porch ┊april 27 ┊@taylorswiftmicrofic ┊evanstaffノtruetunes┊wc: circa 1000 ┊tw: none
Lily Marie Evans had been born first. In the middle of winter, she came, tufts of crimson hair striking compared to the snow that soaked through the thickest of gloves, dusted every nook and cranny and piled atop every sign in their small town. With her, colour and warmth arrived again to the lives of Lewin and Edie Evans, who always found themselves in poor spirits during the cold season, barred from their gardens, all their precious flowers having withered. Declared as such from the moment her eyes blinked open and shined the colour of their love, Lily was and would always be in their eyes just so: their miracle. The magic only confirmed it.
It was uncomfortably logical then, how Petunia Celia Evans paled in comparison, born in the summer of the next year. Lily’s laugh had the blossoms richening already. That season, the heat afflicted upon England was dreadful: baby Petunia’s face was more often red-cheeked than not, and she had fought like a vixen against the stifling confinement of clothes. She was, once affectionately, bestowed the title of their prissy girl. So much more difficult than Lily, boasting bratty blonde as if a kindly warning from the fates - here was to be a pain of a princess.
To their relief, Lily marshalled her younger sister excellently as they both grew. Precocious as the elder was, she outgrew the limits of their back-garden quickly, taking to traipsing the overgrown park down the road like it was a forest. Petunia would trail along, fingers dancing up the length of wild ferns, thinking how much prettier their parents' ordered rows of watercolour flora were, but eventually be drawn into the games nevertheless.
It was good. Lily’s smile banished all attempts at sulking over dresses torn by brambles and weird boys who leered and had cooties, didn’t you know-?
It was not a long era.
People had always said Lily to be a changeling, pretty in ways old boring poets would fashion their life’s works after, strange in ways that had boys cross-eyed from staring that wasn’t even malicious. The prettiest of the region, they would say as they pinched her cheeks and watched them bloom. Fiery colouring suited for a girl with such innate warmth, like it was something of an accomplishment of hers to look always as if haloed by the sun, green eyes flashing. How did Lewin and Edie manage it? People wondered. They would keep wondering. No one could ever know.
Magic. Magic had been what set Lily apart from the rest. Made her stalk shoot that bit higher.
Her petals unfurled where Petunia could not see. Down in London, with friends who wrote in fancy scribble on parchment like old books delivered by beaky owls who tapped on their windows in the morning, imposing even on holidays when Lily - distant Lily - was supposed to be busy being the darling of their parents' eyes. Being Petunia’s cool older sister. Not their witch!
Tempting as it was, magic led Lily astray, polluted her from who she had been, drummed a beat to knock her march off-course. She tripped and swooned into it's solicitous arms. Always so resolute and stubborn, not thinking to look back to small gardens and smaller sisters when a whole world lay waiting at her wand tip, Lily had been stolen by the breeze.
So, Petunia deliberated, she had enough of a reason to weed out the sprouting of any and all magic in her life. It had never meant anything good. Not for her. And she was unflinchingly good, if nought else. Good daughter, good student, good friend. Her Evans’ temper was woven behind her buck teeth, drowned by sweet lies and emerging only as a slow simmer because forbid a woman be as explosively angry as she. The reputation of a shrew, surprising as her fearsome scowl might have it be, did not enchant her.
Still, somehow, all of her intentions blew: her plans, her reputation, every ounce of decorum she had been beaten over the head with splattering on the walls of her childhood home. Like a dam had cracked and so her soil was water-logged, her blossoms dismembered by a torrent, leaving only sad broken things like her in their wake.
Broken, because what was this? Certainly not the whole, independent, arguably on occasion apathetic, Petunia Evans she knew herself to be. That Evans was the daughter who stayed, who endured, and who chased her principles to London and secured herself a typing course. That Evans would never be considering the young man on her porch.
Yet here she was. Leaned on her doorframe, toes kept carefully on the borderline like he was a vampire from her old storybooks and only this invisible barrier could keep her from being feasted upon by him.
Feasted. Ha.
Willy Wagstaff made for a sorry sight in the rain, his blonde hair plastered to his forehead. In the dark, his hazel eyes gleamed, and she could catch the green in them, like Lily’s. Like magic.
She should turn him away.
The problem gnawing at her was this, however: he always appeared so, so so much dastardly like himself. Like the world could batter against him as fiercely as any storm, and had done so before by the rips in his clothes and the holes in his smiles and the tell-tale tightening of his lying lips when she mentioned the word friends, but he’d withstand to scam another day.
He reminded her of herself in London, before her parent’s health waned and she returned to where the seeds of her misery were planted.
He looked at her like she was still the woman she left behind in London: stood alone like a shadow in a room of light, branching like a great tree and not some measly flower, bearing pomegranates in her lip gloss that brought out a man’s - his - dimples.
Willy mussed his hair, attempting to revive its charming poof, like she was not a muggle to his - no matter how kicked - powerful wizard. His eyes beseeched her heart, and she could see how he had gotten so far, past his questionable wits. A charmer. Sometimes clever. Sometimes not. What bad judgment he possessed, coming to her. No one had done that in a long time. Her thorns had made sure of it.
But perhaps they were both liars, turning on everyone and their mothers and themselves, so that is why it did not matter to him who she was but another unfortunate soul, did not matter to him if she was the delicate flower she’d been named for or brambles poking into his amber skin. The blood she might draw could not scare him.
So thats why the porch moaned beneath her steps. She crossed her own boundary.
Petunia Celia Evans snagged the wizard by his sodden collar and pulled, mud tracking across her polished floor, before the nosy neighbours could blink on their lights.