Disclaimer-I take no responsibility for any character, I am not clever enough to create the world JK Rowling has.
life perplexed. James was always a melancholy character; he was intrigued and repulsed by people in turns. At best he was fickle, at worst pessimistic. James was perplexed by everything, he would often spend days just thinking over a poem he'd heard. Sometimes the words felt like smooth rocks rolling over and over within his head. Sometimes they slipped from his head building a wall of words between him and the rest of the world. James had friends, but between them there was always a wall built of unknown verse. An impervious wall. Really, people annoyed him. Sometimes they acted as an irritant, slowly chafing his spirit. He just felt so tired, and no combination of prose or verse could describe his type of fatigue.
Lily didn't mind being simple, not really. There were many facts in life, and her simplicity was just one of them. She wasn't stupid simple, or challenged simple, but simply simple. Simple in her emotions, and simple in her mannerisms. it was downright disarming declared everyone who met her. Unnerving but endearing. Often when people got to know her they would try to think of a euphemism to disguise her true nature, but they soon found the matter quite befuddling. She called all who met her to return to who they really were, they would forget the awkward pretenses and strange rituals of familiarity. Lily called everyone back to honesty. She had a romantic way of speaking, uncluttered with the pedantic words of those who are overly verbose; straight and to the point, it often caused others to blush. However, she wasn't perfect. She often felt like a not so important narrator of not so important times, and she resented the fact that she never received the highest grades but came in just fourth. She often wondered why the fourth place even existed, it was such a queer placement denied the glory of being in the top three, and denied the relief that you didn't have to shine in number 5. Fourth place was always reaching, always striving to break barriers.
They met by chance, in a quiet serendipitous way. She was buying poetry. it was always a bit ironic that she loved poetry, for in a way poetry represented everything that she wasn't. Poetry was quiet ruminating verse, or euphoric declamations of emotion. He was there because he always wanted to find honesty, and in some way, James always believed he would find it in a book. After all, he rationalized, that was where he found everything else.
In a very cliché way they were thrown together.
She was walking in a straight line, eyes upward and face to the world. The way she always walked.
While he shuffled quietly along, hoping to not be noticed, hoping that his continuous string of thought would not be prematurely clipped.
All at once, they collided. It was a collision of spirit.
"I'm sorry." she said, "I didn't see where I was going and I ran into you." she picked up her book and brushed it off, it hang limply at her side.
"right now, your sorry isn't quite good enough. You see I am in a hurry, and you got dirt all over my book." he replied, his voice was round and smooth, like polished mahogany and golden galleons.
He didn't mean his statement harshly, but he could tell by expression of mounting shock upon her face, that that was how it was received.
He only meant it honestly.
She bumped into him, and for a moment he forgot to disguise his words with unneeded adjectives.
He could hear the words fall brittle from his mouth, they descended, and shattered between them.
"Now that was rude, because I made an honest mistake, and it seems to me, it takes two people to collide. My sorry was sincere, and you were unkind." her words were round, totally round, and unblemished with hidden agenda. They silently pulled away at the stone barrier separating him from honesty.
"perhaps" he thought with a smile, "she is my favorite book."