Disclaimer: I own nothing. Harry Potter belongs to J.K Rowling.
A/N: Reviews are Good. This has been a subtle hint from the author - Please return to your regularly scheduled reading.
chapter seven: home again
She thought she was going back home – back to her hometown anyway – alone. But having little Harry along is no burden to her. Indeed, it is an absolute joy. He is such a good natured baby, still small enough to fit in the car seat she digs up out of one of the boxes (glad now that she had put off dropping all of His things to Oxfam until after she said goodbye a final time) and entranced by the passing world as she drives behind the moving van.
And in Cokeworth the Evans' name is a boon to her when she looks for employment (with no previous experience outside of the single job she held for four months in the secretarial pool at the firm she met Vernon at) with a little boy in tow. Here they remember her parents as good people who everyone mourned the passing of and are visibly horrified at the news of little Lily and her husband being killed.
(She does not tell them she was ever married, she does not tell them of her little boy in the box – dead before he left her body - buried deep in the Earth in Surrey. It is just easier for everyone that that knowledge stays inside her. Harry is what is important now anyway. )
These things garner sympathy, they melt the heart of her new landlord and she lets the little kid with the bright smile join Petunia in her small single bedroom apartment - even though when she had called ahead renting it she had only claimed herself as the only occupancy. And allowances are made for the orphan babe with Lily's eyes to be cared for at the job where perhaps usually children would not be welcome.
Cokeworth in general seems more welcoming to her – much different than the grey dreary industrial town she remembers from her childhood - she only really returned to it because it is the only place where she has roots, the only real place she can look around the world and call home. And had worried a bit when she realized she was bringing Harry there. But the old mill, the warehouses that her mother always told her to avoid are all gone, bulldozed to make room for tall sprawling buildings of metal and glass. The identical brick houses that were the main characteristic of the place in her mind for so long are still there…..but they are no longer identical. In an almost aggressive push for individualism each of the brick houses are now very different, many painted in bright colors that contrast with their neighbors.
She doesn't like it at first - frowns as she passes (her inner need for normalcy, order, at the fore). But after walking by many different times with Harry she comes to see the joy of it – comes to enjoy pointing out her favorites, or simply different colors to the young child. The air is much cleaner without the constant smoke from the mill's chimney, the roads as well are free of debris (mostly anyway – much better than the overflowing bins she remembers), green things are starting to grow tentatively, and everything just seems brighter.
