Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, or any of the characters mentioned in it. They all belong to the wonderful J. K. Rowling.
The night had started normally - or at least, as normal as one could get when one is in a school for magic full of adolescents. Lily Evans had been sitting in her favourite comfy armchair next to the fire, half-reading the material she was supposed to memorise for her N.E.W.T's, and half-dozing, before she lazily glanced at her watch to check how much longer she could bargain with herself to stay up and study.
She processed the time with a start. 4:30am her watch said. Sure enough, when she glanced outside she squinted to see the faint light of the early summer dawn stealing into the room in long strings of gold, as opposed to the bright full moon she'd been reading by when she lacked the energy to cast the lumos spell.
Resigning herself to capitulating to her body's demands of sleep, she gathered up her books with a slow drowsiness. The volumes had somehow migrated throughout the night until they were liberally laid over the worn red and gold carpet. Stifling a massive yawn with the back of her hand, she stood from the chair and turned to pick up the remaining book-
Then the pile of them in her arms fell onto the cushion with a quiet thud.
Sucking in an almost inaudible gasp, she whirled around to face the portrait of the Fat Lady as it swung open, then closed again without a sound. The woman in the portrait looked as freaked out as Lily, and met her eyes with a faintly terrified expression.
Because there was no one there.
Even as the thought crossed her mind, Lily's brain was working feverishly to understand it. As she came to the conclusion she deemed most likely, she stood where she was and folded her arms, letting her green eyes glare holes in the general proximity she thought her boyfriend might be hiding. If the flashes of brown shoes the cloak wasn't quite big enough to hide were any indication, she had the coordinates right.
A muffled curse confirmed her suspicions. He hadn't appeared to notice her yet.
With a snap as the cloak was ripped off, Lily could finally see James as he came into view - and Remus, to her surprise; she would have thought he'd be studying as diligently as she was. Once she'd processed the sight of those two straightening up from their hunched positions, she could take note of the anomalies in the image: as in, the lack of Sirius, the presence of a large black dog at Moony's heel and a small bedraggled looking rat squirming wildly in James's hands.
Remus spotted her first, being the closest. His eyes widened drastically as they flicked from her, to the two animals, to James, to the cloak, and back again. He gave a sheepish expression that was one part grimace and one part grin, and scratched the back of his neck.
James, turned away, didn't notice his friend's dismay, as he complained in a hushed voice, "Ow, Wormtail! Quit scratching!"
The black-haired boy set the rat down, and Lily could only watch with speechless shock as it twisted and grew until the tail receded and instead of a rat sitting on the floor, there was little Peter Pettigrew curled up on the carpet.
Lily shrieked, heedless of the late hour, and was severely hushed by several portraits.
James jumped at the noise, then yanked his head round. At first his gaze landed on Remus, who nodded to the chair Lily was standing behind, then her boyfriend's eyes travelled to her. They froze.
And widened considerably.
"Lily," he said, in an attempt at nonchalance so transparent it was almost pitiful. He still looked faintly shell shocked, she observed with a flare of pride. "What are you doing up; it's late. I thought you wanted to do well in your N.E.W.T's."
There was a drop of genuine concern in his voice as he said that, like he wasn't just scrambling for words. She refused to let it sway her in the slightest, despite that part of her that wanted to melt. Her glare only grew more intense.
"'IT'S LATE'?! IT'S LATE'!? I'M NOT THE ONE WHO'S PRANCING AROUND THE SCHOOL AT BLOODY FOUR IN THE MORNING, JAMES POTTER! WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WERE YOU THINKING!"
Peter cowered behind James as she screamed at them, and even Remus angled himself slightly so his shoulder was behind the boy. The black dog - in a bizarrely human gesture that almost shocked Lily out of her anger - lay on its front and covered its ears with its paws. But James just stood there, albeit with his shoulders slightly hunched, wincing as she scraped her throat raw.
"Lils," he said calmly, that deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face fading into acceptance, which only further incensed his enraged girlfriend. She opened her mouth to yell at him again, but James had clamped his hand over her lips before she could, much to her annoyance. Her glare intensified even further, if that was possible by this point. "Easy there. You're going to wake the whole of Gryffindor, and half of the Ravenclaws in the other tower at this rate."
She shoved him away, and he stumbled slightly. Apparently his superb athletic abilities were reserved purely for a broom, and not on land. "Well how did you expect me to react when you traipse into the common room at four in the morning and somehow Transfigure a rat into Peter!?"
He winced slightly at her lowered, but still harsh, tone. "With rational thoughts and calm understanding?" He ventured hopefully.
"As I've already mentioned - IT'S BLOODY FOUR IN THE MORNING. All 'rational thoughts and calm understanding' went out the window hours ago! Now explain why you were outside of the tower in the middle of the night with a black dog and Peter as a rat!"
The black dog seemed to think that was a prudent moment to stand up from the floor and morph into the familiar sight of Sirius, his hair more mussed up than ever. Lily shrieked again, and James moved forward against to capture her face in his hands and brush his thumbs along her cheekbones. "What- Why- How?"
Sirius, ever the unhelpful troublemaker, was treated to a glare by his best friend as he supplied, "Why do you think they call me Padfoot?"
"Bloody hell," she muttered. She sank back into the chair, slipping her face out from James' hands and covered in with her own. "Bloody hell. What is happening? What. Is. Happening?" Am I hallucinating from lack of sleep?
"Calm down, Lils," James murmured in a soothing voice, taking one of her hands off of her face and holding it tightly in between his own, making sure to rub his thumb over her knuckles in comforting circles. "Calm down. We can explain everything to you, I promise."
Lily glared at him again. "Then do." She snapped, but sat back and eyed the four boys in front of her with wary but tired eyes as they took seats on the scattered sofas and James told her an outlandish, ridiculous, mental story, kneeling in front of her and holding her hand all the way.
.
.
.
"You're all crazy." She concluded at the end of his story. "You're all bloody crazy, and I already knew that, but I never realised you were this crazy." She put her face in her hands again.
"You know, Lils, I think I've heard you curse more in the past twenty minutes than in the rest of these past seven years I've had the pleasure of knowing you." She reiterated her glare, and he held his hands up in surrender, that joking grin that had made her fall in love with him plastered on his face. "I'm just saying. It's a rare occurence that deserves to be pointed out. Commemorated."
She huffed an exasperated sigh, almost lamenting at his stupidity, but found she couldn't look away from James's hazel eyes. "I can't believe that after all-" she encompassed the entire of the Marauders, the door, and herself in a short, violent, circular gesture. "-this, that's what you're commenting on?!" She huffed again and bent her head. "I can't believe I fell in love with a madman. This is so unlike me."
Silence.
Complete and dead and utter silence, the likes of which Lily hadn't realised the Marauders had heard of let alone been able to practice. It left her floundering for a moment, wondering what was it she'd said. Had she gone too far? Had she offended them?
Then she looked at James, whose expression was shocked and flabbergasted, but his eyes shone with something light and hopeful, with that gentle love that had never failed to surprise her, and the question dried in her mouth.
Oh.
Oops?
"...What?"
Lily didn't answer, her eyes flicking from Remus's white face, his jaw hanging low enough he could swallow the moon, to Sirius's grin that seemed to carve his face in two, to Peter, where he still sat sunk into the sofa, looking like he hadn't quite caught on as to why his boisterous friends had gone silent as the grave.
Lily swallowed harshly eyes she scrutinised the portrait on the wall opposite her, which had been giving her the evil eye for shrieking but now looked just as captivated as her friends by her words. But she didn't look at James. Never at James.
"Lily," she heard him say, and in his voice was something softer and more tender than she'd ever heard. She closed her eyes to try to stop the tears welling up in them, but they leaked out anyway. She barely flinched at all when James's thumb came up to wipe them away. "Why are you crying?"
She opened her lids again, eyelashes damp and spiked like the points of those gold star stickers her primary school teachers would give her as a kid, to see James looking back at her, the green and brown flecks in his eyes forming whorls and knots like the twists in the bark of the tree for which the colour was named. "There's no need to cry."
Lily shook her head, or at least, as much as she could with James's hand cradling her cheeks. "I'm a stressed and hormonal teenage girl. There's always a need to cry."
James gave a short bark of laughter. "Hormonal? You? Of course not!" He said in an airy voice. She sniffed a little, half laughter, half trying to make herself stop crying. "If this is what you're like when you're stressed, I just can't wait to see what you're like when you're pregnant."
Then it was her turn to be left dumbstruck. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened and closed without a peep escaping her. Behind James, the Marauders had averted their eyes with their hands over their ears, apparently either sickened by the mushy scene it from of them, or respecting the couple's private moment.
James laughed quietly at her expression, and she returned her attention to him. His thumbs had restarted their stroking motion over her cheekbones. "Yeah, I said that." A crooked smile. "Might as well admit that I love you too, then."
His lips were on hers before she could suck in enough air to reply.
And for once, she didn't mind not having the last word.
I really like Jily as a couple, but I've never tried writing them before. Did I do well? I'd like to post more one-shots, but I'm not sure.
What did you think? Review?