The Marauders: Year Seven Part One

The Tides Are Brutal

Lily was feeling quite sour. 

Downstairs, Petunia was hosting Vernon Dursley for tea in the living room. She'd spent the last day and a half fussing and baking sweet cakes for the occasion, decorating a little tea tray she had purchased with her allowance. She'd gotten special tea - some sort that Vernon had mentioned specifically a couple weeks before - and she'd been having a right fit all morning over what she would wear and how clean the lace doilies were ("They're practically yellow! It's as though they've never been bleached!" she'd shrieked no less than two hours before). Mrs. Evans had gone to bed, complaining of a terrible migraine, citing Petunia's irritable attitude as the cause, and Lily had been banned from the room until Vernon Dursley had finished his tea. There had been a spat - during which Lily had threatened to magic Vernon's teacup into a mouse just as he brought it to his mouth and Petunia had accused Lily of sabotaging her future - but Vernon had finally arrived, and Lily had escaped up the stairs.

Now, she was laying in her bedroom, staring up at the ceiling, feeling quite perturbed with the world in general. It had been days since James had called and it was days still before he would be back from Costa Rica and she was feeling quite bitter that he hadn't insisted on coming back immediately. After all, he knew how uncomfortable she was feeling about the stupid box - stupid, bloody, whisper-hissing box, she hated that stupid box - and yet he was still off partying about Costa Rica with Sirius Black as though nothing were wrong in the world. Probably kissing loads of pretty Latina women and drinking loads of tequila or whatever the Wizarding World's equivalent of tequila in Central America was... Probably forgotten all about the box, all about Lily, even. She'd never hear back from him, probably. Stupid, dense git, she thought angrily.

The box hissed from the desk.

"LILY!!!!!!"

The scream came from the living room, seeming to be in response to Lily's very thoughts and she sat up the moment the shrieking cry reached her ears. 

"LILY!!!!!!" Petunia was squawking in a terrible fit and she could hear crashing and bellows of shock from Vernon Dursley and --

But it couldn't be.

She leaped up, her heart lighter than it had been in days and days, and she sprang down the stairs, taking them two or even three at a time, clutching the banister, swinging 'round to race down the hall, past the broom closet under the stairs, 'round the corner of the kitchen and into the living room...

James Potter stood in front of the hearth, his hands up, looking rather startled, his eyeglasses askew, hair unkempt and dusty with ash, his book bag slung 'round his shoulders. He was wearing that one Gryffindor jumper that she so loved, and a nice button-down shirt printed with blue plaid that made him look quite handsome (aside from his messy hair he looked quite refined actually). His wand was clutched in one hand. 

"I told you!" he was crying out, "Lily's expecting me - Lily Evans... Come now, Petunia, you know who I am. We went to the cinema once together..."

"LILY!!!!" Petunia was shrieking, and as Lily watched, she tossed a tea cup at James and he dodged it as it smashed against the fireplace brick and shattered, falling to pieces in the hearth.

"Really, that's uncalled for," James said, looking down at the broken pieces.

Vernon Dursley was perhaps the funniest of the whole scene, though, for Vernon had grabbed hold of the tea tray and was brandishing it at James as though he were a lion tamer in the circus, shooshing him back against the mantel. "Stay where you are, I'm warning you -- not a step forward!" Vernon barked. "Don't know where you came from, but I'll see to it the police take you away for breaking and entering!"