A/N: I was cleaning out my hard drive the other day, and I found this fic that I wrote way back in November when I was too concerned with NaNoWriMo to post anything, but thought I should finally put it up. Plus, the Viennese Waltz is just so underappreciated. This is meant to be a oneshot, but I rather like the Jily Oxford AU feel, and I've had a few thoughts about other stories set in this universe, so we'll see what goes on with that.
(and yes, I'm aware that it's almost March and I'm posting a story that takes place in fall and perhaps has some follow-up to Halloween and Christmas, but whatever. I once wrote a Christmas AU in May. I'm seasonally challenged. Sue me).
xx
Kate
Dance in the rain
With clouds at your heels
Rosebuds refreshed
The calming one feels
Life is the present
There's no need to wait
Throw back the shutters
And unlock the gate
~Holly Jamestone
vVv
There is a certain etiquette involved in waking one's roommate, a procedure to be followed to ensure the harmonious passing of time between both people.
It should not involve a bucket of water. Absolutely not.
"Oi, wake up, arsehole. You have class." The loud and unfortunately familiar voice broke through the pleasant haze of sleep falling over him, punctuated by a poke on his shoulder.
James rolled over in his bed, burying his head in pillow. "M'no," he mumbled. "Classes" a yawn "—s'at eleven." He felt the waves of sleep recede, then rise again…
Another poke. "It's daylight savings."
A grunt. "So?"
A pause of silence, the sound of footsteps walking away then returning. "You're twenty minutes late." And then Sirius Black dumped a bucket of water over his head.
James shot upright in his bed, sputtering and shaking his head. "You—what the actual fuck Padfoot—" He wiped the water out of his eyes and glared mutinously at his best friend, whose blurry form was staring unapologetically at him.
"You wouldn't get up," was all Sirius said, then he turned and flounced away.
Sitting alone in his wet bed, soaked to the bone and very seriously contemplating murder—any sensible jury would acquit him on this one, he thought—it was only then that Sirius's words registered.
Daylight savings.
James shoved on his glasses, squinting at his bedside—the clock read 11:17.
Class was at eleven.
His curse echoed through the room. "Shit!"
vVv
There is absolutely no etiquette involved in being late for class.
James didn't think he'd ever gotten ready that fast—he didn't bother to brush his hair, shoved his legs into his pants backwards, buttoned only what kept him decent and non-pneumonic in November and Remus looked entirely confused when he raced down the stairs as fast as possible, stole the half-eaten bagel right out of Pete's hand, stopped to give Sirius the finger, and was out the door.
"God dammit, of course I had to live off campus," he wheezed to himself, pack hanging unzipped over one shoulder and his scarf trailing on the frosty sidewalk as he sprinted, attempting to eat at the same time and only succeeding in nearly choking. "Fucking Sirius's fucking idea. Why did I ever listen to him—?"
Oxford was a comparatively small town to his hometown of London, but his lungs, burning and aching (possibly from a stuck piece of bagel that just wouldn't go down. And it was garlic. He detested garlic), seemed to think the ten minute walk was more along the lines of a ten kilometer sprint when he entered the university campus, pushing through the masses of people and praying to whatever deity deigned to listen to him that it wouldn't start to rain.
His mother's voice rang in his head. It's always raining in England, James. He could picture her, standing in the garden and clicking her tongue at him as the slate grey skies—a perfect blue only minutes before—opened up. See?
The sky looked similarly grey today and a brisk wind was slicing through the stone courtyards, but James didn't pay any attention to that or the fact that he thought his fly might be unzipped (because dear God, it was freezing down there) only that his watch now read 11:31 and he was skidding to a halt in front of the double doors of the Theater department and racing down the empty corridor—
His glasses, perched precariously on his nose the entirety of his travel, finally gave up at aiding him in not bumping into other pretentiously misleading Homo sapiens and decided to take a little trip to the floor.
Carpeted, thankfully. Wouldn't that have the cherry on top of an already perfect day.
James skidded to a halt, lunging desperately to swipe up the wire framed spectacles he'd worn since he was six. The arms were old and flimsy, the type that folded three times in on itself and required careful manipulation to extend properly, manipulation he absolutely didn't have time for right now—
James shoved them against his eyes with his free hand, holding onto his pack with the other and trying to angle it so as not to drop anything as he navigated the still mostly empty hallway (there was only one other girl hanging out at the end, entirely engrossed in texting on her phone and a harried looking boy who was holding his map upside down. Freshmen) heading towards the doors leading to his drama class that he was officially thirty five minutes late to.
His glasses were pushed unevenly against his forehead, allowing him to see glimpses of clarity, but mostly blurring and blocking his entire view, so he wasn't entirely surprised when he pushed open the wooden doors, the beginning of a litany of apologies spilling off his tongue—
"I know, I know it's the third time this month but I was up so late last night helping my roommate find a new apartment because his girlfriend broke up with him and he's kind of staying with me temporarily—except, well I have these two other roommates who are kind of supposed to be living somewhere else but I can't afford the rent on my own and they're busybody freeloaders anyway and then the clock changed and my bagel—"
—only instead of the over-filled stage and variety of Drama majors holding white papers with their lines on them he expected to see, he saw what he assumed was an empty auditorium and a single person spinning in the middle of it.
She looked like a giant red blur.
James halted, scrambling to fix his glasses as he squinted—
Yes, she. Female. Person—thingy—
He knew this was the wrong room—he must have gotten mixed up and turned left instead of right at the intersection of the building—and that he should move on and get to his class as soon as possible, but he stopped, glasses settled back on his nose as he stared.
Because she—the girl, red haired and dressed casually in jeans and a Beatles T-shirt, wearing no shoes—was dancing.
There wasn't any music that he could hear, but he saw the trailing end of headphones peeking out from beneath her hair as she spun and dipped, eyes closed and hands outstretched to some invisible partner. Her feet made shuffling sounds on the floor, one sock bright red and decorated with reindeer, the other lemon yellow. Disconcertingly so. The whole show was rather mesmerizing and he found himself staring, the way she moved through the room as though space and air parted for her or perhaps just moved with her—
Then his childhood of Classical education kicked in and the movements became familiar.
He blurted out, stepping closer, "Are you—are you dancing the Viennese Waltz?"
It was a stupid question (he knew perfectly well what she was dancing) and his words were loud—louder than he'd intended.
Loud enough for the red haired girl to stop dancing, whirl to face him. Her eyes were wide as she pulled out the earphones (he was close enough now to hear the faint sound of Tchaikovsky issuing from the small purple earbuds) and stepped backwards. "What?" Her accent was British, but tinged with some other, sharper drawl. Scottish, maybe. She was staring at him, a bright flush rising in her cheeks and spreading down her throat and chest—
He shut down that thought as firmly as he could.
"You're dancing the Viennese Waltz," he repeated, gesturing. "Alone."
She shifted on her feet, crossing her arms and squinting at him, suddenly looking rather defensive. "So? No one was using this room. Unless you have some kind of claim on it that I didn't know about for the past six weeks I've been using it?"
James bit back the absurd urge to laugh. "No, no, that's not what I meant." He let his pack hang to the floor, staring at the girl. She stared back.
"It's just…I don't think I've ever met anyone who can properly dance the Viennese Waltz. At least not without a partner. Who taught you?"
The girl fidgeted for a moment. "No one did. I taught myself."
James blinked and almost choked. "Taught yourself? How long exactly did that take you?"
She shrugged, scrunching up her brow in thought (he most certainly did not notice how adorable that was) and he thought he caught the slightest edge of a half-smile at the corner of her lips as she said, "Two or three months? I think? I wasn't really counting." Then she added, seemingly casually, "It was the first time I'd ever really danced, so I wasn't worry about proper positioning or posture."
This time he really did choke. And it wasn't even his fault, really. "Two months?" he echoed. He shook his head bemusedly. "My mum's had me in dancing lessons since I was in diapers and it took me ten years to learn how to do the Viennese Waltz, with that 200 tempo. I'm still pretty much rubbish at it."
The girl shrugged, though her flush had certainly darkened, and pulled absently at a bit of her unbound hair. "I'm sure that's not true." She raised her brows. "Though if you'd like to prove it, I certainly won't stop you." She gestured to the auditorium floor and it took a second for her meaning to sink in.
When it did he stared at her. "You're asking me to dance?"
A little smile and she tilted her head. "Well, I'll never turn down the opportunity to humiliate a self-proclaimed rubbish dancer, not to mention you're the first person I've met in this place so far who actually knows the tempo a Viennese Waltz. It's not exactly popular nowadays. Perhaps I just want to interact with someone who appears not to be a total dunderhead."
He laughed, still a little shocked. "Oh, I assure you, I can be entirely dunderhead-y when I want to be." He shifted on his feet, the ticking of his watch a steady reminder of his situation and the fact that he really didn't like dancing the Viennese, but she was so pretty and he was still yearning for just one more glimpse of that ethereal way she danced…
Etiquette and dancing went hand in hand, but suddenly he didn't feel so very proper.
James dropped his bag on the ground, sliding out of his own shoes (they were unlaced anyway, an absolute breach of all the social rules in the world) and walked over to her. She looked vaguely surprised that he'd accepted her offer. "You know," he warned as he got into position opposite her, "I could be an axe murderer who preys on unsuspecting girls."
Her lips twitched as she unwound the headphones from her neck and pulled them out of her phone jack. Her Spotify was pulled up, the waltz halfway through playing. As she rewound it, she murmured, "Well, I also happen to have a purple belt in Akido, so…"
He laughed out loud. "Red Haired Dancer Girl, is there anything you can't do?"
Her smile was a challenge as she pressed play on the music and they began.
James hadn't been lying—it had taken him eleven torturous years to learn the Viennese Waltz, though at least he'd gotten to drag Sirius down with him recently, and he knew his legs were going to be aching in just a few minutes from the fast, spinning movements.
But even still, muscle memory took over as the first movements of the waltz rang out quietly from the crappy phone speaker and he bowed. She curtsied.
Her hands were soft and cold as he held them, feet finding the movements as he traced a path around the room. Her style was different from the one he'd been raised on—light and loose and incorporating some of the moves of other dances from the same era. They were both trying to lead and it was awkward and more than a little ungraceful, but James still felt dazed, adrift, anchored only by her presence as they spun and spun and spun, weaving their own little world around them.
She smiled as he twirled her, hair sliding across her shoulders. Outside, it had begun to rain, the droplets plunking on the arched windows. "See, not so bad, is it?" Her voice carried clearly over the music.
James hid his grin. "I guess not." Quiet for a moment. "So, Mysterious Dancing Girl" she snorted at the title but didn't correct him with her name "where exactly do you hail from?"
"Hail? What are we, the proper societal guests at a nineteenth century party?" she muttered, but added a moment later, "Edinburgh."
"Scotland?"
She nodded.
Aha. So he'd been right when guessing her accent.
"What brings you all the way out to Oxford?" They parted way, gliding around each other in swanning motions—not exactly a part of the traditional dance, but James went with it.
"I was attending a performing arts school over there," she admitted, ducking beneath his arm and spinning herself around, before snapping back into his embrace. James tried not to think about how soft her bare arm felt on his. (Etiquette, etiquette, etiquette, he chanted to himself. It was absolutely not proper to kiss your dance partner. At least not at first) "But I had a friend who transferred to Oxford last year and so I decided I might as well tag along with him when his term started in the fall, perhaps see what other areas I might be interested in. I've been taking Ancient History classes for the past month or so. But I could never give up dancing."
The music rose and fell in grand declarations, wrapping them in a curtain of rain and grey and sound.
James raised a brow. "A performing arts major and a historian? Are you trying to undermine the rest of us poor simple folk?"
The girl smiled, their hands brushing together. "Only on Wednesdays."
The came apart, then back together, swaying and stepping together. (At some point she had assumed the lead, but James wasn't overly bothered by it).
The music dripped away to nothing more than plinking droplets, then utter silence, but their dance didn't fall away with it.
He continued swaying with her, the girl whose name he didn't know, whose dancing had captivated him at a glance and whose sharp tongue had kept his interest.
He'd never met anyone quite like her.
They seemed content to stay there, dancing to the echoing sound of silence after something terribly beautiful had gone, until James's watch beeped.
All of a sudden, reality came rushing back in.
Class. Homework. The audition he was supposed to give for a part in the school play.
Shit.
He said the word aloud and the girl frowned. "What—?" she began.
"I'm sorry," he swore, reluctantly untangling their hands. "But I'm super, super late and I have class and an audition and it's almost midterms so—?" he looked at her with a sort of pleading expression hoping it says the rest of what he can't voice.
She laughed, leaning back on her heels. "Relax. It's fine." She grinned at him, eyes, a truly distracting green, sparkling. "I'll just see you around, I suppose." And then she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
James froze—a truly juvenile move that he so totally should have been beyond now being in university and living away from home—could do nothing but stare and perhaps work on his very attractive impersonation of a dead fish as the red haired girl sashayed to her stuff, picked up her boots and a messenger bag filled with books, then made for the door.
"Wait!" The word tore out of his throat and she paused, looking over her shoulder. She cocked her eyebrow.
James ran a hand through his hair, feeling absurdly nervous. "I don't know your name," he said finally, trying to play it cool. "Just so I can find you again. Maybe. I think."
He cringed. Maybe? I think? What was he, twelve?
But she looked at him for a moment, seemingly studying him. Then a smile spread across her face, dazzling him. "Lily," she said quietly. "My name's Lily." Then she was gone, taking her music, breaches of etiquette and beautifully painful dancing with her.
vVv
Etiquette has no place in running through the rain. (Honestly, James was starting to wonder if it had a place in anything besides luncheons and high teas any more)
For the second time that day, James found himself flat out sprinting, though this time it was in the entirely opposite direction he had been going that morning.
His front door loomed in front of him, decorated with spiders and cobwebs, courtesy of Remus and Sirius and their fascination with corporate holidays (utterly early in his opinion) and he pushed through it, dropping his bag in the entrance room as he panted, pausing to catch his breath.
After Lily—oh, how he loved to say her name—had left, he'd lingered in the room for far longer than he probably should've, and by the time he'd regained speech and movement, he was aware that it was far too late for him to actually attend his Drama class, but he had an advanced Astrophysics course twenty minutes later, and he desperately—absurdly—needed a cold shower after feeling the warm press of her lips against his cheek, even after the cold autumn air and pouring rain cured his body of any of its ailments.
Hence, the sprinting.
James took a deep breath, shaking out his soaking hair, heading quickly for the stairs, only to run into Remus, who was coming out of the kitchen a worn History textbook tucked under his arm.
Remus raised a brow at the sight of his no doubt horrifically bedraggled appearance. "Run any marathons recently?" was all he said. "And to think, you absolutely needed Peter's charred garlic bagel fresh out of the oven to do it."
James scowled, pushing past him. "Shut up, Lupin." He tossed over his shoulder as he ascended, "You could've at least warned me about daylight savings so I wouldn't have to deal with Sirius-the-bloody-Maniac when I'm half an hour late for class."
He was nearly at the top of the stairs when he realized that Remus hadn't responded. He turned around, looking down and seeing that, well…Remus honestly had a very peculiar look on his face.
Somewhere between amused and cautious.
"What?" He could still feel the touch of her fingers on his hands, the sound of music flitting through the empty auditorium, familiar steps lost to time.
Remus had the oddest half smile on his face as he stepped backwards. "Oh, it's nothing really." Then he added oh so casually, "It's just that daylight savings starts tomorrow. Thought you should know."
Then he—wise man that he was—ducked into the kitchen and out of sight.
James was frozen for a moment, foot hung suspended in the air, brain skidded to a halt of red hair and rain and time—
Then—
"SIRIUS BLACK!"
("Oh shit," came from the downstairs bathroom)
vVv
In the living room, Remus contentedly sat on the worn couch, paging through his History textbook and thinking of when he could set up his next study session with his project partner.
He knew Lily liked to be on time with her assignments.
Out in the hallway, shouts and crashes and a variety of foul language could be heard.
A good friend would've intervened, pulled the two of them apart and ensured everything was good between the roommates.
Always a clever man, Remus took a sip of tea, smiled serenely, settled into the couch, and turned the page.