Disclaimer: Nope, don't own any of the characters and I am just (mis)using them for entertainment purposes.
...Some things never change...
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I Loved You from the Moment I Met You
James dodged the flying plate with a relative amount of stoicism -
Living with Lily Evans was many things, but dull it was not.
"HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?" the woman in question shrieked, face rapidly approaching the same colour as her hair.
James took a deep breath.
In some of his more wistful and downright fanciful moments he imagined that they were a husband and wife circus team and Lily was really blindly chucking objects at him as part of their act as oppose to in ice cold anger.
He winced as out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of some spaghetti tongs nonchalantly lying on the sideboard.
"I'm waiting." Lily stood in front of him; hand on hip and looking like a very young Professor McGonagall. James shifted uncomfortably and fell back on the age old escape strategy of cornered men the world over:
Blame the drunken heap passed out in your hall.
"Lily my sweet - it is completely and utterly Sirius' fault."
The tongs whistled past his left ear...
Living with a ball of barely suppressed rage was painful, but it improved your reflexes no end.
James now began to realise maybe it wasn't exactly sensible to have brought the blind drunk Sirius Black back home with him. 'Honey, I'm home and guess what? I've brought my completely pissed best friend with me who will probably throw up all over the couch' somehow didn't have quite the same ring to it.
"So Sirius told you to skip our wedding rehearsal dinner?" Lily asked casually.
"Well it's kind of funny how he didn't tell you to skip the STAG PARTY TOO!"
James jumped several feet. It never ceased to amaze him how the love of his life was able to go from her normal speaking voice to something round about the frequency of cats and dogs in the time it took to start a car.
He was beginning to feel slightly panicked now.
This situation had started to resemble a series of horrible nightmares he endured in the weeks after he had proposed. Most of these tended to detail various gut wrenching and horrible ways in which his Lily would be cruelly snatched from his grasp. None of them up until this point had involved Sirius though.
Not only was there an evil wizard on the loose hell-bent on destroying everything and everyone, but to lose the only thing he had ever loved on top of that? It didn't bear thinking about. Taking this into account, James decided that he wasn't above begging -
"I love you," he wailed, falling to his knees in supplication and embracing Lily's feet beseechingly. "Please don't leave me."
Sirius, who had wandered in from the hall, let out a sharp burst of laughter: "You really want to be stuck with 'Cirque du Crazy' over there for all of eternity?
In Lily's eyes at least throwing the fork at him was completely justified and in her defence she had been aiming for his man-organ and not his head.
Meanwhile Sirius tittered and wondered how he was going to explain the fork sticking out of his head at the wedding tomorrow because, being largely cynical people, the assorted guests would probably think that he was somehow at fault. Briefly he also considered why having a piece of cutlery sticking out of his noggin wasn't causing him more pain.
Here he promptly passed out.
The bickering nearly-weds surveyed Sirius Black's graceful and remarkably swan-like fall to the ground with interest. In these days of unrest Drunken Sirius, with his unsteady steps and glib remarks provided a certain amount of comic relief – markedly more so than Sober Sirius.
"Well that's just great," James exclaimed. "You tried to take out the groom but you got the best man instead."
"So?" Lily snapped back, unconcerned about the sleeping drunk. If she had learnt one thing in her Hogwarts years it was that Sirius Black was made of Teflon.
"If we make it down the aisle tomorrow you can use Remus instead," she continued, placing great emphasis on the word 'if'.
James pouted and gazed sadly at the comatose Sirius. "You never liked Padfoot."
"I'll tell you what I really don't like – sitting for three and a half hours at the rehearsal dinner for my wedding WITH NO FIANCE IN SIGHT!"
"Our wedding," James interjected helpfully, wincing at her volume. "And I may not have been there in person, but I was there in spirit."
(James hadn't actually played a massive role in the development and planning of the Potter/Evans wedding, Lily's actual words to him on the subject being something along the lines of: "Turn up for the run-through and keep Black away from the alcohol").
That was a failed on both counts then.
"Lily, I've apologised. I don't know what else you expect me to do ... other than tell you that I feel a certain sense of déjà-vu..." A series of uncomfortable memories surged to the front of his mind here, pertaining to various moments from his time at Hogwarts when Lily's temper had got the better of her and obscured her ability to listen to apologies.
Seeing that the red-head was remaining silent James looked towards the ceiling patterned with plastered swirls as if to ask for some kind of divine assistance. His fiancée and best friend had never got on brilliantly, but they had more in common that they thought. Both of them had the silence speaks louder than words maxim down to a fine art.
James let out an explosive sigh. "I couldn't just leave Sirius passed out in some bar, could I?"
"I would have done," Lily replied back curtly and perfectly accurately.
James snorted. "If your precious pre-wedding dinner was at stake then you would have left me in a bar rather than miss it."
A look of extreme hurt flashed across her delicate features and James mentally slapped himself for not being able to control his tongue. Sometimes it was all too easy to forget how fragile his Lily was -
Then again it was very easy to forget that someone who oscillated between an absolute goddess and a reincarnation of the Terminator had any feelings at all... James silently patted himself on the back for managing to keep this observation to himself.
"I thought you'd gone, I thought you'd left me." The words tumbled out of Lily's mouth seemingly of their own volition.
There was a stunned silence in which James tried to process this new information and Lily wondered when exactly her mouth had ceased taking instruction from her brain.
"Lily, how could you even think something like that?"
Lily let out a sniff. Suddenly she didn't feel so much like misusing plates as Frisbees anymore - seeing the earnest and hurt face of her fiancé was causing her to feel very guilty indeed.
James walked towards her (gingerly at first, both in order to step over the broken shards of plates as well as to ascertain whether Lily would throw anything else at him).
"Lily Evans - I loved you from the moment I met you and that will never change." He laced their fingers together and smiled the adorably half-sheepish, half-handsome smile that had won her heart all those years ago.
Lily looked up into his hazel eyes and posed a tentative: "Really?"
She was not an expert on these matters, but displays like this did not exactly invite husbands...
(Most of the time) she was very grateful for James' having proposed because, as most people she knew continually delighted in telling her, no one else could stick around long enough to put up with her.
Lily stopped dead as a thought occurred to her: "Why didn't you call me to let me know where you were?"
She staggered back with a start as James silenced her with a deep kiss.