when they partied a little too hard and passed out together in a bath tub. The two of them now share a flat but have found that their contrasting shifts mean they rarely spend time together.
James: An endearing idiot, Lily and James may bicker like a married couple but they would do anything for one another. She is quick to tell him when he’s being annoying and often has to switch on mother mode when with his friends.
Rabastan: Lily and Rabastan met one another when he was rushed to A&E following a particularly bad punch to the skull. She found him easy to talk to and even promised to come and watch one of his boxing matches.
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