Jily oneshots

Another Damn Grocery Fic, Okay?

by elanev91

Every summer since she'd turned 13, it was the same routine.

She woke up at five thirty, so early that even the summer sun was just barely peeking over the horizon, and walked ten minutes down the road to her dad's shop. She helped her dad open, accused him of leaving the easiest tasks for her to do, got into spirited arguments with him about rugby. She was there all day, and though she left each day exhausted, it was worth it to walk home with her father every night and laugh about the things that had gone wrong that day.

Her dad always got to the store at half four, long, long before it opened, but he loved the quiet walk, the hint of orange that coloured the horizon in the summertime, the sharp crispness of the air in autumn — it was the only time you could hear the birds when you were on the high street, and he would gladly sacrifice a bit of sleep for one of life's little luxuries.

It was the same every summer — early mornings, long days, surprisingly annoying arguments with people about the produce quality. Over time, her father started waking up later, but Lily always made sure to compensate. When he started rolling out of bed at five thirty, she was halfway to the store already. When he was pulling himself up at half six, she'd been there since five.

He started joking, in between ragged breaths, that she was leaving all the easy tasks for him.

She was. She knew he'd been leaving them for her, too — but that seemed so long ago now.

Their walks home took longer, required more breaks, but still included a lot of laughter.

Every summer was the same — the dark purple bags under her eyes because she never quite mastered the early bedtime, the rowdy boys that bought as many sweets as they could carry and flirted shamelessly whenever they were home from their boarding school.

Every summer was the same — until it wasn't.

When Lily came home that summer after her first year at University, she knew that she was home for good.

A lot still stayed the same, even now that she was the one running the place. She now woke up at four, met the lorries when they arrived at the crack of dawn, poured over the books at the end of every quarter, but she still left the easy tasks for the end of the morning, still made a mental list of all the bizarre things that had happened to her that day.

Her father wasn't there to laugh with her anymore, but she still made mistakes, loads of them, and she liked to think that running through the list on her walk home alone was the same.

The boys were still there, too, though there were three instead of four, and they were more like men than boys. Two, James and Sirius, had moved to the village when Lily was eleven, and though she'd hoped they'd go to school together, get some new faces to liven up the place, the Potter boys had gone to some posh boarding school and Lily had ploughed on at her comprehensive.

They were gone all year, from September until basically July, but they hung around the shop all summer, had done for as long as Lily could remember. They'd stumble in around eleven (then closer to noon or one as they got older), usually doubled over in laughter about something, before they greeted her, her dad, and bought whatever it was they came for. Sometimes they just bought coffees, sometimes the one in the glasses, James, bought a bouquet of flowers for his mum ('Piss off, Sirius, we owe Mum an apology and these are her favourite!'), or else they bought as much food as they could carry. They would sit out in the sun all afternoon, eating whatever they'd purchased, their laughter growing in volume as they rolled around in the grass in the park across the way.

She didn't know much about them, other than the fact that they all went to school together, and the other two, Remus and Peter, seemed to spend a lot of time in Godric's Hollow with the Potter boys. She never would have admitted it, even to herself, but she quite liked when they were around, even if she did occasionally have to tell them off.