Chapter 2: A Hard day's night...
Lily worked long into the night, furiously scrubbing and polishing every surface of her bedroom, preparing it for inspection by her new family. All the while, her mind wandered. She thought of all the boys at school that she thought that Dumbledore might choose for her.
There were the boys in Gryffindor house, but they were all mainly prats. Surely Dumbledore would have more sense than to promise her to some pure-blooded idiot like Sirius Black, or strange, eccentric Arthur Weasley. Or even worse the short pudgy boy Peter. And her friend Remus, she knew, wasn't completely pure-blooded. And there was that one boy whom she wouldn't even name who would be the worst boy to marry. She didn't let her mind wonder there.
There was that lovely bloke in Ravenclaw whose name she thought was Theodore Whaling, though that might also have been the name of their Quidditch captain; Lily was never very good at remembering names, but he might be ok.
There were always the Slytherins, but Dumbledore wasn't about to pair her with someone like Severus Snape or Walden MacNair, was he? Surely not, she hoped.
That left the Hufflepuffs. Was she doomed to spend the rest of her life as a Hufflepuff breeding machine? It was then that Lily Evans started to cry. She curled herself into a ball under the neat bedclothes and sobbed herself to sleep, where she dreamt she was surrounded by dozens of children clad in yellow and black.
Sixteen-year-old Lily Evans was quite sure life could not get any worse. She was standing in the drawing room, in a pink dress that clashed horribly with her red hair, waiting for her fiancé to arrive.
Now most sixteen-year-old girls, her father pleaded with her, would be thrilled to find that her parents had arranged a marriage for her. It meant no having to date, or flirt, or wear silly clothes to attract attention to them.
Lily argued that she would be thrilled to find that a large hole had appeared in the kitchen floor for her to throw herself into.
Her mother clucked her tongue at her daughter and set to the task of smoothing out the frilly pink skirt of the Worst Dress Ever.
"Lily dear, you look so pretty," her mother exclaimed. In Lily's mind, the hole in the kitchen morphed into a manticore, which proceeded to devour her entire family as well as the contract on which they had signed her life away.