Title: and in this moment i am happy
Author: andromeda3116/cupid-painted-blind
Rating: In the realm of PG, for more mature subject matter, and a few dirty jokes.
Characters/Pairings: Lily, James; pre-Lily/James
Summary: A lull in the chaos, preparing for sixth-year exams; a late-night trip to the kitchens and a run-in with a boy she's supposed to hate. Lily's most honest and most deceitful moment; James's most honorable and most painful memory.
A/N: The missing moment that bridges the gap between Common Stories and i await a guardian. Song that lends itself to the title is Wish You Were Here by Incubus. Also, "Dramatic Irony" should be a genre that I can list stories under.
i lean against the wind, pretend that i am weightless —
She is lonely — and it's the worst kind, the alone-in-the-crowd sort of loneliness that comes when you realize that no one around you looks at you and sees you. It's the week before sixth year exams and all of a sudden, she's the most popular girl in the school, everyone wants to hang with her now because everyone knows that she's a bleeding-heart who will help anyone who asks her to.
Agitated and unsatisfied and frustrated and stressed, she finally gives up on the mountain of revision bearing down on her and leaves the common room at just under a run.
It's just a bad night, she thinks. Just a bad week, just a bad month.
It's just been a bad year.
Her world has been shrinking in around her lately, as the number of people who actually know Lily dwindles further and further; or maybe it's simply that she's more aware of her status now that she's looking at the world with a little more critique, a little more cynicism. There's a big, still-raw, Severus-Snape shaped scar scrawled across her, ten years of good memories gone sour, that's made her step back and consider the others in her life and what they're taking from her.
And now she wishes bitterly that she hadn't. It was better to be blind.
She runs a shaking hand through her hair and slows her pace to a less urgent one, idly making for the kitchens. It isn't that she's hungry, but rather that she needs some motion to stir up the stagnant waters, a little air to clear her head, a tiny moment of escape.
So when she walks into the kitchens and sees him there, she almost falls to the ground and screams.
"Miss Lily Evans!" one of the house-elves cries, and rushes over to her. "What can we do for Miss?"
James Potter glances at her, raising an eyebrow, and waves. He looks as tired as she feels. "Couldn't sleep either?" he asks, motioning toward the bowl in front of him. "You like strawberries, right? I seem to remember that."
She almost lies and says no, but there's a shadow on his face that looks a bit like the scar written on hers. "I do," she replies, and turns to the house-elf. "Do you have any cream?"
"Of course, Miss!" he chirps, and rushes off, returning with a small bowl just as she's sitting down on the bench opposite James Potter.
"Thank you," she says, smiling, and sets the cream right in the middle of the table, beside the still-mostly-full bowl of strawberries. The air between them is a little cool, slightly strained: although their five years of antagonism have mostly passed now that he and his posse have left the bullying behind them, it still hovers around them, words said and things done that can't be forgotten, not yet.
"I didn't even think to ask about cream," he says, with forced levity and a grin that looks barely real. "Looks like there is a brain under all that hair after all."
"Please, Potter," she sniffs, "we all know who had more Outstandings on their OWLs."
"Oh, come off it," he snorts dismissively. "That Charms examiner was biased against me. He swears I made mistakes on some spells that I know I did right."
She tries to laugh, but the air is still tense and the weight in her head hasn't lessened. To hide her discomfort, she leans over and makes a show of picking out the biggest strawberry she can find without digging through all of them, and drenching it in the cream.
"Hey!" James Potter cries in mock offense. "I was saving that one!"
"You don't save strawberries," she replies airily. "The only right thing to do with a strawberry is to eat it and all of its friends as soon as you can."
"Unreasonable woman," he mutters, but he's smiling. Part of her likes the way they're talking right now, but most of her is wary of the way they've always talked before; she's preparing herself for the explosion that she'll turn on him if (when) he twists this conversation into yet another reason that she should leap into his arms. But then...
James Potter has been different these past few months - and while everyone has noticed, no one seems to know why.
(She does. It's burned into her memory, a November night and a Sirius-Black-shaped scar.)
It rises up inside of her as he idly picks another strawberry. Now that the conversation has faded, that look of deeper-than-bone exhaustion has returned to his face, and he doesn't seem willing to look at her.
The silence stretches and stretches and stretches between them until it breaks, almost of its own accord.
"What happened that night?" falls out of her mouth, and she winces, shutting her eyes tight, waiting for the inevitable axe to fall.
"What night?" he asks, voice balanced delicately. She takes a deep breath to steady her voice and rally her nerves into sensibility: whatever James Potter is, prone to bouts of rage he is not.
"With Sirius," she says tightly, "and Severus? I — I wasn't trying to spy, but I heard yelling and... what happened?"
When she opens her eyes, he's looking at her with something strange twisted into his expression, a mirror of the bitterness she's tasted all year. "I gave up on my brother when he needed me most," he says, as though confessing a mortal sin.
There's a moment then, where she looks at him and all she sees in his eyes is her reflection. But the answer isn't enough, and she holds eye contact until he turns away and continues, the story pouring out of him like it's something he's been locking up for too long.
"He — He's had a bad year," he admits, refusing to look back at her. "Not really... not himself — or... or — himself, but on — on fire or... something..."
"Like," she begins, trying to get the measure of his meaning and also to give him a moment to rearrange his thoughts, "his normal personality, but turned up to eleven?"
"More like fifteen," he mumbles, and sighs. "I mean, his fa — " he starts, and then catches himself and changes direction, "he had a bad summer, and it's just been getting worse. And — you know, for a while, I was playing along like usual, but it started to be — he started to get destructive — I mean, really destructive. It wasn't making fun or playing pranks," he says, voice rising with each sentence. "He was actually hurting people — actively hurting people — trying to hurt people.
"It started to get scary, you know, we were really worried about him, but when we tried to talk to him about it, he either laughed it off or snapped back at us, accused us of not — not getting it, not wanting to be his friends anymore... It was like he was trying to make everyone hate him," he adds finally, in a much lower voice, back to that forgive me Father for I have sinned tone. "He wanted us to hate him, too."
She almost asks him to clarify what he means by "too," but it would just be cruel; she already knows. The details are fuzzy, but Sirius Black's relationship with his family of Slytherins and Pureblood supremacists has been strained from the moment he walked away from the Sorting Hat, and has never improved.
"So, he finally did something nasty enough?" she asks quietly. "So nasty that it would finally do it?"
"Yeah," he replies, running a hand through his hair. For a moment, he stops entirely, and then lets out a heavy breath and shakes his head slowly, looking away from her again. "And — and God help me, I took the bait. I just couldn't — he was out of control and I couldn't... I couldn't stop him and I was sick of trying. I just gave up."
She thinks about that for a handful of seconds, and then speaks in an even, soft, measured voice, each word weighed carefully — "But you didn't," she says, and he looks up at her, half-confused and half-angry. "You told Dumbledore that you did it. You were the one on a week's suspension, not Sirius."
His expression is thousands of miles away from and uncomfortably close to her. "He'd been in so much trouble since September, he was — they would have expelled him," he answers, sounds like an actor reading lines. "And if they expelled him... he doesn't have anywhere else to go," he explains, so quietly that she can barely hear him.
When the words sink in, the final piece in the Sirius Black Puzzle falls into place: he doesn't have anywhere else to go. His family has officially cast him out; Hogwarts and his friends are all he has. And he tried to make all of them hate him because he thought it would be better to push them away himself before they left of their own accord.
It sounds bitterly, brutally, painfully familiar.
"At least he listened to you," she says slowly. "He came to his senses."
James Potter laughs outright at this, a bark of a laugh that sounds so unlike him. "It wasn't me that did that. It was Mo — Remus," he corrects himself. "Remus, he... he's a saint, looked at everything and — and that — that idiot forgave him. Right there. No questions asked. It was — I was so mad I couldn't even see straight but he just..."
"Managed to shame Sirius right out of it?"
"I guess," he replies. "It was a wake-up call, I think. Remus — look, if anyone had a right to be bloody furious about what happened that night, it was Remus. Even more than Snape. Much more than Snape, actually. But Remus forgives him on the spot, and all of a sudden, Sirius realizes that there is — officially! — nothing he can do that will make Remus hate him. I just wish I..." he starts, and trails off, the sentence fading off of his lips and rising to her own.
"...had had the strength and clarity to show him that yourself," she finishes for him, looking away. "But you can't — at some point, you have to let go. You can't keep making excuses for someone and trying to — to help someone and — and be there, for someone who doesn't want you there."
They aren't talking about Sirius anymore, and they both know it, but in an unexpected show of grace, he doesn't call her out on it. "You get to where you're bleeding for them," he continues, the same kind of undirected agitation in his voice as the kind that brought her here, "and they're not even listening to you, and you can't — you run out of energy and — "
" — you have to start saving yourself because you can't save him anymore." She's memorizing the wood grain in the table and compulsively twisting the leaves off of a forgotten strawberry. "He's finally just... too far gone."
(It will be several hours before she'll catch her slip.)
"It hurt," he admits. "It hurt, it really hurt. I was so mad at him, but I felt so bad for him at the same time, and I — I hated it. I hated to do it. But..."
Silence falls and draws the seconds out into hours. The mantra she's spent the last year relying on slips out of her lips without checking itself at her tongue, at her throat, at her mind; it spins itself into sound without any regard to the danger it puts Lily and Lily's stupid ever-bleeding heart into as it does.
"It hurt like hell to do it," she whispers, "but it would have killed me if I didn't."
"And other people," he adds, an implicit agreement and explicit connection that wraps itself around her and terrifies her beyond all reason.
With a start, she shakes the moment away and grabs another strawberry, taking great care to get just the right amount of cream on it. "I know how you feel," she says unnecessarily, focusing all of her energy on the strawberry and putting on her tired, ragged, half-unwanted Advice-Columnist-Lily Hat. "And for what it's worth, I — " she's about to say I would have done the same thing but then realizes that she did — "I think you did all you could. It sounds like a bad situation all around, and... everyone has a breaking point. It isn't weakness," she tells him firmly, because she can apply the platitude to someone else and mean it but she can't believe that it applies to herself.
And then he looks at her in another way, a dishearteningly familiar way, and opens his mouth to speak, but she tosses the perfectly-creamed strawberry at him to shut him up, hoping that the warning in her eyes will carry through the ostensibly playful action. Don't ruin this, she thinks. Don't make me hate you all over again right when I think someone is finally seeing me.
Don't make me wrong about you, again.
He fails to catch the projectile, which hits him square in the chest and leaves a splatter of cream on his shirt that slowly follows the strawberry down onto his lap, but he does seem to get the hint; all of a sudden, the heavy atmosphere shatters, and they're barely seventeen again instead of too old and beaten down.
For a moment, he looks down at his chest, and opens his mouth to speak again before closing it right back and failing to pretend that he isn't fighting back a dirty joke.
"I know what you're thinking," she tells him, straight-faced. He looks up at her, obviously biting his tongue.
"Do you?" he asks tightly.
"Mm-hm," she replies primly, still poker-faced, and leans forward on the table, chin propped up on her fist. "You're thinking that I just came all over your shirt."
He explodes into shocked laughter, a hand over his mouth. "You of all people!" he cries. "You are making a raunchy sex joke!"
"It was obvious!" she counters, but his laughter is infectious and she can't keep it in. "Besides, who ever said that I couldn't make a raunchy joke?" He looks at her for a moment, a deer in headlights, and looks away, half-open mouth turning into a guilty grin. "So help me," she says, pulling her serious face back on, "if you call me a prude, I am throwing this cream in your face."
He pauses. "I have two responses to that," he says after a moment, looking very thoughtful. "I'm trying to decide which one to go with."
"Don't even bother, I know what both of them are."
"You can show me that you're not a prude all night long," he goes on, like she didn't say anything. "And I'm very flattered that you want to come all over my face."
She actually throws her head back and laughs, even though she expected both. It's the way he says them, with just enough innuendo to be funny but not so much that it's uncomfortable, dances the line right inside the safe zone. She doesn't know if it's actually that funny or if it's just that it lifts up the weight in her head and in their conversation and makes it disappear.
"I told you not to bother," she admonishes, and then, with a swish of her wand just too sudden for him to escape, she tosses the entire bowl of cream right onto him. Out of kindness, she aims it for his shirt rather than his face.
"Augh!" he yells, wincing and laughing at the same time. "Not fair! You didn't give me time to dodge!"
"C'mon, Potter, you play Quidditch," she teases. "You of all people should know. The opponent never gives you time to dodge," she tells him, in the tone of one imparting great knowledge. He just looks at her, pouting. "Oh, come off it, you big baby," she says, waving a hand. "Even with your paltry E in Charms, you can clean your shirt off in one spell."
"Now you're just being cruel," he sniffs, crossing his arms in a dramatic huff before pausing to think about what he's doing. "And now there's cream on my hands, too," he adds conversationally, and then winces.
"That sounds like a personal hygiene problem to me."
"I walked into that one," he acknowledges. "What's that now, Lily: three, James: zero?"
She makes a show of thinking for a moment. "Well, if we're talking about just this encounter, yes, but if we consider the last six years..." she muses, and smiles. "I'm pretty sure I'm beating you into the ground."
"Only because I let you win," he mutters, but can't seem to quite stop laughing. "Man, I can't get over... you made that joke," he says, like he still can't believe it. "And there's no witnesses! I can't share this revelation with anyone! No one will believe me."
"So, I guess that means..." she starts, and clicks her tongue. "Lily: four, James: zero."
"You manipulative, cruel, sadistic, devious witch!" he accuses, and then grins. "I'm impressed."
He bows to her, as much and with as much pomp as one can while seated. And she laughs again, because it's nice. It feels good to, after such a bad year, laugh with someone who isn't asking anything from her, to finally build a bridge rather than burn one or let one fall into disrepair.
She laughs because nothing hurts right now, and she isn't lonely right now, and she thinks she's finally starting to understand James Potter and maybe he's finally starting to understand her too. Lily doesn't like hating people; she's a bleeding-heart who will give everything she has to fix someone or something and for once — maybe for this one time, maybe for this one moment — it actually feels like it's worth it.
"I'm glad you can appreciate me for who I really am," she says like she's joking to hide the fact that she means it entirely, every corny word. If he catches on, he doesn't act like it.
"Well," he replies, waving a hand carelessly, "you don't ever let on that you're a cruel, cruel woman. How could I have known?"
She smiles and shakes her head slowly. "My apologies," she says airily, and then stands up, stretching; a small, wicked part of her takes notice of the way his expression flickers as he takes notice. "And it is now time for bed," she explains, grabbing another few strawberries before she leaves. "Good night. Don't let the bed bugs bite."
"I imagine they'll be attracted to the sugar all over me," he replies in a slightly hoarse voice.
"So take a shower," she suggests lightly.
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbles, and then turns toward her. "Good night," he adds hastily, fervently, giving her pause. For about a second and a half, she's standing at the door looking back at him, covered in cream and looking so much less tired than he did when she came in, and in a sudden flash, she knows that she doesn't want to hear the words he's about to say. "Thank you," he tells her, in that same fervent tone. "It... I don't know anyone who — who understands and I — I want you to — "
She cuts him off before he says anything else. "It's nothing," she says, half-honest and half-warning, and his expression flickers again, but in the opposite direction. She tries to find new words to say. When nothing comes, she defaults back to, "Good night, James."
"No," he counters, and she flinches as though she's been hit. "You don't — you didn't have to listen to all of that and — it means a lot to — "
"And I mean it when I say it's nothing," she replies. "You needed to let it out, and... I did, too. We're even, don't worry about it," she finishes, like that was what he meant or that it will ever actually be the end of it. "Good night," she says again, quieter this time, and then leaves before he can say anything else, although she does catch the start of another sentence, a fragment of
"You don't — "
but then the portrait door swings shut and she's back in the world where she and James Potter don't have anything in common. She returns to the common room at just under a run, and doesn't think about what he was going to say, especially doesn't think about the part of her that wishes she had stayed to hear it.
— and in this moment, i am happy.
" — understand. It means more to me because you don't think anything of it," he finishes, each word falling shorter than the one before it, and buries his face in his still-cream-coated arms.
"Master James?" a house-elf asks, and he doesn't look up.
"I was this close," he says, voice still pointed at the table. "I was over her, finally — finally! — over her. This isn't fair."
But house-elves aren't good at human hearts. The one standing beside him just watches him awkwardly and warily until he stands up and, with a single, bitter motion, charms the cream off of his shirt and back into the bowl. The strawberry that she had thrown at him tumbles to the floor and he picks it up, holds it for a moment, then looks back to the portrait-hole with the stupid hope that he doesn't want to feel.
"Lily: five," he mutters, and throws the strawberry into the bowl with the ruined cream. "James: zero."