A/N: This stands completely alone from anything else I've written, and is set to span 5-7 parts and maybe 40kish words. As always, please let me know what you think! We're all meant to write for ourselves, but I live for comments.
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Magic
The first time Lily Evans and James Potter kiss, it's an accident.
Admittedly, that accident is all her fault, but it's an accident just the same.
Friendship hasn't come easily to them—not when they had started erring that way as their sixth year had progressed; not when they had come across each other in the prefects' compartment on the Hogwarts Express with matching Head Boy and Head Girl badges on September 1st, 1977; not when they had had to learn how to coexist in those leadership positions during the first months of the fall term.
No, that's a lie. Friendship has come easily to them at some points. At some points, he's made her laugh until tears have come, even dating back to the days when she would turn on her heel and leave the room if he tried to approach her. At some points, he's touched her with the sincerity of his deep loyalty and the rigidness of his moral compass—usually in relation to his friends and no one else, although she'd noticed that that had started shifting in the throes of their sixth year. At some points, he's made her wonder if she's misjudged him all along, because he's shown such deep magical skill that she's certain he couldn't be a total idiot like she's always claimed. Yet at other points—
At other points, he's made her want to tear her hair out for a myriad of reasons: because he doesn't know when to let go of a fucking joke, because he enjoys arguing with her like it's the greatest entertainment life can provide, because his cruelty knows no bounds when someone crosses him or—even worse—someone he loves. Their roles as Head Boy and Girl haven't fixed any of their issues. If anything, their constant need for interaction has only exacerbated things further. As November's cold weather begins in earnest in the year 1977, Lily finds herself spending far more evenings than she'd like in his company, either laughing herself sick or shouting herself hoarse, with absolutely nothing in between.
With absolutely nothing in between, at least, until the day comes where she kisses him. Understandably, that changes things entirely.
"Why are you so hung up on this?" she demands late one evening, throwing things into her bookbag in their tiny, shared Heads' office. She extinguishes the lamp on her desk with such a fierce wave of her wand that the glass lantern cracks, which hardly improves her mood. Any further evidence of just how deeply James Potter can get under her skin just shoves her deeper into anger. "It's just a patrol schedule, Potter, the same patrol schedule we've had the entire term. If it worked last week—and the week before that, and the week before that, and the week before that—there's no reason why—"
"There is a reason why it doesn't work for me next week." He's run his hands through his hair so many times that it nearly stands on end from roots to tips, but he seems unaware of that fact, not like when he used to mess it up for attention. Yet again, he rakes both hands roughly across his scalp, and then pulls off his glasses and tosses them onto the top of his desk, which sits flush against the front of hers. "Look, just—I can't explain it, but I can't patrol next Thursday. Can't you just trust me on this? I'm not—"
"Trust you?" she repeats, voice spiking unreasonably high, and he flinches a little. She doesn't blame him. It's her voice, and the sharpness surprises even her. "Why in the name of god would I ever trust you?"
The bridge of his nose has gone red from the pressure of his glasses, and he rubs there with the pads of his thumb and index finger, his eyes closed. "Because I'm asking you to." His words come out short, clipped. "Just this once, and never again. Do you trust anyone, Evans, or is this unique to me?"
She's not sure what stops her up short: the question or his tone, both of which sound like a personal attack. They're not above personally attacking each other, and haven't been for years, and she's developed a dragon's hide by that time. Between summers with Petunia and verbal and magical onslaught from Slytherin students, not much penetrates her thick skin. And yet—
And yet that does, weirdly. He does, weirdly, and her response freezes in her throat, thoughts of broken trust and Petunia and Severus Snape heavy on her mind.
He opens his eyes before she can unstick the sudden lump blocking her reply. His eyes look different without his glasses—less threatening and certainly fuzzier overall and less sharp, like he has to really focus to catch sight of her even from five or six feet away, but he makes the effort. His brow creases as he takes in the sight of whatever reigns on her face, and then his mouth opens and hangs ajar for a moment. "Evans—" he begins, the two syllables more carefully spoken than anything he's offered her in recent days—maybe ever—and she can't take it.
She crosses the short distance to the windows to jerk the hangings closed, a relic of her mum's behavior at home. It's an unbreakable habit learned at her mum's knee, and one she's suddenly grateful for. It gives her the excuse to busy her hands before she can gather her thoughts quickly enough to throw some parting shot his way.
The heavy weight of the moon catches her eye, and her fingers freeze on the drapes.
"Next Thursday," she says, and she turns to see him watching her, glasses once again on his face.
His mouth closes abruptly, and she spies the way his eyes, sharp once again, slide over her shoulder to the moon behind her. "Yes."
"Is that the full moon?"
Something in his expression closes further, although she can't quite place what. Atop the long-argued patrol schedules littering his desk, his hands clench and unclench mindlessly. "Yes."
For a moment, neither of them speak. The fire crackles in the grate, popping quietly and then snapping louder as the logs collapse on each other. A fine spray of sparks shoots up into the chimney.
She breaks eye contact first. "Okay," she agrees, and she heads back to her desk.
The way he's opened his mouth, the set of his jaw furious even from the corner of her eyes, tells her that he'd expected her to argue further. He'd expected it because they're always arguing, something he seems to enjoy until suddenly he doesn't. It's like she sometimes pushes him too far without her knowledge, even though he's constantly pushing her to her breaking point. Somehow, it seems like it gets to him more when she makes him snap than when he sends her own hands flying to her hair with frustration—perhaps because it takes so much more to get him there than it does with her.
"Okay?" He sounds more than a little dumbstruck, and his eyes look that way too, uncertain as she wheels her desk chair around to perch next to his. "That's it?"
"Yes." She tugs the scattered sheets of parchment together, and he lifts his hands automatically, eyes locked on her face. She can feel his stare, even though she doesn't look back. "Just...be careful, okay?"
"Evans." He waits until she looks at him, and his lips appear almost bloodless in the faint yellow light of the lamp atop his desk. Aside from the fire, it's the only light in the room. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
He's a terrible liar.
"Sure. Where can you switch? We had you patrolling on Thursdays because your Quidditch schedule made things difficult. Has that changed at all? And, no, we're not going to switch someone from the Hufflepuff Quidditch team in here to sabotage their chances next week."
Something in his face shifts again, but in the opposite direction. The closure on his face breaks open, present somewhere in the lift of his mouth and the crinkle around his eyes, before he's suddenly beaming at her, the change so rapid that she could have blinked and missed it. "Now, there's an idea," he says. "Are you sure you don't want to hang out more with me and my mates? We could use your brains, you know."
"Oh, I know. I'm just surprised you'd admit it." She looks back to the patrol schedule before her traitorous face can smile in return, because she can feel the beginnings of it forming on her cheeks. He's too bloody charismatic and charming for his own good, something she's always known, but has known with even more certainty as the years have passed. "So—Wednesday? Don't be difficult about this, please. I'm tired."
Under most circumstances, admitting exhaustion to James Potter is tantamount to admitting a weakness to a Slytherin. Normally, he exploits her tiredness however possible, poking and prodding until her short fuse bursts. Normally, she does the same in return.
For some reason—maybe because he feels like he owes her for capitulating and not pushing him to admit his need for an absence on the full moon—he doesn't do that. Instead, he sets out to make her laugh, a feat accomplished with annoying ease, because almost no one can make her laugh with as much consistency, or as hard, as James Potter can make her laugh. It's an unfortunate truth she's known for years, ever since Severus had first lobbed the accusation at her during one of their worse rows. While she may have accepted it—with no small amount of self-loathing, but with acceptance just the same—Severus had never fully come around to that fact during their friendship. The scowl on his face as he watches James make her laugh in every prefect meeting shows that he still hasn't gotten past it.
It happens out of nowhere, and she has no idea why. James has her laughing over some asinine story about Slytherin Malcolm Morris and why he refuses to patrol with him, ever, a story so long-winded that she can't help but interrupt.
"Is there a point to this, or are you just enjoying the sound of your voice?" she asks, but she hears how very little she cares either way. She's already dabbed tears away from under her eyes at his truly masterful impersonation of Malcolm's slow, thick voice, and that laughter has chased away much of her weariness as well.
The grin on his face widens to something truly brilliant. "If I tell you it's both, am I opening myself up to accusations of arrogance?"
"Your mere existence opens yourself up to accusations of arrogance."
"Evans." He chuckles low and under his breath, and her name comes out accusatory itself, but also warm and fond, as he settles an arm across the back of her chair. "Don't—"
She has no idea what triggers her. His laughter? Her name? His arm so near to her shoulders yet so carelessly placed, like he hadn't thought through the action at all, when he once had never made a move without considering how it might get him closer to her?
The reason doesn't matter. Not really. Before she can think—before she can breathe, really—she leans in and kisses him.
It's an accident, purely an accident, and she recognizes it as one after her hand joins her lips on his face and travels up to cup along the strong line of his jaw. The scratch of stubble under her fingertips brings reality crashing down, because it hits her all at once with the force of a hex.
It's James Potter's lips against hers, James Potter's skin warm under her hand, James Potter's body frozen against hers. James Potter.
She jerks back like he's cast a Banishing Charm on her, and it snaps movement into his limbs and words to his mouth.
"Evans." Her name sounds nothing like it had seconds earlier, or perhaps ever before in her life, as he lunges for her hand with the arm no longer looped across her chair. Suddenly there's purpose in every muscle in his body, and he's using that purpose to drag her back to him, first just with his hand, and then with his other arm tight around her back after she steps closer. He uses that arm to tug her down into his lap, his eyes wide and more than a little wild behind his glasses. It takes him only a matter of seconds, certainly no more than three, and she's too stunned at her own actions and the intensity of his reaction to do, well, anything, save for her body's insistence to blush so hot and deep that she can feel heat flood her cheeks. "Don't," he says, and she has no idea what he means. Her blush? The way she can feel her body tensing in a fight-or-flight response, with either option entirely possible? "Don't," he says again, softer, as he takes in a breath so deep that it sounds like he's just remembered how to breathe. "Just—come here. Come here."
Against her better judgment, she does.
xxx
The first time Lily Evans and James Potter kiss, it's an accident.
The second time, it's entirely his fault, although he seems a lot less torn up over it than she does.
In the days that follow that first kiss—that first accidental kiss followed by an embarrassingly long time spent wrapped up in much deeper, more purposeful snogs—she avoids him. During that time, she waits for his mates to erupt into uproarious laughter at any given moment, certain that James will tell them all at the earliest possible moment—and certain that Sirius Black, at least, won't be able to resist losing his head over it.
That time doesn't come. After a few days, she breathes a little easier, to the point that even her friends ask after why she's suddenly relaxed, although none of them had called her out on the tenseness that had preceded that relaxation. They're almost comically good to her.
"It's nothing," she lies breezily. "I'm just a real bitch most of the time. You all know this about me; I don't know why you're surprised."
Absurdly, he lets her avoid him. He posits a single, "Alright, Evans?" the day after she rushes out of their shared office so quickly that she nearly left her bookbag behind, and he doesn't follow up when she's clearly uninterested in conversation. Really, his decision to leave her be surprises her perhaps more than the fact that he's clearly concealed it all from his mates. On more than one late night spent restless behind her four-poster bed, she can't decide which surprises her more.
Really, she realizes later, he simply spent those few days not respecting her space but biding his time, plotting and planning his next move.
That move comes after their next weekly prefect meeting, a meeting she can't leave quickly enough, although sixth year Gryffindor prefect Zachary Bishop thwarts her escape attempt with a question and a smile. Just like that, her quick getaway vanishes into thin air.
James waits, of course. He leans up against the wall of the Transfiguration classroom and chats amiably to one of Ravenclaw's prefects while she fields Zachary's well-meaning inquiries with as much patience as she can muster.
James' patience breaks first. "Zach, you don't mind, do you?" he asks before she can come up with some excuse to dash away. "I need a second with the Head Girl."
Zachary clearly does mind, based on the way his smile slides away, but he kowtows to James almost immediately. People always kowtow to James, and it's annoyed her for years, even if she understands it more than she'd like. Somehow, his gracious thanks as Zachary ducks out brings the smile right back to Zachary's face.
It's grating.
She reaches for her bag before the door can swing shut behind him. "Yes?"
James doesn't mince words. "Are you interested in him?"
Whatever she'd expected, she hadn't expected that.
She can only stare at him, her bag held limply in her hand. "I'm sorry?" she prompts finally, and the desire to laugh flickers in her throat, where her heart has started to pound.
James doesn't laugh. If anything, he looks almost…uncomfortable, a rare sight indeed, as he shrugs and shoves his hands into the pockets of his trousers. "He fancies you. He's made that pretty clear in the locker room after Quidditch practices. I don't—"
"In front of you? He's said he fancies me in front of you?" She hears the incredulity in her voice, and that breaks her. The laughter in her throat bubbles over, and he's right there too almost immediately, laughing along with her like the previous few days never happened. "And you let him walk out of there?" she asks, leaning to sit on McGonagall's desk. Her legs suddenly can't take how absurd it is, to have finally acknowledged that she knows that James Potter fancies her. He's never tried to hide it, although half of the time his antics over the years have had her convinced that his alleged affection for her errs more on the side of the world's longest joke, and his actions aren't real, serious attempts to woo her.
His hand seeks his hair, but not to ruffle it, that tic she's always hated. Instead, he smooths it down with his palm, the action almost sheepish. "I'm trying to hex people less." Somehow, he makes it sound like a shameful secret, not like something she's hoped to hear from him for years. "You're not making it easy, though, trying to poach my keeper off me. I can't—"
"I'm not trying to do anything."
"Sure you're not." The agreement comes a little too easily, and far more easily than what follows. "But could you look a little less fit? You'd really help me out."
The laughter dies in her mouth, shut off like a tap abruptly closed.
Suddenly, they're on the edge of something entirely different. She can feel it down to the very cells of her skin, which tingle.
"Listen—" she begins, unsure where she even means to take things, but he solves that problem neatly.
"I can't stop thinking about kissing you," he says, and something twists inside her stomach, something she can't identify as either pleasurable or painful. It's torn somewhere entirely in between.
He waits. She says nothing. She can't say anything.
One corner of his mouth quirks. "Say it back or tell me to fuck off. It needs to be one or the other, Evans, and I need to hear it."
She feels her own mouth turn upwards, almost in direct response to his. "Why can't it be both?"
A switch flips in him, like someone has turned on all the lights in a room at once, and there's real brilliance in his smile beyond anything she's yet seen—ever, in seven years of knowing him, including all the times she's watched him muck about with his mates or make her laugh or even the dazed, perplexed, breathless way he'd smiled at her before she'd dashed away from him days before. "It can," he says quickly, like he's worried that even a moment's more consideration will have her rethinking the entire thing. "It absolutely can. But I'd appreciate it if you could hurry up with it, because—"
He doesn't finish, but he doesn't need to. He's already moving towards her, his own bag dropped carelessly to the floor, and she hears hers join it before she even feels her fingers let go.
Her heart has jumped again to her throat, joining the rapid pace of her breath, and she does what she's tried to avoid doing for well over six years.
She gives him what he wants.
"Fuck off," she says as he stops in front of her, and his arms immediately encircle her body, like he grabs her all the time. He laughs, the sound somehow accelerating her heartbeat even further, as she buries her hands in his hair to pull his mouth down to hers. "Fuck off and kiss me."
In turn, he gives her what she wants.
xxx
No version of her—past, present, or future Lily—can figure out exactly how it happens, but, suddenly, they're snogging all over the castle.
The strangest part of it all? It's not snogging him senseless atop Minerva McGonagall's desk after prefect meetings, which leaves her questioning her own sanity when the capacity for thought returns. It's not letting him drag her into secret passageways on a whim, or pushing him down in front of the fireplace in their office. It's not lying to her friends when they cluelessly comment on her long absences from the common room, or working with Sirius Black in Transfiguration (paired due to the alphabetical order of their surnames that she hasn't escaped since first year) and wondering what he knows. It's not catching his eyes on her during class and knowing without an ounce of outside confirmation that he's thinking thoughts that make her blush, or watching sunlight catch his jaw in the Great Hall and having those thoughts of her own.
It's how easily it all happens, like there's never been a time before snogging James Potter or her desire for him.
Against her better judgment, she ends up telling him that weeks into their tryst, or whatever it is, the thing they still haven't put to words that has him making excuses to his own mates about his whereabouts several nights a week. She mutters something about it into his skin as she hunts down the spots on his neck that make him swear and hold her tighter atop his lap, each location already deeply burned into her brain.
"Christ, Evans," he says, a swear he's stolen from all of the times he's coaxed it out of her in recent weeks. His hands tighten on her hips, rocking her against the hardness between them that always accompanies their more serious snogging sessions, and she has to bite her lip to keep from swearing in return. "There seriously never was a time before I wanted you. I—what?"
She's pulled back to look at him, lip still between her teeth, and the unfocused look in his eyes sharpens a little as she takes in his ruddy cheeks and red mouth. "Nothing," she lies, but it comes less easily than many of her lies to her friends. Unlike her friends, he also clearly intends to call her out on it. She sees as much in his face, in the way his brow furrows a little with something close to concern, but she cuts him off. "Can I take off your shirt?"
In his haste to agree, he sucks in a breath so quickly that he nearly chokes on it. "Yes. Yes, here—" Again, hastiness overtakes him, and they end up laughing as he fumbles with the buttons to the point that he nearly derails the whole thing.
She can deal with the laughter. In fact, she's started to crave the laughter, to purposefully drop bits of banter against his ear or neck or chest or mouth just to watch him laugh and try to collect himself enough to kiss her again. Quickly, watching him battle between his desire to keep her laughing and his desire to kiss her becomes a favorite pastime, one she likes far better than when he tries to tell her something deep or meaningful. Half of the time, it's fully her fault when he drops a hint at some sort of feelings, because she finds herself tripping backwards into those moments. Sometimes, she has to question if she wants him to tell her those things, because he often says them in reciprocation to dropped hints of her own.
The rest of the time, she seeks to distract him from even the smallest hint of anything emotional, because she can't deal with it. Not from James Potter, who sometimes still makes her want to tear her hair out; who still drives her up the wall in his spare time that's not spent snogging her; who still does dumb shit with his friends that earns detention and loses house points, even if he does hex people less. Fortunately, distracting him comes easily enough, and she experiments with all the ways it becomes possible to shut him up without giving him the direct command. It's often as easy as reaching for the knot of his tie, or sliding her hands under his shirt, or prizing the buttons apart. It's as easy as kissing him, or going for a particularly sensitive spot on his neck, or running her lips over his ear. Hell, sometimes it's as easy as taking her hair down if she has it atop her head, and she tries it out publicly a time or two when they're bantering or arguing (or that blend of the two that seems unique just to them). Their friends aren't stupid. She knows at least one of them—probably Remus Lupin, if she had to place a bet—notices that James' ability to speak shuts off for a good handful of seconds as he watches the progress of her fingers in her hair like it's the most fascinating thing he's ever seen.
As it turns out, her friends notice too.
"Lil, if you'd like to share how to get a lad to look at you like that without shagging him, I'd appreciate it," Marlene McKinnon says as the term nears its close, and she doesn't bother to keep her voice down. James absolutely hears it from where he sits nearby with his friends in the common room, and he clearly can't summon even a hint of embarrassment.
"Evans, for the record, I'm open to shagging you," he calls over to her, and he lifts a hand to deflect the pillow she throws his way. "That's on McKinnon! Don't get mad at me."
But she is mad at him, or maybe at herself, because she's increasingly amenable to the idea as well, and she hates it.
Yet, somehow, she never stays mad at him. He can enrage her with hardly any effort, which isn't exactly new, but his ability to rectify things with even less effort is something she's never experienced before. She hates that almost as much as her inability to keep her hands to herself every time they have a second to spare around each other.
"Evans," he chides the next night in their office, once he'd clued into the fact that she's not exactly thrilled with him. "C'mon, it's not like I—"
She hates when he interrupts her, but she can never stop herself from interrupting him. It's a curse. It sometimes feels like he's a curse. "I don't appreciate you joking that like that in front of our friends."
Our friends. Shit, what had that even happened?
"I wasn't joking."
She sets her book down with a loud, dull thunk.
He stares patiently back across the space of their desks.
"I'm happy to go tell our friends I'm serious about shagging you, if that would make you feel better." His mouth jumps with a barely-suppressed smile. "Although I'm sure they know that. My mates do, anyway. They know I've liked you since fourth year."
Liked you. It sounds eerily more solemn than 'fancied you,' something they've definitely established by that point.
Her mouth has gone rather dry. "That doesn't mean—"
"Of course it means I want to shag you. Are you daft? Evans—" He leans forward, no longer smiling or anything close to it. "I'm getting hard just having this conversation with you. Do you really not understand how fit you are, and how much I fancy you? Look, if you don't want me to joke about it, that's fine, but—just so we're on the same page, I'm not trying to push you, because I'm not keen to put you off me. But I'm fucking mad about you. There's nothing I wouldn't do to you, or with you, if you asked."
Her throat has gone dry too. She swallows more than once before answering. "Two days ago in our prefect meeting, you told me you couldn't stand me."
He has the decency to look at least a little ashamed, although the way he shrugs counteracts that. "Yes, well—what's your thing you're always saying? It's both. And to be fair—"
"You started that argument. It was your fault."
"Probably. I can't help it. You're beautiful when you're angry."
If she hadn't already put her book down, she might have thrown it at him then. "Stop—"
"I'll stop saying it when it's not true anymore." He shifts in his chair. "Are you going to hex me if I come over there?"
It's a challenge and a taunt, and a baseless one at that. She hasn't hexed him in years. "No. I'm trying to hex people less."
His smile erupts then, like he's barely held it back all along. "I'll do my best not to exploit that."
She doesn't believe him. Not for a second.
She also doesn't care. She's kind of looking forward to it.