#maybe make most of the first part into canon-lily chapter and then extra lizzie part

[thelucyverse]

Lily | Elizabeth

Elizabeth Alcott is born in a small town not far from England, except she isn't called Elizabeth nor Alcott then, yet. She is born Lily Evans, second daughter to a lower-middle-class nonmagical married couple with a pretty, well cared for house in a nice-enough neighborhood.

Lily's sister Petunia teases her little sister and fights with her, but mostly she plays with her, protects her, and lets everyone know that she is the only one allowed to make fun of her little red-headed sister. That is, until Lily finds other friends, friends in primary school, friends in the park between their neighborhood and the not-quite-so-nice-enough neighborhood on the other side. There's one boy in particular she likes to meet up with, and while Petunia first easily teases her about being in looove, her teasing soon turns more bitter than light-hearted because Lily doesn't seem to have time for her anymore, and Petunia never had an easy time making friends other than her sister, alright, and anyhow most of the things Lily and that Snape boy are doing are just unnatural, alright? Jumping from the swingset and flying, really flying through the air afterwards, letting flowers bloom in their hands and catching more butterflies on their skin than Petunia ever caught in a net. Her sister turns jealous and bitter, and Lily barely notices. Her acceptance to Hogwarts while Petunia stays behind is really just the last straw to break their family ties apart, even if it comes out of the blue for Lily.

Meanwhile, she makes new friends in Hogwarts, girls who share her love for muggle as well as wizarding fiction, other students to study with in the library, but she does stay in contact with her first magical friend, too. They turn to aliases in their letters when Lily writes to him when Sev is at Hogwarts over the holidays while Lily is at her loving home (loving, still, despite her jealous sister), because his house mates shouldn't know he is conversing quite so much with a known mudblood, and Petunia shouldn't know she is still writing to that boy. Lily calls herself Elizabeth, after the heroine in Pride and Prejudice, and Alcott after the author of Rose in Bloom. Both names old enough to fool any pureblood into thinking that Severus is writing to a half-blood at least, while so muggle in origin that it is making Lily smile. The first time she signs with the name, Sev asks whether he can call her Lizzie then, and ends up having to explain about the sister of the author and gifting her another book, 'Little Women', for Christmas (or Yule).

With her friends (or despite them, at times), Lily/Lizzie learns all about magic in Hogwarts, especially the different charms, how they work and what you can do with them in all aspects of life, as well as potions, which are Severus' passion. She has fun, she is a happy child and young teenager, but it cannot stay that way. A war is at the horizon, and everyone in the magical world - adult, student, child - is dragged into it, whether they want to and particularly care for one side over the other or not. Her first friend makes his choices, and she makes her own. She finds new friends along the way, a boyfriend even and his friends are quickly becoming close to her, too, and they all work together in their last months of school and the time after, to fight, to win this war once and for all.

Lily and James were supposed to marry not long after graduation, because when there is a war going on, no-one has any time to lose.

Perhaps there would have been a prophecy made, a child born, a dark lord vanquished and the parents' lives over.

But not in this world, not in this universe.

The good thing about the multiverse and the agents working cross-verse within it is that, when for once a universe opens up at a point in time where they know something bad happens, and they have fought the same fight in a different 'verse before, they can step in and stop it all much quicker than anyone who is lacking that bigger picture. They destroy the horcruxes, kill Tom Riddle, check his followers for compulsions and the like and turn quite some of them over to the local authorities. And the other people, those who fought for the light? Some would just leave them in that dark about what happens, leave the universe again now that the job is done, and in fact quite a number of them do just that. But there is no rule against talking, this isn't a time-travel conundrum but a truly different universe with a different future now, and one or more of the multiverse agents think people deserve to know the truth of what happened, of what could have happened, of why certain people were arrested - Peter Pettigrew hadn't turned his friends over to Voldemort yet and what a different universal of his has done is not a crime he can be imprisoned for, but he has been found out to already pass different information on to the death eaters, and while he has avoided azkaban and has gotten out on parole to do community service, his friends - former friends - are still disgusted with him, and even more so when they hear about what could have been, would have been.

The agents are careful to say that just because someone was evil in one universe, it doesn't mean the same is true here, people are shaped by their experiences much more than their DNA - but Peter is too much the same as the stories about a traitor portray him, and neither the Marauders nor Lily trust him anymore. They can't look in his face, neither can Lily look at Severus, and when one of the multiverse agents offers transport to their home world and planet to everyone willing to leave this world behind in exchange for holding onto a gadget for a year that will make them an emergency contact for anyone in need, a safe place for the injured, a callcenter for the lost, the four of them all readily accept.

Bajor of the universe two-to-the-left of their old one is a beautiful place, with its own conflicts an religions and only few magic workers around, and they find their place there easily, especially James, who wants to settle down after all, to have the wedding now almost a year (not quite, as days and months move different here than on earth) later than planned, to have a child and create a home - and Lily - no, Elizabeth, now, because no matter who she first shared the nickname with, it is hers now, and she knows there might be another Lily Evans elsewhere in this new universe, and she wants a name of her own - Elizabeth says no. There is a whole universe out there - yes, multiverse too, but right now she is more concerned with the fact that there are different planets and such different ways of understanding magic and so many new things that need discovering - why would she ever want to 'settle down'?

They have a talk, and a fight, and another talk, and maybe it could have worked out in a long-distance kind of way, but - it was a relationship born from war and very set expectations, a relationship started in school, the first serious relationship either of them had - and after the third long talk way into the never-quite-as-dark-as-they-are-used-to night on this new planet, they decide to part on amicable terms. Maybe, they think, maybe they will meet up again later, when their life goals align properly again and they find they are still in love... Instead, Jimmy Potter marries a local woman a year later and has a child that calls out "Auntie Elizabeth!" whenever she visits, and it is as if it had always meant to be this way.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth travels far and works hard in a lot of different jobs, psi-null or magical, to afford the journeys to different planets, and then she works on-planet too most of the time instead of taking a proper vacation, because there are always people that need help one way or other, and she is always ready to give it when she can. By the time she is thirty, she has made a name of herself in this universe, though not as much of a name as the dead variants of herself have on their own planets. She is called reliable, strong and ingenious and sometimes pretty instead of a beautiful heroine mother, and she is called so by perhaps the same number of people, just stretched much farther across a universe.

She is still called brave.

When she comes across another agent of the multiverse - of Central, as she now knows - she asks for a job with them, to see even more far-away places, even if some are more familiar to her than she has seen in a long time. She works as a spellmaker at first, to combine magical means and electricity to make inter-universal portals more durable and reliable, but after a few too many occasions where she ends up going with a research and rescue team who come through a portal of hers, she is officially included in their numbers, wearing the tight uniform of the universal jumpers because any excess air between you and the fabric makes it more likely for you to end up nude on the other side of a portal door, when the calculations aren't exactly right. She pulls on a witch's cloak over her uniform, even though she does tend to lose them around the portals more often than not, because the clothing still makes her feel at home after all this time, and because no matter where you end up, a neutral-coloured robe stands out much less than the gleaming high-tech uniform shirts.

Between missions, Lizzie visits Jim and his wife and two children, and her new friend Georgiana she had once helped search a long-lost lover, and other acquaintances from the universe she called home for the second-longest time.

It takes her a while to be comfortable around her home planet again, even in different universes, different lands, different times. It takes her even longer to go back to any kind of Hogwarts, but when she does - over fifty, experienced in a lot of things including disguises but not even really needing one because she is older than Lily Evans here ever got to be, older even than she would be now, and her hair is a darker colour anyway from working with the portal radiation (that no, isn't dangerous, Cleo tested this) and then from colouring it because she got used to it - when she goes back to this old and still so new world, earth, 1990s, Hogwarts after a war the agents have not quite managed to intercept this time, but at least they can help with the aftermath - when she arrives there, she feels a nostalgic shudder of home, but at the same time she knows that her home has long been elsewhere now, not settled down anywhere but in the fast movings of Central, in the groups of people she works with and calls friends, in the stars.

And if she finds a man there who reminds her of an old friend of hers - but not really, because not only is he kinder than her former friend has ever been, but he is also older than she had ever known that other version of him, yet ten years younger than she is now - and they are confused about each other at first, then work with each other despite it, then get to know each other as the separate people they are - and if she falls in love with someone so bound to a world, universe and planet, by his profession and an adopted son (who has her universal's eyes, but not her own), then this time, she knows she can make long-distance work.

She finds new friends there too, when she now spends most of her downtime there instead of with her old friends and ex-boyfriend, in a woman who killed her first husband when he tried to kill her son and then when Central came went on adopting first all the children of her universal versions less loving than herself, then younger versions of herself, too; and in a woman from a universe one to the right who had travelled back in time a number of years, and in a woman she never thought she would ever see a friendly universal-version of but is now convinced that DNA does not shape anyone to be evil -

And Elizabeth Alcott has a wonderful, fulfilled, long life.