A Muggle!Lily AU
So, since I finished Mirrors, I decided it was time to embark on another long-ass fic, this time in answer to and inspired by this Reddit prompt. Because it's just so delicious!
I haven't figured out what ships I wanted to do here probably Prongsfoot because these days, that's how I roll. But here's a snippet to share.
Characters: James Potter, Sirius Black, Harry Potter, Petunia Evans (Potential) Pairings: James Potter/Sirius Black Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Sorry Lily died, Harry needed the mother's love protection, And I guess the prophecy needed it too, The Marauders are adults now!, They have completely adult lives!
Prologue: The Accident
Lily Evans flicked another nervous look up at the rearview mirror. Driving at night when she could very well simply have taken a train to Bath and hired a taxi from there should have been what she'd thought of the moment Alice's invitation came through on the mail. But then she had been burning her midnight oil slaving over that stupid thesis statement that her thesis team decided not to go with anyway. Harry had started crying, and if Petunia heard, there was no end of hell to pay, especially if Harry's crying - caterwauling, more like - woke Dudley up, and then she and her recently divorced sister would both be up all night trying to quell the babies well into the morning, whereupon the neighbors would quietly judge the two scarlet lettered Evans sisters for their poor choices in life.
But the reality was she'd been sleep-deprived, hungry, and tired, and her toddler had a great many odd things happening to him lately. Things she hadn't been able to explain. Things Petunia thought Lily might want to find experts to speak with, because Dudley had none of the same symptoms and Petunia was beginning to grow frightened for Harry.
Things Lily thought people would think her mad if she tried to actually find child doctors to try to explain them to.
Even now, as she watched Harry fidget with the straps of his car seat, she was not entirely sure Alice knew altogether what Lily was going through with her son. Twin floating globes of eerie pink and purple lights hovered over Harry's chubby hands, and the boy giggled as he let go of the straps and poked at the lights, making them spin in the black, empty air of the vehicle's backseat. Lily almost wanted to smile at the innocent delight Harry took in the simple action. Almost.
If only those lights hadn't actually been there ten seconds ago, which was the last time she'd checked on Harry before turning her attention back to the yawning expanse of empty country road before her.
“It's not that strange,” she told herself, keeping her eyes on the gleam of the white paint of the road signals in the borrowed car's headlights and resolutely not looking back to gawk at the way Harry had started ping-ponging the lights to the car's ceiling.
Not that strange at all.
I wish my Neville's shown similar, visible signs, he’s scarcely ever turned the table wine into Jell-O. Wish my mother-in-law wouldn't badger the poor child, but ah, well. What can you do with these country ladies and their expectations on their poor sons and grandsons.
That had been what Alice had said when Lily had first accidentally knocked into her at a pub just outside of uni. Poor girl had been so unstable on her feet stepping out of the loo, Lily had thought she was high. She hadn't been, of course. She'd been talking with another friend whose name escaped Lily now even though the three of them had ended up sitting at the bar together and Lily had somehow poured out her terrified observations of her son to these two twinkly-eyed strangers who had been so kind in telling her she was not slowly going mad from exhaustion between her part-time work, uni, and Harry.
That meeting had perhaps singularly saved her son's life. She'd been so terrified she might have to... to place some strange calls to the NHS, and then the doctors would tell her that she would have to bring Harry to Broadmoor and she'd never see her little angel again. Because she was terrified of what Harry could and sometimes did do, but she adored him all the same.
If only he'd thought to... create something else other than those strange lights. Or, well, if only Lily's ridiculous major wasn't literature and she wasn't writing a thesis on true cases of extra-sensory phenomena used to fuel Victorian horror literature. She was half-frightening herself with the things she'd read, and might even have considered shifting to a different major in her final year, if she wasn't mortified that Petunia would have to put up with another year of her mooching off her poor sister's meager junior nurse's salary.
Stop it, Lily Evans! she told herself sternly. You’re frightening yourself over nothing. Harry is a perfectly normal, healthy boy. It’s just that he—that he—
Wisely, she decided not to pursue that thought or it would lead to a slippery slope that would end in nothing but misery. Harry wasn’t the one at fault for his own predicament. That was all Lily and her stupid, wanton disregard for her older sister’s dire warnings not to spend too much time carousing when she should have been studying. Uni was free, but drinks weren’t, Petunia had told her. And with the meager inheritance from their suddenly dead parents, there wasn’t a lot to live on, not when Lily also had to rent a flat in London so she could live somewhere close to her school and not have to suffer a daily three-hour train ride to Birmingham and then another hour-long trek to Cokeworth. But did she listen?
Truly, she only had herself to blame, both for the condition she’d landed herself in after giving in to that charmingly soused and thoroughly infectious grin of the bespectacled boy at the club. A boy whose name she hadn’t even caught over the sensory overload of music, grinding bodies and far, far too much alcohol.
She could have had an abortion when she found out. Tuney was studying to be a nurse, after all, and her older sister would not have let her be tarred by the judgment of her peers if she had. But not only had she decided to carry to term, she’d also decided to keep the child. And now, Harry was the one bright point in an overwhelming sea of misery and regret that had become Lily Evans’ life, all his strange powers and capabilities be damned.
No, it was just… just the season, she was sure. Halloween was supposed to be that one time of the year besides Christmas that she could let her hair down. She’d loved going wearing funny little costumes as a child, going door to door on Spinner’s End with Petunia in the hopes that their beleaguered neighbors had sweets to give out to bright-eyed little girls in identical witch costumes. She wanted her young son to have the same with the son of her new friend, even though the true nature of Lily’s visit to Alice Longbottom had little to do with trick or treating, and a lot to do with Lily’s need for commiseration that her son was alright, that he was normal, that the ability to conjure up ghostly lights in the darkened backseat of her borrowed car was not mind-numbingly terrifying, she might have peed herself when she first glimpsed Harry playing with them in the rearview mirror.
Yes, just the season, and nothing more. This was not the first time Harry had done such a thing, nor would it be the last. And Lily Evans was nothing if not a practical who only sometimes made impractical decisions.
Impractical decisions that tended to ruin lives.
Like taking up literature instead of something immediately useful like typing. Like taking a portion of the inheritance she received to dull the pain of losing her parents in a screaming, wild dance club. Like sleeping with a handsome boy whose name she did not know. Like keeping a child out of wedlock when she had neither money nor the means to bring the child up when her sister had given her a most practical way out. Like tearing apart said sister’s marriage when Vernon Dursley, that ass of an ex-husband Petunia had left, had the audacity to call her a wanton harlot over a weekend family dinner and her tossing the table wine on his ugly, puce face. Like—
“Stop,” she told herself, again and with more force. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
“Mummum?” Harry gurgled from the carseat in the back.
Lily shook her head, risking a backward glance to look at her son through eyes quickly filling with tears. She hastily wiped them away one-handed and cast a watery smile at her boy. Her favorite boy in the world.
“Mummy’s all right, little bean,” she murmured, craning a little so she could touch something, a small part of her sweet, handsome son, smiling at her so winsomely with those adorable little front teeth that looked like tiny saws in his mouth. “Just a few minutes more. Auntie Alice said she has a son your age that you can play with when we get there. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Mummum,” said Harry happily, leaning forward and swatting at her reaching fingers.
Lily wanted to grasp her son’s chubby little hands, but she remembered there was a fork in the road up ahead, and the slip road turned into a driveway that seemed to lead up into nothing. Maybe it was just that it was already so late and dark that she wasn’t seeing the Tudor-style manor house on top of a hill that Alice said was where her family lived. She could have sworn there was nothing up there but a bit of stunted trees that looked like they’d been struck by lightning.
Good God, she really shouldn’t have embarked on this… this pointless errand. What could Alice possibly tell her? That being able to conjure lights and sometimes make flowers bloom or wilt in an instant was normal toddler behavior? And so what if Alice had a boy of her own that she was convinced could do the same things Harry could? She should’ve stayed home and studied while Harry played alone. Better yet, she should have driven to Cokeworth, where Petunia and Dudley were and have her son play with his cousin instead!
“Mummy!” Harry suddenly exclaimed, the sound loud in the quiet hum of the car’s faint mechanical rumble.
Lily’s eyes darted up to the rearview mirror to see that Harry had slapped the balls of light from his face and was growing restless that they weren’t floating back to him fast enough for his liking. She let one hand drift from the steering wheel, for what reason she wasn’t sure. Maybe to quell the beginnings of a temper tantrum, or maybe just to comfort her obviously bored child.
Whatever it was, it distracted her enough that she took her eyes off the road, right at the T where the road forked. And then suddenly, there was a pop from outside the car and something big and black and reflecting nothing of the incessantly bright headlamps crashed against the front of the car. It rolled over the hood, the sound of metal denting from the impact a sonorous screech in the silent night, before the thing rolled upwards over the windshield, cracking the glass, and bounced on the roof of the car.
Lily screamed as she hit the brake pedal, the hand still on the wheel fighting to gain control of the suddenly careening vehicle as the tires screamed on the tarmac, and the car spun out of her control, straight towards a copse of trees just past the T fork.
Glass rained down as the windshield gave from the impact. More shrieks of metal as the front of the car dented and bent around the trunk of one tree, pushing the screamingly hot engine inward, onto Lily’s bent legs, onto her unprotected belly. Onto her, and eventually her son.
She hadn’t even the chance to plead with the good Lord for her life as pain sizzled through her with the crush of her legs, the stab of the wheel on her sternum. Her head lolled forward, her entire body like a rag doll given over to the implacable centrifugal forces of the out-of-control vehicle, and bumped, hard, on the upper bend of the wheel.
But even in the madness of the accident, she fought to keep her vision, suddenly rimmed with a wash of red, steady as she tried to twist to check on her son. Instead of Harry, what she saw was a dark gray mist erupting from where the thing she’d hit lay mere meters from where the car had finally rolled to a stop, its dangerous trajectory impeded by the trees.
The mist was heading for them, traveling at a speed no wind could have carried.
No, she thought. It wasn’t her, for she knew she was dying. It was heading for her son. Her sweet, beautiful son, who was still alive, still fidgeting in his car seat, still uninjured save for a small cut on his forehead oozing blood.
“No, no, no,” she whimpered, powering through the haze, powering through the agony. Powering through impending death. The mist was in the car now, enveloping her and Harry. “Not my son, please not my son! Take me instead! Take me! I’m dying anyway!”
She didn’t know what else she babbled. What else might have escaped the burst of pain ripping through her chest as the wild lights from her blinking, shattered headlamps spun. There was a whoosh in her ears as the mist seemed to coalesce before her for a moment. It was as if she was in a wind tunnel. She couldn’t see anything, hear anything, feel anything, but the rushing sound of that thick, oily, dark mist, the heaviness of it blanketing the interior of the cramped vehicle.
It seemed to grow, seemed to expand, seemed to encompass everything she was. And then it sharpened, as if into a knife point and stabbed into her beloved son’s forehead. There was another loud, inhuman screech as the mist tore itself apart even as it drove deeper and deeper into Harry’s weeping wound.
Distantly, she thought she heard a baby crying. She wanted to go to it, the maternal instinct in her to protect and comfort a squalling babe still strong despite the unending agony her body bore. But she was tired. So very tired. And in so much pain. She couldn’t take it. She could barely keep her eyes, already awash with blood–so much blood!–open.
And then, at last she breathed her last, and Lily Evans, her undying love and her sea of regrets, was no more.
