Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Howl.
run-ons have got a certain rhythm
be careful of the curse that falls on young lovers
starts so soft and sweet and turns them to hunters
florence + the machine : howl
Lily Evans had a love affair with Muggle poetry. It started with Green Eggs and Ham and Oh, the Places You'll Go and continued through Where the Sidewalk Ends. By seventeen she was reading beat poets so obsessively that her friends were half-afraid she'd snap her wand in half some brilliant morning and hop a plane to the States to follow Kerouac's free-written roadmap.
But she liked Ginsberg best, and James thought that was probably a good thing. Of course, he'd never read anything by the man – he had enough reading to do with the stacks of Defence textbooks McGonagall and Dumbledore handed him daily – but James didn't think that Ginsberg had recommended getting in an automobile and driving recklessly around the country with no clear goal in mind. The idea of Lily going off chasing moonlight or whatever was only problematic because (a) he didn't think she'd ask him to accompany her and (b) he really needed her help running the school. Although, if she had abruptly abandoned her life and asked him to abandon his as well, James really wouldn't have given a damn about the state of the school; after all, an indefinite amount of time spent with Lily would have granted him countless opportunities to prove that snogging would only improve their relationship.
Sometimes he daydreamed about it: The Romantic American Road Trip. When he was driving – because they would take turns, of course – she'd sit in the passenger seat with her freckled feet on the dashboard and a wrinkled map on her lap. Her voice would be sweet in the breeze and after a few days she'd toss the map out the open window and order him to pull over at a dark rest stop. And when they got out of the car she'd kiss him back against a picnic table's sticky surface, not caring whether the bright burning stars were their only witnesses or if American tourists stood watching, scandalised.
That's the way it went in his daydreams. He supposed that if he and Lily actually did go on a road trip, one of them – and honestly, it'd probably be him, what with her temper – would end up alone on the side of the road seconds after it began.
So James considered it a good thing that Lily's copy of Howl and other Poems was wrinkled and nearly black with scribbles of ink, while her second-hand copy of On the Road only had a few dog-eared pages.
James found Lily on her stomach in front of the Gryffindor fire one night, thumbing through Howl and other Poems,her index finger running down the paper as she read.
He collapsed on the floor beside her. "Evans, don't you know we've got patrolling tonight? What're you doing?"
"I just wanted to find," she bit her lip, pausing to scan a page and then flipping forward a few more as she continued, "I just wanted to find this one part..."
"I've never read that," James began conversationally. Lily didn't even bother to look up. "You could act surprised."
"I don't think you'd like it," Lily told him. "It's a bit..."
"A bit what?"
"Nothing. D'you want to go?" She closed the book and James snatched it before she could slip it in her bag.
"A bit too intellectual, is that what you were going to say?" He flipped to the first page and began reading,
"'...ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in / Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night / with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and...' Evans!"
"Potter!" Lily mimicked.
"This is filthy!" He waved the book at her, his eyes wide. "Positively dirty! What are you doing reading something like this?"
"I told you you wouldn't like it," Lily replied smugly. "Get up, Potter. Didn't you say we had to go patrolling?"
But James's eyes hadn't left the worn little book. "What is this bloody American thinking, writing stuff like this and then selling it to impressionable girls?"
Lily's eyes narrowed and the smirk dropped from her lips. "Excuse me?"
"I mean, honestly Evans. If it were Sirius reading this, I'd get it. But you?" James hadn't looked up, so he didn't notice the change in Lily's countenance. A few people sitting nearby had, though, and they jumped from the plush armchairs, moving to the other side of the room in anticipation of a full-blown Potter-Evans battle.
Instead of pulling her wand from her pocket and cursing James to Azkaban, Lily stood and coolly Accio-ed Howl and other Poems from James's hands. "Will you please ask Alice or Remus to patrol with you tonight, Potter? I'm feeling a bit too upset at the moment."
"What? Oh, Evans, come on. I didn't mean anything by it." But Lily had already disappeared up the steps to the girls' dormitory.
Sirius, who sat in a chair nearby and had watched the disaster develop, tossed a crumpled piece of paper at James. James smoothed the parchment out and read: You're an idiot.
"Thanks, mate," James called across the room. "Exactly what I need at the moment."
"I think you needed it about two minutes ago, but I couldn't risk hitting Lily," Sirius responded, standing and stretching. "Want me to find Moony so you can go patrol?"
"No," James snapped, getting to his feet. "I'll go find him. If you go after him he'll never show."
Sirius stuck his tongue out at James's back.
James thought that Lily would get over her little pique in a few days – a week at the most. Nine days later, she still wasn't talking to him, and it was making their Head duties rather difficult, as Lily always had to get Moony or Alice to speak for her. James thought the whole thing was absurdly immature.
"Why haven't you apologised to Evans yet, mate?" Moony asked, collapsing at the Gryffindor table on the evening of the ninth day. "I'm tired of being her messenger, especially when you're both in the same room."
"I didn't do anything wrong." James had said these words so often over the past week – actually, come to think of it, over the past seven years – that they barely had meaning anymore.
"I was there, Prongs. You insulted Lily and her favourite poet all in one go." Sirius tilted his head thoughtfully. "It was actually quite impressive, if you find bastardly obliviousness impressive."
"Which you shouldn't," Peter put in.
"Exactly," Moony said. "So apologise to her, Prongs. Please."
James sighed. "Fine." He stood and walked to the other end of the table, where Lily sat with Alice and Marianne and a few others. "Evans, I'm sorry for what I said the other day about you and Allen Ginsberg. Will you forgive me?"
Lily didn't look up, but Alice did. "Unfortunately," Alice said, "I think you're going to have to do better than that, Potter."
"But I said I was sorry. And I mean it, too."
"If it were up to me," Alice told him, running a hand through her sandy hair, "she'd have forgiven you a week ago." She flinched; Lily must have kicked her under the table. "However," Alice hurried to add, "I do see her point. Just apologising isn't enough."
Sirius later said that if James had been wearing a skirt his retreat could have been described as "flouncing." Since he was wearing Muggle jeans, it just barely passed for stalking. James later told Sirius that he was an arse.
Sirius came into their dormitory that night and hit James in the face with a book, interrupting his world-class moping session. "I've borrowed this from Evans. She doesn't know, of course, but I suggest that you read it. The whole thing," he said, when James opened his mouth to protest. "Or risk never speaking to Evans again, let alone getting in her pants."
James opened and closed his mouth a few times, holding the stealthily borrowed edition of Howl and other Poems loosely in one hand. "She'll get over it eventually," he finally said.
"Are you really willing to risk that?" Sirius asked. "Don't you want the chance to take her on that road trip you're always daydreaming about?"
"I don't – You don't – How do you know about the road trip?"
"Oh, come on, Potter. We all know about the road trip," Peter said from his bed. "You mumble aloud whenever you get to the part about 'the sticky picnic table'. And by the way, we all find it rather strange that you include that detail. It's a bit much, don't you think?"
James could feel his skin flushing under the amused looks of his former best mates. "The details are important," he ground out, hopping off his bed and moving toward the door. "I'm going to go ask McGonagall if I can transfer to Ravenclaw. That lot seems nicer than you all."
"They spend their nights reading poetry, Prongs. It would never work!" Sirius called after him as he shut the door.
He kept walking until he reached North Tower, where he sat in the window and stared out over the Forest. He still had Lily's book in his hands.
He sighed, opened to the first page, cast a Lumos charm, and began reading: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
He found Lily at the Gryffindor table early the next morning; she was drinking a cup of tea at the Gryffindor table and glancing over some notes for one of her courses. He slid onto the bench across from her and placed her book carefully on top of the parchment she had been reading. She stared at the cover for a moment before raising her eyes to meet his. She still didn't speak.
"Sirius borrowed that for me," he said.
She nodded. She didn't look angry at Sirius, which James found rather unfair considering that the last time he had taken something of hers without asking she had cursed him with boils that didn't heal for nearly a month. Granted, it had been a bra, and he had hung it in the Entrance Hall, but still.
"I read it."
She nodded again.
"All of it."
She didn't look particularly impressed. She really should have, he thought, considering that it was quite a lot of stream-of-consciousness to get through in one night.
"I reckon..." James rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. "I still think it's a bit...scandalous."
One corner of Lily's mouth rose in a half-smile, but he knew from the way her eyes were still looking into his that he wasn't forgiven quite yet.
"But you have the right to read whatever you like and I shouldn't judge you for that. And there are a lot of parts of this which were quite good."
Lily blinked, and when she opened her green eyes again they were bright with interest. "Oh? Which parts?"
James reached hesitant fingers out to take the book back, and when she didn't snap at him he lifted it from the stack of papers and flipped toward the middle of the poem. He read,
"'who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish…'"
Lily laughed. "You just like that because you think the whole poem is a stanza of gibberish."
James shook his head. "Come on, Evans, you should know better than to judge someone's literary preferences."
To his surprise she actually looked chastised. "You're right. Sorry, James." She held out her hands and he placed the book back in them, letting his fingertips brush her palms as he deposited the small text. She didn't pull back until he had rested his hands on the table in front of him and raised his eyebrows at her.
"So?" he asked.
"So?" she repeated, her eyes still locked on his hands.
"What's your favourite part?"
The smile on her face was nearly enough to make the whole ordeal worth it.
"I can't really choose one," she answered. "But," she held a finger up when he seemed about to speak, "I really love:
'who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying...'"
James chuckled. "Of course you do."
"What do you mean?"
"I've always known that you have a thing for road trips, Lil."
"Have you?" she raised one eyebrow. "And how did you know that?"
He replaced her question with one of his own. "Tell me something. If you went on a road trip today, who would you take with you?"
Lily grinned. "I'd go alone. If I invited anyone I'd end up abandoning him by the first night. You know my temper, Potter."
"Lily, will you go to Hogsmeade with me? Please?"
"As a date?" Lily asked.
He answered, even though he thought it was fairly obvious, "Yeah, as a date."
"Okay," Lily said. "But remember that you're not allowed to insult my poets ever again."
"Your poets are all right," James said. "Although I think I like limericks better."
"Thank you for giving Ginsberg a go, though." Lily grinned at him and stood, collecting her papers and book in her arms. "You coming?"
"Yeah, I'm coming." But he didn't get up right away. He watched her walk away from him, pausing at the door to the Great Hall and looking back over her shoulder with an amused expression on her face.
He had always thought that if she ever said yes to him the world would sort of just explode. But everything was intact and that was strange. He could feel the chair beneath him and the table under his hands and he could see Lily and she didn't look like she was about to tell him it was all some huge joke cooked up with Sirius and Marianne.
"Come on, Potter!" Lily called across the Hall. "You'll have plenty of time to stare at me when we're in class."
"I wasn't staring," James mumbled, getting to his feet and making a show of leisurely strolling to meet Lily.
"Don't lie, Potter." Lily smirked at him. "It's not endearing."
He rolled his eyes and followed her from the Hall.
:::
Two weeks later they had a rare moment alone in the common room. James rested his head in Lily's lap and let his Defence book fall to the floor with a thump.
"Hey, Lily?"
"Mmm?"
"I'm bored."
"This is rather dry, isn't it?" Lily dropped her book next to James's. "What do you want to do?"
"Read to me?"
Lily grinned at him and tugged Falling Up from her bag. "I'm assuming you'd rather this than Howl?"
He nodded, although honestly he'd have been happy if she had pulled out Chaucer. James Potter had a love affair with the way Muggle poetry sounded when his girlfriend read it aloud.
A/N: This story was going to be the first in a collection of random one-shots I had planned. I've now decided to give that collection a theme (which will hopefully limit the number of words I write for each entry) so I decided to publish this separately. I hope you enjoyed it!
I appreciate reviews!