Toil and Trouble
By She's a Star
(My titles would be much more impressive if they were centered. Damn you and your general weirdness, MS Word.)
Gracias para los comentarios acerca de el cuento. Ustedes son muy magnifico, fantastico, etc. Llevo el queso. No me lleva.
Chapter Two
"I'm asking Lily to the ball," James announced as soon as he, Sirius, Remus, and Peter stepped into their dormitory that evening.
"No!" Sirius said, feigning shock. "Really??"
"Amazing," Peter threw in.
"Remarkable," added Remus, smirking slightly.
"What do you think she'll say?" asked Sirius, gazing poetically into the distance. "I can just see it now – her red hair dancing like fire as she tosses it over her shoulder . . . green eyes sparkling . . . lips red and full as she replies in a tone like the sweetest serenade . . ." He paused dramatically. "'No way in hell, Potter.'"
Remus and Peter laughed.
"Shut up," James ordered, glaring. "She's going to say yes this time. I know it."
"James, mate," said Sirius, "I'm telling you this solely for your own mental health and well-being: come off it, you git."
James stared skeptically at him.
"Okay," Sirius admitted, "I threw in the 'you git' part for fun."
Rolling his eyes, James responded, "Thanks but no thanks, Padfoot. This time, it's going to be different."
"How so?" Peter asked interestedly.
"Lily'll slap him when she refuses?" Sirius offered innocently, then after a moment of thought added, "No, wait, she's done that already."
Peter laughed, looking as though he was savoring the memory. "In front of the entire Great Hall at breakfast . . ."
"All right, you two are useless prats," James decided, glaring, and then turned to Remus. "Moony? You're on my side, right?"
"Well," Remus said, a bit uneasily, "she does seem to hate you a bit less this year, but I'm not sure that you should . . ."
"Face it, Potter," Sirius said brightly, throwing an arm over Remus' shoulders, "We've got you, three to one. There's no way."
"Some friends you are," James grumbled. He glared, apparently furious beyond all reason, for approximately fifteen seconds before sinking down onto his four-poster and saying easily, "So, who're you all asking?"
"No one," Peter said glumly, sitting down on his own bed.
"Same here," said Sirius.
Everyone stared at him in surprise.
"What??" Sirius asked. "I've simply decided that I will let the ladies come to me this time around."
"Really?" asked Remus mildly. "No snogging with Hestia Jones in the rose bushes this time around?"
Sirius shrugged. "To tell you the truth, I've gotten quite sick of her."
"You get 'quite sick' of everyone after approximately two weeks," James reminded him.
"At least I haven't been madly in love with the same girl since I was thirteen without her ever paying me the time of day," Sirius shot back. "It's really getting old, you kno—"
"Defense Against the Dark Arts was interesting today," Remus cut in pointedly.
James and Sirius glanced over at him, and after a moment both took the hint that he was attempting to extinguish the bickering before it progressed into an all-out wizard's duel.
"Wasn't bad," James agreed after a moment.
"There's been worse," Sirius said, nodding.
And they fell into a boring but thankfully non-violent discussion concerning school work.
*
Perhaps Lily was paranoid, but she didn't quite think so. After all, she had every excuse to believe that James Potter was stalking her.
Running into him exactly fifty six times in one day just couldn't all be blamed on coincidence. Or if it could, Lily decided that coincidence might be almost as big of a prat as James was.
When time fifty-seven rolled around, as she stepped out of the girls' bathroom and he just happened to be standing approximately five feet away, she felt her temper boiling over.
All right. That was enough.
She fixed the most menacing glare she could manage onto her face (surprisingly, it wasn't a hard task) and stormed over to him. "Okay, Potter."
"Okay what?" he asked innocently, grinning at her and running his hand through his hair. She really hated it when he did that. Part of her was tempted to tell him that he looked like a complete idiot, but then he'd know that she actually paid attention to his hair, and it might give him ideas. The wrong kinds of ideas.
"Touched as I am that you want to follow me around all of the time, stop or I'll curse you to next Tuesday and back."
"Following? But . . . I'm not following you!"
She wondered if it was humanly possible to be less convincing.
Groaning in frustration, she snapped, "Why don't you just get it over with?"
"Get what over with?" he asked earnestly.
AAAUGHHHH.
"Ask me to the ball already!" she practically shrieked. "Just do it before I go completely mad!"
His eyes immediately lit up. "Does this mean you're going to say yes??"
She felt nearly overcome with the urge to slap him, in manner of herself in sixth year after he'd thrown his arms around her coming down the stairs and then attempted to convince her that he had tripped.
Unfortunately, Professor Flitwick was standing about twenty feet away, and she felt that her Head Girl position might be jeopardized slightly were she to be caught attempting to beat an "innocent" student to a bloody pulp. Ugh. Such was life.
"You make me insane, Potter," she informed him, quite brusquely, before spinning on her heel and making her way toward the Great Hall.
" . . . Insane with love?" James asked hopefully from behind her.
Lily didn't even bother to check to see if anyone was looking as she let out a quiet shriek of fury and kicked the wall.
