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Disclaimer
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Everything that JK Rowling wrote, belongs to her, everything I added belongs to my imagination. Eaton Drove is a real place in England, so is Sedgeford, Heacham, Snettisham and Kings Lynn. And there is a Heacham River and it is just a few miles away from Eaton Drove, there are really two Eaton Droves, but the one I'm setting this fan fic in is off Sedgeford Road, right next to Sedgeford and Heacham River. I have no clue if there is a Waterhouse Bookstore in Heacham, but it would appear from all the information that I have gathered that Waterhouse is UK's Barnes & Noble for US. Living in US, I have limited information of England and blame the World Wide Web for any mistakes.

This goes for all chapters in this fan fic.

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Author's Note
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This starts when Lily is eleven, but I'm going to leap though quickly to seventh year by chapters and I'm relying on you guys to understand that Lily and James weren't all over each other the moment they saw each other and that you read the FIfth book and Snape's Worst Memory in particular. Don't argue with me when I saw James was a chaser, he was, the movies are evil and have no clue what they are talking about, JK Rowling however does and since she writes Harry Potter I'm gonna follow her and say James was a Chaser. The movies are a little off because you have to break down the books and build foreshadowing and stuff like that. The Marauders learned that Remus was a werewolf in their third year and they became animagi in their fifth as far as all the reliable sources report.

Note, I'm typing this story in a pathetic WordPad until I install Word, so do allow for my horrible spelling and don't yell at me for it, but do tell me that I misspelled a bazillion words here. English is my second language, but I won't claim that I can spell in Russian, because if you see how I spell in English, my Russian spelling is a lot worse. But then Russian has like 36 letters instead of just 27, so I guess, I'm not that terrible.

Love, TATs

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The Story
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Love stories are always popular, but there's one everyone likes to tell over and over again in their own words with details from their own minds. I wrote it and rewrote it five times already. And I'm not the only one. This is story is of course of Lily Evans and James Potter. Story which we only know parts and bits of from the hints JK Rowling left us. We, fan fiction writers, treasure those hints like expensive gems and luxury goods. So today, you eager readers and fans of this a little cliché love story, I will tell you another version of how it all came to be.

Chapter 1. Moving In.

It was the middle of summer and peak of hot August days, the days when the weather stayed at most seemingly stable and the rain stayed away. Pretty soon though, the third week of August would begin and this sort of uncomfortably hot but comfortably insistent on frying the neighborhood's grass weather would be lifted. Instead, an unpredictable wind and the stormy clouds would populate the sky while the yards would become full of muddy water that in turn will attempt to drown the same grass, which would insist to survive even this sort of cycle year after year after year.

The grass in this small English town's neighborhood is much like the people that walk on it. This grass rubs its characteristics into these people starting at an early age during which they all play games on it in company of pets and friends and family. So stubborn and unyielding are guaranteed characteristics in any of the residents of Eaton Drove, Sedgeford, in some more then others of course.

One of those exceptions was the Evans family, the Evans had moved to Eaton Drove to raise their family of two girls. Mrs. Evans was far from stubborn, she was quite lenient to everything that had some sort of reason behind it. Mr. Evans a gentle man who could never learn to resist anything his wife suggested and his daughters asked for, other then moving. The two adults mutually agreed that Eaton was a great place for a family, the location was natural and isolated from any modern clubs and such dangerous places for young girls, there could be no fooling around with unknown boys because everyone knew everyone in Eaton and the closest thing to a city was Sedgeford which consisted of a few small conservative entertainment places such as a movie theater and a grocery store. Near Sedgeford were two small cities Heacham, for which the river only a mile straight North from Eaton Drove was named for, and Snettisham. Mr. Evans worked as a manager of Waterstones bookstore in Heacham, just a small branch really, and Mrs. Evans worked only on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday as an English Literature home school teacher in Snettisham. The arrangement worked very well for everyone and when the girls started muggle school, they also started their dance and music lessons.

Very soon the girls interests took different paths. The older sister Petunia, continued on her ballet lessons and took a headstrong interest in piano, becoming the top of her class and setting sight on the private boarding school for outstanding and talented children in Kings Lynn, a large city only a few hours away from Eaton. The younger sister, Lily didn't hang back from her sister and entered school the same year with her so the girls would be in the same grade and even strived for best grades to be able to join Petunia in the boarding school. But she didn't continue her ballet lessons or take up piano, Lily went ahead to limited her dancing lessons to a one day a week of general dance, instead took up karate and Italian style fencing. The girls went on locked step in step with each other and were as tight together then Siamese twins.

Petunia was only a year older then her sister, and her younger sister Lily did sometimes seem a tag-along to her friends, but Petunia never rejected her sister anything. After all, Lily was harmless. They never looked like sisters to a casual eye, Petunia was a tall skinny ballerina with short cropped wavy dark brown hair and Lily was shorter by half a head and hidden under a mass of red frizz. Petunia was outgoing and not afraid to speak her mind, Lily was always next to her sister and seemingly harmless unless she had a foil in her hand. But if you looked a little closer, you would see that Petunia never failed to give a helping hand to her sis, even to cheat a little to help her pull up her grades so she'd be in same boarding school with her. There was more to these two then green eyes, there were bonds as strong as that grass' resolve to stay alive, as strong as love.

The bonds held firm until one summer day they began to melt in the smoldering sun. On this day, the tale begins.

It was a Tuesday and the sun was hanging a little lower then one o'clock and the girls and their mother were sitting out on the porch reading a fashion magazine to pick out new clothing for the coming up school year when a few cars pulled up to the "ON SALE" house across the street just two houses over. They were clean cars and the people that stepped out of them were all dressed in business suits except for one woman and a boy who was being nearly dragged around by that woman. The woman was wearing something that reminded Lily very much of a bath robe only it was longer and much more... casual? A casual wear robe? Something like that. One of the men was wearing a lime green retro suit, but despite such ridiculous attire everyone else listened very hard to his directions. Except for one other man, everyone else seemed to be there to follow orders. This man was wearing a stylish suit jacket with untied tie over a t-shirt tucked in at odd angles into a pair of very worn jeans with an unmatching navy belt.

Aside from the ridiculously dressed man and the woman in the 'robe', the only other interesting person of the group was the boy. He was wearing very normal clothing that seemed to be just a half-size too big for him, but that was probably because of his unusual height, he was a little too tall for eleven and a little too short for twelve. From his belt hanged what appeared to be an eleven inch wooden stick. Boys, Lily thought biting back a smile. The wind messed with his hair, but it was quite impossible to mess it up any more, it was a few months behind on getting a hair cut but even being properly cut wouldn't have helped the unruliness of its nature. The boy himself acted a lot like his hair, unruly. Despite the regularly occurring hit from the woman who appeared to be his mother, he kept pulling and tagging her in different directions, asking her random questions that she answered with nothing more then a shake of her head. It appeared that he was going though all this trouble to be released, but he was no where near successful at his task, the mother just kept on talking to Mr. Ridiculous.

Mr. Ridiculous was talking to the man with the odd clothing and the woman in the robe, standing at safe distance from the boy. The woman was asking him questions, while the man just kept on listening and observing the sign. Finally after a what seemed to be an hour, during which Mrs. Evans and Petunia left into the house, leaving Lily to observe the newcomers, the men in suits got back into their cars and left taking the "ON SALE" sign with them and leaving Mr. Ridiculous and Lily's new neighbors to go inside the house. The boy was finally released after his father spoke to him and left on the porch while every one else went inside.

First he walked up and down the porch, measuring it in steps, then he walked up and down the steps, stopped and climbed up on the railing and pointed his stick at random bushes, then he carefully returned the stick to his belt and started observing the houses... and finally spotted Lily.

Lily had been leaning on her porch and watching the boy, he was quite amusing if you had nothing better to do. But now that he noticed her, he took out his stick and pointed it in her direction playfully, in that same moment a serious brooking no nonsense call sounded from the house, "James Harry Potter!" The boy fell over the railing in his hasty attempt to return his stick to its place and fell into one of the bushes. The door opened and Mr. Ridiculous and the other man came out, the more or less normally dressed man had lost his jacked and tie inside the house and now appeared almost normal except there was something about him that wasn't quite ordinary. He looked up and down the porch, then shook his head in a gentle but tired manner, then spoke to Mr. Ridiculous, they shook hands and the weird man left in his car. At that point James had returned to the porch and followed his dad in the house, he seemed to have trouble walking, as if he had just been punished severely by a belt and not just fallen into a bush.