"I can't believe I'm having Easter dinner with a couple of Muggles," James murmured, his fingers working nervously over the fabric of his suit. "And it's the day before my birthday, too. Is my tie crooked?"
Sirius stood to help him adjust his very much crooked tie. "You're also having Easter dinner with Lily Evans," he pointed out.
"Very true." James bit his lip. "There's still the issue of the Muggles, though. I've almost never talked to one before." He glanced back at Peter. "What's that football team you said I should tell them I like again?"
"Manchester United," Peter reminded him.
"Manchester United," James murmured. "What are they united in, exactly?"
"I dunno."
"You'll do fine, James," said Remus. He still looked exhausted from the full moon a couple nights before. "Just try not to be a prat."
"Solid advice, Remus." Lily had pried open the door to their room, her arms crossed over her chest. She was wearing a simple black dress with pantyhose and a pair of sensible flats. James found it very difficult to take his eyes off of her.
"Let's go," she was saying. "The reservation's for six-thirty, and we've still got to get somewhere we can Apparate into London from."
"Er…right." James gave his friends one final nervous glance; they each shot him a thumbs-up in return. Manchester United…Manchester United. "I'm all set, Lils."
James took one last moment to steel himself before going over to Lily and taking her hand. He had a very, very bad feeling about how this night was going to go.
James and Lily were meeting the Muggles at a classy restaurant in Chelsea called Beckwith's. It was filled with lacy white tablecloths and soft strains of jazzy music, with waiters and waitresses who were dressed nicer than James was. James had never been much of a fan of fancy places; he was already itching to get back to Hogwarts.
The hostess brought the two of them over to a table in the back where a man and woman had already been seated: Lily's sister Petunia and her new fiancé. Petunia had Lily's tiny nose and arched eyebrows, but the similarities ended there: her face was thin and wan, her blonde hair stringy and her neck much too long for the rest of her. The man beside her was large, mustached and purple-faced; even though he was probably in his mid-twenties, he already dressed and styled himself like a man in middle age.
"Petunia!" Lily said cheerily, holding out a hand to her sister. "Happy Easter."
"Happy Easter," Petunia replied, not returning Lily's smile. She took her sister's hand gingerly, as if it were covered in something dirty.
"This is my fiancé, Vernon Dursley," Petunia said as James and Lily took their seats across from them. "He's just been promoted to junior executive at Grunnings."
"Oh, congratulations!" said Lily. James had no idea what Grunnings was, but it sounded incredibly boring. Vernon Dursley as a person sounded incredibly boring.
"Vernon, this is my sister, Lily, and her…magician boyfriend, James." James snorted into his water glass; Lily shot him an angry look.
"I see." Vernon's mustache was twitching with displeasure. "What an…interesting career path." Vernon said interesting like it was the worst insult his brain could muster.
"Not as interesting as working at Grunnings, I'm sure."
"James," Lily murmured. She was holding a menu out to him, as if hoping the prospect of food would distract him from Vernon.
"Grunnings is the second largest producer of drills and drill bits in all of England," Petunia said heatedly. "Vernon's work is incredibly important."
"It's all right, Tuney." Vernon laid a beefy hand on her shoulder, fixing his eyes on James. "We can't expect him to understand. From the looks of him, this man's been living on the dole."
"Oh, really?" James's eyebrows shot up.
"James," Lily said, more insistently this time.
James ignored her. "Contrary to your beliefs, Mr Dursley, I'm actually quite well-off, thank you very much. My father invented a wildly popular hair product which I believe you yourself would benefit enormously from—I'll mail you a sample, if you'd like. I've got a small fortune to my name in a bank run by goblins not too far from here, made out of solid gold. I had a bit of it exchanged into pounds for this dinner; I assume Lily told you I'd be footing the bill tonight, so feel free to order whatever you'd like. I'm not sure how often drill manufacturers are able to treat themselves."
Vernon bristled visibly. "Are you making fun of me, man?"
"Oh, certainly not; I'm entirely serious." James leaned back to waive over the nearest waitress and began rattling off the most expensive items on the menu for his order, complete with a two-hundred-pound bottle of wine for the table. Vernon, feeling challenged, was compelled to one-up him and order a lavish plate of beef spiedini as an appetizer, ensuring that the waitress understood to bring the bill for it to him. James grinned; he was enjoying this a little too much.
"Lily," he said once the waitress had left, scribbling furiously on her notepad, "why didn't your parents come tonight? I'd love to find out where you got your good looks from; I can't say I see too much of a resemblance between you and your sister."
Petunia set down her glass. "She didn't tell you."
James looked to Lily, who had averted her eyes. "Tell me what?"
"Our parents were killed in a car crash over the summer," Lily said quietly. "Head-on collision with a drunk driver. There was nothing anyone could do."
Shit. James had had no idea—why hadn't Lily said anything to him? He raised a hand to his mouth, doing his best to obscure the hurt look on his face. Eventually he said, "Well, that's too bad. I suppose it'll have to remain a mystery."
The conversation only went downhill from there. Vernon, blustering, began bragging about his new car, seemingly a safe fallback topic for him; James responded with an enthusiastic description of his Starsweeper. Petunia questioned the point of a Hogwarts education, and James regaled her with a thorough description of a N.E.W.T.-level Hogwarts curriculum, complete with bat conjuring and transforming field mice into pocketwatches. "That spell's particularly tricky—mice don't make the best timekeepers, I suppose." There was certainly no discussion of their favorite football teams.
Finally, Vernon and Petunia had had enough: they rose from their seats, hand in hand and glaring at James and Lily, and stormed away, leaving their untouched crab-topped filet mignons behind. "Tuney!" Lily tried calling after them, but Petunia wouldn't even turn around.
Lily whirled around on James, her eyes welling with tears. "I thought you said you'd play nice," she said, her voice breaking. "What the hell, James? Why did you have to do that?"
The sight of Lily on the verge of tears was enough to make James wish he'd held back, at least a little. "They were horrible, Lils! Especially Dursley. He said I looked like I was on the dole—I mean, how else was I supposed to respond to that?"
"You could have brushed it off!" Now Lily was really crying. "You know how important it is for my to make up with my sister, and you decided to say all those things anyway—how could you?"
"Well, maybe I don't know what's important to you," James countered, feeling a bit of anger rising in him as well, "considering you never even thought to tell me what happened to your parents."
"God, James! Maybe I didn't tell you because it's hard for me to talk about, and I still can't help but cry when I think about it, and when I'm with you I just want to feel happy and not have to worry about all the unfair shit going on in my life, and I…." Lily broke down into sobs then, her hands tearing at her hair.
James's anger quickly dissolved into shame. Why did he have to be such an arsehole? "Lily, I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I—I don't know why I do things like that, really."
"Yeah, well, you need to grow up," she sputtered, turning away from him. "You're almost eighteen, James—you need to start bloody acting like it."
"Hey." James squeezed her shoulder, leaning forward until he could meet her eyes. "You're right; I do. I promise, Lils, I'm gonna make things right with that—with Vernon. And then you can make things right with your sister. It's going to be okay; I'll make sure it's okay. You know how hard I work for the people I care about, right?"
Lily gave him the tiniest of nods; then she moved to bury her face in his shoulder, staining his suit with her tears. James kissed the top of her head and held her close, hating himself and Vernon and Petunia just as passionately as he loved her.
