Photo Manip: To view the cover page I made for this fic, check my profile for the link, or type in: img dot photobucket dot com / albums / v325 / HeronOnFire / CaughtInbetween-LilyFicManip dot jpg (there's no www, so just start with the 'img').
Caught Inbetween (A Story in Three Parts)
By: Jewel Kaufman
I.
When Lily Evans was ten years old, she had a year left before her Hogwarts acceptance letter came, and her life changed forever. At ten, she was still considered Muggle, and although she was a whimsical child, she already knew that magic as she knew it was relegated to fairytales and Disney films.
Still, she couldn't help imagining the fantastic possibilities of 'what if?', and nightly dreamed of flying high over the treetops, feasting her eyes on the world below. She'd been told that magic wasn't real, and she accepted that as truth in the way a young child takes their parents' words as gospel, but Lily remembered the year before, when her whole family had gathered in front of the television to watch as that American astronaut, Neil Armstrong, became the first man to walk on the moon. If that wasn't magical, she didn't know what was.
And she wouldn't know what was. Not for another year, though to those who knew what to look for, it was already more than apparent.
Wizarding children often experienced instances of accidental magic when their emotions ran high, and in spite of her Muggle heritage, Lily Evans was no different. Her bedroom door locking, though it didn't have a lock; the classroom bully burning his hand as he tried to grab her; her carefully made diorama still in perfect condition, even though someone had purposefully knocked it off of her desk moments beforehand... Things just seemed to happen around Lily, making a lot of would-be friends just think of her as weird.
The worst was her older sister, though. Petunia was terrified of Lily's "abnormalities", disgusted by the pride and awe her parents displayed when Lily told them about things like the diorama, and above all else, convinced that Lily did all of it on purpose.
It was on a particularly antagonistic day between the two sisters, shortly after Lily's tenth birthday, that the most astonishing, impossible example of these occurrences took place.
A muddy Lily had come flying up the Evans' driveway, with an outraged Petunia in hot pursuit, screaming something about turning her friend Annie's hair green.
"She pushed me in the mud!" Lily shrieked, throwing the front door open and dashing inside, "Besides – it wasn't me!"
Petunia followed closely, reaching out to make an almost desperate grab for her sister and letting out a cry of frustration when she missed.
"It's ALWAYS you!" Petunia screeched, horse-like features pulled taut into a snarl as she pushed her dull brown hair out of her face, "And I'm gonna do worse than a little push in the mud!" she added fiercely, punctuating her words with a leap at the younger girl, her larger form making the maneuver something Lily hadn't a hope of escaping.
The redhead had already started shouting for her mother, and the answering pounding of footsteps could already be heard from upstairs, when all of a sudden time seemed to slow down for Lily. In one instant Petunia was falling towards her with a vicious look on her face, and in the next, both girls heard a loud CRACK! – and Lily was gone.
Petunia landed hard on the floor, face first, her cry almost-but-not-quite covering the second CRACK! that sounded on the floor above. Upstairs in her room, Lily opened her eyes, not knowing exactly when she'd closed them, taking in her sudden surroundings in utter shock and disbelief.
The scream she let out upon recovering her voice had both her mother and sister come running.
Her mother had been the first to arrive, automatically sweeping her youngest daughter up and into her arms, rocking the now-shaking girl and trying to comfort her as best she could.
Petunia, when she'd arrived in the doorway, let out a scream of her own, and Lily immediately burst into tears as the older girl babbled out the nonsensical explanation.
Their mother, completely baffled and slightly afraid, quickly decided that her own panic would wait until later. This was not the first time Lily had done something that defied all sense of logic, and though it didn't stop the absolute stupefaction from setting in, she knew that a bad reaction in front of her daughter would only make things worse. She forced herself to exude a sense of calm, her efforts coming out only a little bit awkward.
"Shh... shh... it's all right," she soothed, kneeling down to cup Lily's tearstained cheeks, "And... at least you got to skip all those stairs," she pointed out, smiling slightly at Lily's watery laugh.
Petunia just watched them from the threshold, unwillingly affected by her little sister's sobs. It was the first time she had ever witnessed Lily being anything but ecstatic in the aftermath of one of her displays of freakish power. This was a moment Lily would never know about. A moment in which Petunia, in conflict over her reaction to this newest "episode", could almost sympathize with her sister – could almost actually realize that Lily was just as confused by these continuous strange happenings as she was. This was a moment that might've turned the direction of their relationship onto an entirely different path.
But it was then that Petunia realized the mud was gone.
Somewhere between the time Petunia went airborne downstairs, and ran upstairs at Lily's scream, Lily's clothes had been washed, dried and pressed – all of which combined had to have only taken an instant!
Lily had done the impossible! AGAIN! Their parents were going to be so proud. Of her. Sympathy vanished in an instant, never to return.
"You little freak!" Petunia hissed, looking past the shocked look on her sister's face as Lily turned to face her, "You absolute freak!" she cried, before turning around and taking off down the hall. Lily heard her bedroom door slam a mere moment later.
Lying on her bed after dinner that night, Lily thought about what she had inadvertently done that day. Spontaneous apparition (as she would later learn it was called) was incredibly rare accidental magic. But then, Lily Evans was an incredibly rare witch.
Not that she knew that yet, of course. At that moment, Lily Evans didn't know a lot of things.
She didn't know that the relationship she would have with Petunia for the rest of her life would be defined by that day's events. She didn't know that an owl would fly into her kitchen one day a year from now and make her entire life suddenly make sense. She didn't know that the decision she made that day at eleven years old would introduce her to the missing part of herself, and let her experience things she'd never even dreamt of. She didn't know that that same decision would show her horrors she couldn't have fathomed, and shorten her own life to just ten more years.
All her life, she had felt the pull of a world she didn't yet know existed. It was a call to something nameless, a wistful, yet otherwise indescribable feeling that, at ten, she had no choice but to ignore. That evening, Lily lay on her bed, listening to John Lennon on The Beatles' latest record, voice only slightly off-key as she sang along with the chorus;
"Jai guru deva om... Nothing's gonna change my world... Nothing's gonna change my world..."
She doesn't know that a year from now, as she packs her trunk in preparation for her first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, she will take this record off her shelf, play this song and laugh.
