Home
Lily steps off the train and immediately is almost toppled over by an enthusiastic first year with a battered brown trunk. She wishes she could run after them and claim their excitement as her own, reminiscent of her own first year when her parents still came to pick her up at the station. Instead she weaves amongst the chatter and bustle to join the queue infront of the gate to the non-magical King’s Cross, very helpfully illuminated by glowing purple lettering stating “Muggle Entrance”. Waiting infront of her is a Vietnamese couple with kind faces, along with their daughter sporting a yellow tie and an even younger boy wrapped around her like a backpack.
Lily thinks she recognises the girl from Herbology class, one of the shocked faces when she accidentally shattered a massive ceramic plant pot in greenhouse five just last week. Her partner, Marlene, had peered at her through shiny blonde locks and then burst out laughing. Lily had aborted the motion to start picking up the pieces off the floor, after seeing Severus shake his head at her slightly from the corner of her eye. Professor Sprout reformed the pot with a wave of her wand, as Lily should have known to do, what should have been her first instinct as a witch. There were no cracks in the pot’s surface, no indication it had been broken at all. If anything it looked better than before.
Reaching the wall, she steps through, shuddering slightly at the uncomfortable sensation that never seems to bother other, non-muggleborn, wixen. Immediately she makes her way across the station, outside to the familiar rumble of cars and ever-present permeating damp and fog of London. She plops herself at the last available seat at the bus stop just down the road from the station, and opens up her suitcase-transfigured-trunk to pull on a faded grey hoodie over her school uniform.
An grizzled old man taps her on the shoulder. “Spare any change?” He mutters. She mutely shakes her head. She doubts the gold galleons in her purse would do him any good, and while she has a smattering of normal change in her pocket, she’s not feeling especially generous. Luckily he doesn’t seem to be one of the more desperate ones who tries wearing people down with excessive persistence, likely used to the people of London, and moves on.
Forty minutes on the bus and twenty minutes trudging along the winding roads of her neighbourhod later, Lily arrives. She knocks on the faded blue door, and footsteps sound before her sister opens the door.
“Hey Lils,” Petunia smiles, and Lily smiles back. She steps forward inside the house, shakes off her doc martens onto the shoe rack, and sets down her suitcase. Her sister spins her around and ensconces her in a tight hug, and Lily relaxes, enveloped in the scent of lavender and tea tree hair oil. The hum of radio drifts through the walls from the kitchen, along with the everpresent rattle of the boiler pipes. Soon her parents will come down the stairs and make a fuss, plying her with a hot mug of tea and updates on the nice postman who has broken his hip. They’ll ask her about Severus, who hasn’t been round since they moved to London last year, and her sweet friend, Mary wasn’t it? A wand of oak and unicorn hair will be tucked away in a drawer until the beginning of the new year, when Lily will once again put on her uniform and set off into the misty moors of Scotland. But for now, she is here. She is home.