A/N: Town of Hogsmeade Game – prompt: Hogsmeade post office

I decided to relax the rule that students can't go to Hogsmeade until third year. Given how school policies develop over time, there was probably a time when anyone could go on the trips, and it suited this one-shot for that to be during the Marauder era.

5 February 1972

Lily hurried down the familiar streets of Hogsmeade, winding her way through the crowd of lively students who were enjoying the day away from school. Usually, she would have been among them, flittering from bookshop to clothes store to apothecary like a buzzing bee. To her, the wizarding town was what Christmas would look like if it were a place rather than a time of year. People were chatting merrily everywhere, and shops were almost overflowing with fascinating and unique magical items that never ceased to amaze her.

But she didn't have time for any of them in that moment. Tears threatened to spill from her eyes as she fought to get through the horde without anyone noticing her sadness.

Every year for as long as she could remember, she and Tuney had made one another cards for their birthdays. They weren't anywhere near as fancy as the birthday cards their parents bought from the shops, but they were always bright and colourful and sparkling with glitter. Her favourite part of January was seeing what Petunia had made for her that year and marvelling over how her sister had managed to put it together without her noticing. Christmases were for joint family cards, but birthdays were for special handmade cards.

Six days before, on her twelfth birthday, she had barely been able to contain her excitement as she went down to breakfast. No matter what kind of arguments the girls had gotten into over the years, they had always kept up their tradition of homemade birthday cards, and she was hoping that making the card would help Petunia forgive her for reading her letter. But, when the mail arrived, cards came from her parents and from the Snapes and from her friends from primary school, but nothing came from her sister.

Petunia's name had been included on the joint family card, but she'd assumed that was only a precaution, her parents' way of preparing in case her sister didn't finish her card rather than because of it.

Maybe, she'd thought, it just got lost in the mail. Maybe it's still at the post office.

She had held firm to that hope throughout the week. Then, first thing that morning, she had gone down to the post office to send her replies to her family and friends and to check if there was anything else there for her. She could have sent her reply directly to her parents via owl post, but she had decided to do it the Ministry-preferred way. The Abbotts, who ran the Hogsmeade post office, had cast a spell on all of the post offices in the United Kingdom so that they would be alerted whenever a letter addressed to a witch or wizard went through the Muggle post. They then collected them and used their own fleet of owls to send them out across the globe. They also did it the other way around, accepting letters delivered via owl or in person and slipping them back into the Muggle post system. Lily sometimes borrowed a school owl when the letter she wanted to send home was urgent, but she usually waited for Hogsmeade weekends instead so their neighbours – or her friends – wouldn't get suspicious about all of the owls flying around.

"Are there anymore letters addressed to Lily Evans?" she had asked. "I'm expecting something from my sister."

"I've already sent out all of the mail for today," Annie Abbott, the current proprietor, had replied. "If anything comes for you, I'll send it up to the school like usual."

Lily had tried to convince her to check again, and Annie had done so to appease her, but nothing more had been found. It had gotten to the point where Annie had gently insisted that Lily go find her friends to play with. Despondent and feeling more than a little bit embarrassed about how she had behaved, the redhead had left the shop and, losing herself in the large crowd, felt the tears begin to well up.

She didn't talk to me over Christmas, either, Lily thought as she escaped the crowd and started to run back towards the castle. She had been planning on converting her birthday money to wizarding currency and using it to buy another spell book so she could experiment with new charms and jinxes, but that no longer seemed important. She could do that anytime, really. In that moment, all that mattered was getting somewhere quiet before she broke down.

She was so fixated on getting back to the castle that she wasn't paying any attention to where she was going. Her feet seemed to have a mind of their own, propelling her through the cobbled streets – and into someone.

"Oof!" Lily stumbled backwards, flailing her arms about to keep herself from falling, as the body she'd crashed into fell to the ground. "S-Sorry…"

"Watch where you're going, Evans," a familiar voice snapped as a boy moved forward to help the person she'd run into up.

Shocked, she took in the faces of the pair. Fantastic. Sirius Black and James Potter. They were in the same house at school as her, but they were probably her least favourite people at Hogwarts. Massive bullies, both of them.

"Sorry," she repeated. "I – I need to go."

Potter shot her a sharp look. "What happened? Was it a Slytherin?"

"What?" she asked, peering at him with wide eyes. His voice was as gruff as ever, but she got the sense that he would actually retaliate if she confirmed that a Slytherin had done something to hurt her. Given how he seemed to view her as a Slytherin most of the time, that was unexpected, to say the least.

"You look upset." He shrugged. "You might spend too much time around Slytherins to be healthy, but you're still a Gryffindor. If one of them hurt you, it's our job to get them back."

"It wasn't a Slytherin. It just – " She wanted to leave it there, but she knew that they were both persistent when they wanted to be. If she didn't tell them why she had been too distracted to realise that she was about to run into them, they would either keep pushing until she told them or would use it as an excuse to pick on more Slytherins. "My sister missed my birthday. Birthdays have been a really important thing for the two of us since we were little, but she just ignored it. I… She doesn't want to be my sister anymore." At that, the first tears spilled over, sliding down her face like raindrops.

They both looked suddenly uncomfortable. "Er…" Potter started.

"Families suck," Black cut in. "You're friends with Remus, aren't you? Why don't you hang out with us? We're meeting up with Remus and Peter at the Three Broomsticks, then we're going to finish working out the prank we're going to pull tonight."

She stared at him incredulously. She did indeed like Remus, but she hated the other three Marauders. And, as far as she was aware, the feeling was reciprocated. Still, it was tempting. It felt wrong to go back to hanging out with Severus right then when it was their friendship that had caused the first few fractures in her relationship with Tuney, and all of her other friends would ask her tonnes of questions about how she was and why she was upset. As sweet as that was of them, she needed peace and distraction for the time being.

"Only if you don't cry," Potter added, and she quickly wiped her eyes.

"As long as it's not a mean one and it isn't on Sev," she replied slowly, hesitantly, "then I don't see why not."

Black's face scrunched up in disgust at her conditions, but Potter quickly protested, "Our pranks aren't mean!"

"Most of them are," she pointed out.

"No, they're – "

"They kind of are," Black cut in, looking utterly unfazed by that fact. "But, fine, we'll make sure it's a nice general one. But don't expect puppies or rainbows or lame things like that."

"Then I'm in."

Potter's face erupted into a broad smile that Lily couldn't help but note was rather pretty. As annoying as the Marauders can be, they can be sort of alright when they want to be, she thought.

"Good," he said. "It's hard to vote on things when there are four of us, so we could use a tiebreaker."

Lily found it hard to believe that it was really as democratic a process as he seemed to think it was, but perhaps he just didn't realise how much Remus and Pettigrew deferred to the two of them. The stray thought that maybe, just maybe, spending time with someone who wouldn't put up with their idiocy might help them crossed her mind. If Potter were really that clueless about how mean their pranks could get and how much his friends followed his lead, then maybe his cruel side was born from ignorance rather than malice. And, as her father always said, it was easier to fix cluelessness than spite.

Besides, it sounded much better than the alternative, and it might even prove to be fun. The pain of Petunia's slight still lingered in the back of her mind as she walked alongside them, listening to them babble about ideas and plans, but it was more bearable. And for that, if not for anything else, she was grateful.