Author's Note: This was written for The Quidditch European Cup Competition by middleofsomewhere for my team, the Wigtown Wanderers, with the challenge to write a Marauder era fic with the prompts ribbon, rain, and reflection. Anyways, couldn't resist writing this...especially because it's James/Lily, and I just can't get enough of them... It's raining as I write this, and for some reason, this story just fell into my head. Hope you enjoy - AND GO WIGTOWN WANDERERS! ;) Make sure you check out my teammates as well, kitty132383, WentToManderleyAgain,and smilelaughread! (They're awesome - promise.)
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Blurred Breathing
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Lily nearly slipped in a patch of mud when she'd finally made it up to the Quidditch pitch, yet another thing for her to add to her ever abundant internal list of awful things James Potter had done to her this school year.
This was currently ranked number thirty-four: Nearly caused me to break my neck because he's a ridiculously pompous turnip face.
She continued to trudge her way inside the pitch, cursing that Potter git with every step she took that landed her feet in oozing brown earth and every drop that fell on her hair and drenched the brilliant red to a deep, subtle amber.
When she spotted him in the sky, her fury grew at once. He was doing loops through the air, and swung his broomstick high up and then cut it back down sharply. His movements reminded her of ribbons suspended in the wind, and if she hadn't been so angry, she might have stopped to stare in awe. But she was incredibly angry, that was important to note, and anything Potter did at that moment hardly impressed her.
"POTTER!" she began to scream at him. No response; he continued to wave through the sky obliviously. How did he fly in such weather? Honestly, that boy... She began waving her hands above her head in a berserk fashion to attract his attention. "JAMES POTTER, YOU ABSOLUTE DUNCE OF A HEADBOY!"
By something of a miracle, James's head turned, and within an instant he was soaring down to meet her at her level. She watched, incredibly callous, as he stopped to hover just ever so slightly above the grass, where his feet couldn't graze the ground.
"Lily! What a surprise it is to see you here," he said pleasantly and with a smile that completely sent her over the edge. He was close enough for her to see the droplets of water blurring his glasses, making his eyes difficult to see.
She crossed her arms firmly over her chest. "I've been patrolling by myself for an hour. An hour, Potter. So I started asking around, seeing if anyone knew what the reason behind your curious absence might be—" she paused, burning with fury, and glanced around the pitch, "—and they said, oh, he never came back from practice, and I thought, he wouldn't skip out on duty for Quidditch. But I had to come see, just in case, and look... look, you've proven me wrong again!"
She hoped that her fuming would spark some kind of remorse in him, but she was much disappointed with the result she received. James only smirked, looking far too comfortable up there on his broomstick.
"You missed me, Lily? Well, if I had known—"
"I did not miss you! I'm- I'm thoroughly annoyed, Potter, because thanks to you, I've received double work!" She was yelling through the shower of rain that seemed to grow heavier each passing moment. "Now, if you'd get down off your broom and take over for the rest of our shift..."
However, the thing about boys—and Lily was just only beginning to see this—was that they never change. Immortally insufferable, in a sense. Because James Potter was James Potter, and he was as arrogant and immature and dense as he was the day before.
"I'll come down if you go out with me," he said, beaming mischievously. Because, yes, that was who James Potter was.
She scoffed. "Yeah, right! I'd rather fly up there and get you down myself!" Lily didn't fly. It wasn't as if she was terrified of it; she was just no good, and Lily didn't enjoy doing things she wasn't good at. And, well... perhaps she was a little frightened of it.
What James said next was completely unexpected, and she found herself going scarlet as he exclaimed, "I guess you'll just have to, then!" and darted off into the sky without waiting for a response.
She gasped loudly, bouncing up and down from the ground in her hysterically livid state. She shot hexes of brilliant purple and blue up into the sky after him, but he moved far too quickly for the spells to reach and the jets of color succumbed uselessly to gravity.
"The spare brooms are at the end of the Pitch!"
She shot him a momentary, pointless glare before scanning the Pitch for the brooms of mention. And there they were, quite a walk away, as promised.
Lily, at that point, was soaked through to the skin. The rain was falling in thick sheets and raking over her skin like ocean waves. Not to mention that it was October and the heat of the summer was shrinking back from the grounds. Her teeth were chattering, and eyeing the stack of brooms, she had no desire to hassle another walk through the mud. Her poor shoes were already terribly dirty enough! She'd have to go to the library and look up a proper cleaning spell just especially for this mess...
It was the combination of foreshadowed pneumonia and burnt out will that drove her to madness. She had hardly thought about it before she was shouting, "Accio broom!" to the wind. The broom pelted towards her at an unimaginable speed, and she shrieked and blindly held out her arms before her to catch it as it came.
She caught it, with some sort of blessing, and numbly balanced herself on the maple wood before kicking off from the soft ground and shooting off into the sky.
This in itself was unbelievable, because Lily Evans, the girl who thought through everything before she did it, was for once acting recklessly.
Lily cursed James's name with every terrible word she could think of as the rain slapped and thrashed her about in violent surges—it was even worse up in the air! Her stomach lurched as she ascended farther above, soaring after James at full speed. She didn't dare look down... She really wasn't good at this flying thing...
"Potter, get down, now!" she called after him desperately. She was trying to keep her voice from shaking, but the wind was so loud that she doubted he could hear her trembling.
James spun and just hovered in the air, laughing loudly at the sight. She doubted he'd ever seen her on a broom, aside from maybe in first year, when they'd taken Flying. Merlin, had she even been on a broom since then? She, however, could not afford to think; all she was aware of was James, his amused expression stretching as he marveled her. The tenor of his throaty laugh drifted to her and echoed in the sky about her. This only infuriated Lily all the more.
"James Potter, I am going to slap you—" She'd taken advantage of his temporary lack of movement and lunged towards him, reaching out her hand to clutch a bit of his cloak.
This, however, was a terrible idea. Lily was really no good at flying at all, and recklessness was not ever known to last long.
As soon as she'd removed her grip from the handle, she knew what was going to happen; she'd felt herself falling even before she started to, and the rain didn't help with things in the slightest. Within a flash of seconds, she lost what little balance she'd had, and was suddenly stumbling forward through the air.
With a loud shriek, she managed to get both hands back on the broom, but the rest of her body had flipped forward at the jerky movement and she was dangling in the air, her only anchor her two slippery hands as she swayed back and forth in the wind like a flag. Her heart was hammering in her chest like a frantic, fleeting drum, and her ears were ringing with a scream she hadn't even realized she'd been emitting.
But James was there, she realized in another flash of moments, and he was holding out his hand for her to take it. She stared wide-eyed, flailing and struggling, uncomprehending.
"What?" she screeched, the word scraping at her throat.
"Take my hand, you dolt! You're going to fall!"
"I'm not—I'm—oh, Merlin, fine—!" Because she really had no other options, and she was already visualizing her own messy, painful death, she took a giant leap of faith and grasped James's hand with all that she could.
He hoisted her up with the slightest difficulty, and her heart was in her throat as she finally managed to squirm herself behind James on his broom. She watched as her borrowed broom spiraled to the ground, oddly gentle, reminding her of ribbons falling through the air, poetic, in a way...
"You all right there?" James asked, and she was jolted from her distraction.
Suddenly, she was aware that she was gripping his hand blue and had her arms tight around him like a boa constrictor. She flushed slightly and released his hand. "Sorry," she murmured, and realized that she ought to stop hugging him so tightly as well. She started to loosen up, but he stopped her.
"No, hold on tight. Obviously you've got no balance."
She suspected he was teasing, and normally she would have wanted to curse him, but she was too exhausted to care. She just returned her arms to their spot around him and pushed her face into his back to block her face from the falling rain.
Suddenly, he rocketed forward, sending her colliding even closer into the cloak on his back. She let out another instinctive shriek, a wave of sickening adrenaline taking over her. That was all it took for her to find herself again.
"Do you even know how to fly this thing?"
James was laughing loudly again, the kind of laugh that normally infuriated her beyond belief, like she had utterly no idea what she was talking about. Without giving her a proper response, he was plunging through the sky again, unheeding to her alarmed cries. He just continued to laugh as he leaned forward and gathered speed, and the only thing Lily could do as they whipped through the sky was shut her eyes tightly.
Almost as if he'd known, he called out to her over the wind, "Are you seeing this?"
"No, you maniac, I can't look!"
"Look! I promise, it's great!"
And so she did, albeit slowly. She lifted her face from the wet fabric of his back and chanced a look.
Her stomach lurched violently again, but this time it was not out of fear. They were flashing at such a speed through the sky that the grounds were a blur, but a beautiful blur; it was not the kind of sight you could dwell in, but the type you saw in a rapid rush, a kind of sight you could feel as you rushed through it. She could scarcely breathe. The rain was still falling, but it didn't seem to touch either of them; they were just a brilliant bullet cutting through the sky cloaked in torrent. Lily could see the moon in a mad blur, and the way it fell on the Black Lake as the rain drops refracted its light, and she loved it, she loved all of it. It was nothing but adrenaline and awe, a sweet, unexpected twist, and any anger or fear she'd held with her prior had fallen to the ground, like ribbons, elegantly forgotten.
She began to laugh, too, finding comfort in this odd situation with this odd boy.
As quick as it had come, it was gone, because that was the kind of beauty it was: a rush. When they finally touched the ground, Lily was breathless. She wondered idly if she should add this to her ever expanding list of awful things James Potter was responsible for doing to her, but there was a glint in his eyes as he returned from retrieving her fallen broom that told her maybe this hadn't been so awful.
No, well, of course it'd been awful. Her feet were practically nothing but mud any longer. Her clothes were just hanging uselessly limp on her skin; she'd nearly fallen to the ground and broken every part of her body, and she was a kind of cold she felt like would settle deep beneath her bones and never leave. Yes, to Lily that qualified as particularly awful, but she couldn't bring herself to be angry at James for it. Even if it had been his fault.
"You're unbelievable," she finally said, thinking of all the hours she'd force him to patrol in stead in vengeance, thinking of trekking through the mud and thinking of falling through the sky. She was, frankly, a mixture of muddled feelings, though she could hardly be blamed for it.
The expression that James met her with was not one of reproach, nor overflowing confidence. He merely smiled, a simple word for a seemingly simple action, Lily pondered. But his smile was not simple, the longer she fell into it. For the first time since Lily could remember, she began to see James Potter as that kind of person who could be your friend, maybe someday, depending on how you turned the tables. His smile was one of those rare smiles you come across maybe five or six times in all your life. To think she'd never seen it, or maybe never tried to see it, was astonishing to her. His smile held reassurance, and understanding, a kind of smile that saw you just as you wanted to be seen, liked just as you wanted to be liked, believed in you as you wanted to believe in yourself. His smile was like a flash of lighting through the sky, momentary and unimaginably sweet, and suddenly Lily felt warmer than she had all night.
His smile grew slightly as he said, "Thanks."
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