Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter... yet

AN - This is my first HP fic. It's a Lily James fic because they are just sooo cute together. Yes it's another one of those stories about how they go ttogether, but it's told in both narrative form and in the shape of various letters, diaries and notes belonging to Lily and James that Harry finds upon his return to Godric's Hollow. The epilogue just sets up for teh rest of the story. There's not really any Harry in it apart from now.

I hope you like it. Please review to let me know what you think. Enjoy :)

As Harry lay in his bed in Ron's room in the Burrow, he mulled over recent events. His defeat of Voldemort. The deaths of Lupin, Tonks, Fred and many others. The end of the war. His reunion with Ginny. All these things whirled around in his head as he lay staring at the ceiling. It was a pity he had not mastered occlumency - it would be nice for him to have an empty mind before he slept. Instead he had to cope with jumbled dreams where he was caught between joy and grief, elation and guilt.

The past year had been the hardest year of his short life. Sure, there had been high points like Bill and Fleur's wedding or the end of Voldemort's regime, but he had been burdened by his duty to defeat the Dark Lord and by the knowledge that he had been living with a part of Voldemort's soul inside of him for his entire life. He had felt so impure when he discovered this little fact. He felt free without it now, and decided that he would go back and visit Godric's Hollow as just Harry and not as Harry the horcrux. His last visit hadn't exactly been encouraging - he had seen his old home with a giant hole in the side from when Voldemort had killed his parents, and obviously that hadn't been easy for him. And then he had been attacked by a giant snake while talking to the bewitched corpse of Bathilda Bagshot. All in all, not an ideal visit. He had felt the need to revisit his parents graves without the constant fear of being attacked by death eaters, and he had wanted to see their old house again, without having to move on so quickly. He wanted time to look at his parents old things - if they were still in the house - and to try and piece together what his parents' lives had been like.

When he arrived there, this time alone and under the security of his invisibility cloak, Harry taken his time to read all the notes that people had scribbled on the fence and gate, like a giant magical guest book. Words like 'Sorry' and 'Great witch and wizard' occurred as frequently as the phrase 'our hearts go out to their son Harry' or 'The wizarding community thank Harry Potter for his defeat of You Know Who'. He moved slowly up the garden path, stopping to look to his left where there was a stump of a beech tree, not unlike the one by the Lake at Hogwarts. Judging by it's rings, it would have been fairly young when it was destroyed - Harry determined that his parents had probably planted it there themselves.

As he looked through the kitchen and living room, Harry regarded the various items that had been left in place by those who had preserved the Potter household. The odd saucepan, left haphazardly on the bench. The toy broomstick discarded on the living room floor. The many photo frames on the mantel piece of Harry as a baby, Sirius and James at school, the four marauders, Lily and her mother. It wasn't until Harry reached his parents bedroom that he found anything particularly personal.

Their room was large and comfortable looking, furnished in red and gold - fitting for two Gryffindors, married straight out of school. The carpet was red, as were the curtains and walls, with gold trimmed bed sheets and cushions. It wasn't overdone in anyway and it reminded Harry happily of the common room at Hogwarts. He smiled as he realised that his parents probably thought the same thing and had furnished their room this way on purpose. The rest of the house was relatively neutral in colour, except for Harry's room which had a bright blue door. At the foot of his parent's double bed, was a large chest with a cushion on top, so that it doubled as a seat. Harry, eager for something personal to remember his parents by, raised the lid with a creak to realise that it was slightly bigger on the inside and filled to the brim with old parchment, scrolls, letters, notes, workbooks and photos. He saw the handwriting and knew that it had belonged to his parents during their school days; James would have had the messy scrawl that reminded Harry of his own style, and Lily was the neat, small writing he could see on the front of a diary.

Eagerly, Harry cast a spell over the box of treasures that caused the contents to spring into life and order themselves neatly in chronological order (a handy spell that Hermione had taught him, of course). Settling down in the centre of the comfortable bed, Harry began to read…