Lily does not know how It happened. She has always been a Strong Independent Woman. She is career-oriented; she has known she wanted to be a mediwitch since second year, even after the headmaster told her she had the potential to be the first female auror. She is practical, dating only three boys, all of them seriously, and never buying her robes at less than 35 percent off. For crying out loud, she even prefers reading her Guilty Pleasure romance novels from the Strong Independent Man's perspective than the Wimp of a Woman's.
Lily knows how to cook exactly three things, one of them being grilled cheese, and is perfectly content to make each thing once a week and eat leftovers the next day and go out on Wednesday night before Order meetings. She is far too busy advancing her career to learn to make lamb stew and cranberry roast chicken thankyouverymuch.
So she has absolutely no idea how she ended up in James Potter's kitchen at seven in the morning with one of his mother's old cookbooks making cinnamon buns. The dough had given her so much trouble she had wanted to scream, only she couldn't because that would wake James and she knew that was not supposed to happen. So instead she let it rise and began searching for sausages and orange juice. James' fridge appears to have been organized by a five year old whose only concern was to be sure the milk and chocolate sauce were easily within reach, but she has managed to find some Kidz Fun Apple Splash juice and that will simply have to do. She pushes the slightly lumpy swirls into two tin bread pans that must have also been his mother's and goes about searching for a frying pan very quietly.
Or as quietly as one can search through pots and pans that are on a shelf taller than she is with her red look-at-me heels. Fortunately, James appears to sleep like the dead, and doesn't come charging in to fight off the Pan Burglar. Or he simply has nothing of value in the kitchen and is cowering under the bed. Lily thinks it is probably the first, given James' love of charging into things.
Things like charging into the girl's tower so fast even the slide-stairs don't stop him on the last day of school to beg her one last time to go to the graduation formal with him. She wouldn't have, shouldn't have, only Alice had just been in to show her the engagement ring and Colleen had tearfully admitted she had been sleeping with Edward and now she had to break up with her soon-to-be-former boyfriend and… Well, he had just charged in at the right minute is all. Only now it has been six months and, quite frankly, James still charges in at the right minutes. A lot of the wrong ones too, but all the right ones. She checks on the oven as she flips on a burner, having decided a wok (really, James, a wok?) will probably do the job for the sausages.
She puts some oil in the pan and nearly burns herself when she realizes those cinnamon buns have to be out of the oven now and not in three minutes. She has no idea what she is doing here, making breakfast of all things (breakfast, which should consist of cereal and milk or a piece of fruit or maybe a piece of toast and jam on a weekend!). She has no idea why she let James take her back to his place last night or why she hasn't snuck off to her flat, only that her gut said to and her gut apparently wants cinnamon rolls more than sanity.
"Er… Lils?" says a sleepy voice behind her.
"What?" she asks very quietly, suddenly too ashamed to turn around.
"Is everything okay?" He walks over and puts a hand on her waist, wiggling the wok with the other.
"What do you mean?" Her voice is verging on shrill and she hates when it does that but suddenly her stomach is clenching and it wouldn't do to throw up on the sausages.
"Is… er… Sirius alright? Remus? Sniv… Severus?"
She turns in his arms and looks up at him. "I… I think so."
"Then why all the…" He gestures to the kitchen, the rolls still in the pan on the counter, the sausage, the glasses of juice.
"I… I don't know," she whispers.
He suddenly smiles, just a little bit, like he's holding back a laugh. "Ah. So no one is… Ah."
"What?"
He smiles a little wider, fighting a losing battle. "I was rather concerned you were going to tell me some dreadful news over breakfast."
She smiles too, although she's rather afraid it looks manic. "No, no great crisis."
"Is there an occasion, then?" There is a twinkle in his eyes now.
"No?" She thinks she is starting to catch onto this game, twirling a piece of hair between her fingers.
His grin widens impossibly. "I think there should be." Suddenly, he is on one knee and there is a little box from god knows where. "Will you marry me?"
Stunned is far too subdued a word for Lily's feelings. She is… something between horror and thrill and terror. The sum of all of them times a few thousand. "You are proposing to me in your kitchen."
"Yes."
"At seven thirty in the morning."
"Yes."
"On a lazy Saturday."
"Yes."
"Oh. Alright."
"Alright?" His brow furrows and she senses he is trying very hard not to make fun of her.
"I mean, yes."
The grin breaks out again and Lily thinks it is the cutest thing she has ever seen. She picks the simple gold band out of the velvet lips and puts it on her finger herself. "Then let's eat!" he says. He pulls out a chair for her while he turns off the burner and goes about the business of finding them plates and silverware.
"I can't cook for real, you know." She looks at him under her eyelashes and grins shyly, because it feels like the right thing to do.
"That's okay," says James as he leans down and kisses her cheek. "I can. And so can…" He picks up the cookbook. "Julie Jorgins."
"Okay then. Good." She thinks this sounds imbecilic and she will probably have to make up a total lie to tell Alice about how she ended up engaged to James Potter, but it feels kind of nice. Very strange, but perhaps the severity of strange that only a Strong Independent Woman can deal with.