Author's Notes: I super thought I posted a lot of these before? Am I going crazy? Oh, well. The prompt for this one was: "At 3 am, before they're friendly but after the vitriol stage, Lily stumbles on James freaking out alone about a huge project."
Botched
Lily hears the muted slew of swearing as soon as she steps into the stairwell, each successive expletive growing louder as her quiet footsteps continue down towards the common room. It's barely three in the morning—she knows, because she's been watching the minutes tick by for the past four hours, too distracted and disquieted by her own thoughts to settle into a proper sleep. She'd finally given up and started to read by wandlight, but the glow seemed too bright in her otherwise black dormitory, and she hadn't wanted to risk waking any of her mates. The common room had seemed like the best alternative, so she'd grabbed her dressing gown and her book and started for the stairs. It would have been the perfect plan, if someone hadn't already been down there.
Someone whose creative grasp of obscenities and blasphemies were, it must be said, actually quite vast and impressive.
"—twin-headed, wank-rotting, fungus-guzzling, fuck of a flobberworm—"
"Fungus-guzzling what?" Lily laughs, stopping at the bottom of the stairwell.
From his spot at the back study table, surrounded by books and parchment and something that looks suspiciously like a collection of tomes Lily had once checked out of the Restricted Section, James Potter lifts his head from its dejected slump, clearly startled by her sudden appearance. There is a long streak of ink smudging an uneven stripe from his hairline to his nose. He's not wearing his specs, and his eyes squint furiously in her direction.
"Evans?" he calls weakly.
Lily nods, though he probably can't see it. "What exactly is a twin-headed, wank-rotting, fungus-guzzling, fuck of a flobberworm, anyway?" she asks. "Truly. I'm genuinely curious."
"What?"
"A twin-headed, wank-rotting—"
"Please stop saying that." His head drops back down to the study table, before lifting slightly again. As Lily watches, he begins to slowly knock his head against the hard wood, an almost soothing rhythm: thump, thump, thump.
Suddenly, Lily is not so annoyed at her wayward insomnia anymore.
"Problem?" she asks, approaching leisurely.
"They're going to kill me," he moans, continuing the pulsing assault against his cranium. "They're going to kill me—not politely, but brutally, in the worst possible, most drawn out, cruelest way they can bloody well think of—and I've got creative mates, Evans. Don't think for a second I don't!"
"Not at all," Lily agrees, slipping into the empty seat across from him. "Remus, especially. Calm waters and all that."
This prompts nothing more than additional moaning, and the continued beating of the thump, thump, thumps that don't seem inclined to stop. If it wasn't Potter, and if watching him in such uncharacteristically sullen straits wasn't so very entertaining, Lily might almost feel badly for the bloke. He seemed rather certain about this death thing.
But one can really only watch another assault themselves for so long before just standing by becomes more than a little perverse. Besides, for all his faults, James Potter has a fine face. It'd be a pity to go and ruin it.
"Not that I want to get in the way of your current, clearly outstandingly brilliant plan of thrashing your head against a table until it combusts," Lily begins, "but might there be some merit in, I don't know, asking the cleverest person you know for a bit of help? One who—would you look at that!— seems to have stumbled upon you at just the right time?"
"Can't." The thumping stops, but his head remains plastered to the wood. "They'll just kill you, too."
"Merely by association?"
"You'll know too much."
"That's never stopped me before. Come on, Potter. Just—"
"I broke it," comes the bleak confession, quietly, finally, on a long breath. His head lifts slightly. "I broke it, even after they said to let it alone, but I couldn't let it alone, and now it's broken, and I'm going to be murdered. Bludgeoned. Fucking ripped to tiny shreds of dung-filled, vomit-covered, wrinkled, old, tea-bagged—"
"Merlin and Agrippa, Potter, pull yourself together." Lily grabs one of the nearby textbooks and thwacks him on the head with it. "We're all very impressed by your colourful vocabulary. But it's not helping much of anything, is it?"
"It's too late," James bemoans. "I've broken it."
"Broken what?"
There is a short pause in which Lily resolutely decides she's probably going to be at this awhile (doesn't even know why she's bothering. She and Potter are not friends. They are notnot friends, but they are not friends, and yes, she's not tired, and yes, she's bored, and yes, he's sitting there looking so devastated and she'd like to learn his expletive skills by osmosis and also wipe that dark smudge of ink off his face, but these things are all decidedly not the point because they are not really friends and she probably shouldn't care one way or another—and doesn't, really, probably), when Potter's hand suddenly lifts in a wayward swipe and Lily finds a slightly crumpled piece of old parchment being shoved her way.
She stares at it—one second; two; five—before quietly clearing her throat.
"Er, Potter—"
His arm drunkenly swipes out again, this time with his wand. He mutters something, but all Lily hears is, "isha swisha inupta no good," before Potter's hand drops limply back to the table.
A moment later, Lily is staring at a full-fledged moving map of Hogwarts.
"Holy mother of Merlin…"
She wants to stare at it all day, in awe, in reverence, but bloody Potter won't shut up.
"Should've left it be," he's moaning again, though Lily's barely listening. "But no, I just had to try to charm it faster. Couldn't just let it be, like the lads said. But there was bloody lag, Evans! A good five seconds! And do you know what happens when one is running hightail down the third floor corridor from Filch with a five second lag time? Mishap meetings with Mr and Mrs Norris and two days scrubbing cauldrons with a toothbrush, that's what! And I'm the one who charmed the bloody thing in the first place, so I should be able to fix it—"
Lily's eyes lift from the map for the first time. "Wait a second—you made this?"
Potter sighs in exasperation, his glaring eyes looking surprisingly small without the frames of his specs. "Haven't you been listening, Evans? Me and the lads. But now it's broken."
"How in the sodding hell did you lot make this? It moves! And it's got all these dots—people dots. It tells you where everyone is!"
"It used to tell you where everyone is," James bites off bitterly, jabbing a finger at the parchment. "Look. It's frozen. I cocked up the spell and now it's got a bloody half-hour lag time. I got greedy, it got huffy, and now I'm going to die."
Lily notices that her dot is indeed still stuck up in the 6th year dormitory. Her mind speeds through the disbelief, the possibilities. "What spell did you use?"
As Potter begins to talk—listing off one spell, then another, then something Lily isn't quite certain is even English, or Latin, or any discernible language, but must be because Potter is sitting there continuing to talk about it as if it should all make perfect sense. Before that moment, Lily would have wholeheartedly stood by that claim that she was the cleverest person James Potter knew. Now?
"—and I tried to do that one in reverse, to counteract the first tracking spell that parallels with the gridlock to keep the shifting spell in place—"
Dear Merlin, how could he still possibly be talking?
"—you're just going to have to kiss me."
That, Lily understands.
"Excuse me?" she asks.
Potter is back to slumping on the table. "You've got that glazed look about you. I can see it even while squinting. It's clear I'm not surviving the day. So do a bloke a favour and grant him his dying wish? No one will even know. I'll be dead by morning."
Lily chucks a stack of parchment at him, then his specs. "No one is dying. And no one is getting snogged, either. Put on your glasses, for Merlin's sake."
James does as she orders, slipping the wire frames over his face, hazel eyes blinking behind the thick glass. He's frowning.
"It's no use, Evans," he sighs. "The thing's botched."
Lily looks down at the map—hardly botched, from what she can tell, and still such an utterly amazing feat of magic that she really can't possibly look too long at it or she'll start spouting out love sonnets and gasps of wonderment in its honour—then over at Potter, who has now dropped a dejected chin in the palm of his hand, drooping into his bent elbow. The ink is still there across his forehead, and Lily just can't help it anymore—she gives her finger a little lick, then leans across the table to scrub at the stain until it's nothing more than a dark taint against his heated skin. It's the most saliva he'll be getting out of her, she thinks, almost grinning.
For now, anyway.
"Don't be such a twin-headed, wank-rotting, fungus-guzzling, fuck of a flobberworm, James," she says, plopping back down in her seat. She claps her hands together and eyes the mountains of books and notes surrounding them. "Now let's fix this stupid map of yours, shall we?"