Hello, I really don't know how to put author's notes in with written
stories so I thought that I would just put it here and hope u read it!!
Thank you so much for your comments they were really really helpful and I
think you were right about Lily being too mean; James didn't mean to be
horrible to Lily he was just showing off and it went too far and Lily was
embarrassed by this. But you are right she was v mean! But that's us girls
for you! Ha! Anyway maybe she will get a bit nicer in chapters to come? I
am thinking of the possibility of an unintentional overhearing of a
conversation of Lily's by perhaps Sirius/Remus where she (by mistake) lets
a few secrets slip....and he has to decide whether to tell everything she
said James or keep it between him and Lily....we shall see! What do you
think? Thank you again! x
Chapter two.
A syrupy, honey -gold sun filtered lazily through the large sixth year Gryffindor boy's dormitory window, fragmented and dimmed somewhat by the heavy, dusty, ruby red drapes hanging at the window, the only obstacle in its path. The tentative branches of light that did pierce the darkness of the small circular room through the gaps in the curtains however were bright gold and carried a cheery note of summer with them into the sleep filled darkness.
One person who was not feeling so cheery however was James Potter, who, upon waking early opened a bleary sleep filled eyelid and gave a rumbling disgruntled groan. In his hurry to lose his sorrows in sleep last night he had not only forgotten to remove his clothes, resulting in a very stiff and creaky neck, but, he had also forgotten to pull shut the hangings surrounding his four poster bed and the dancing golden light played across his face causing him to stir, and ultimately to wake up in a very bad mood.
Waking up so early, especially on a Saturday morning, was a very rare occurrence in the Gryffindor dormitories, especially in the third floor boy's room. The girls in Gryffindor admittedly weren't so bad at getting up as the boys, preferring instead to get an early start on their homework, or go shopping in Hogsmeade. But then as they say, boys will be boys -and as it was often said by some, the boys needed the beauty sleep more than the girls did anyway.
Generally speaking, it was James and Sirius who were usually the ones who liked to have a long leisurely lay in on a Saturday morning whilst Remus and a few of the other Gryffindor's often preferred to go outside and enjoy the early morning sunshine, and, especially for Remus, a few quiet moments of solitude away from the wild, busy, prank filled times with his friends.
James put his lack of sleep down to simply having too many thoughts about how stupid he had been the night before and of course his own bruised pride swimming around in his head and so, sighing heavily, he resigned himself to the fact that he was now fully awake and swung his legs heavily out of his four poster and padded silently to the window.
He stood for a minute or two by the heavy drapes and inhaled their musty scent as he drew back one of them letting the glorious light flood one half of the room and chase the darkness away into the corners with the cobwebs and spiders. There came a loud and irritated grunt from the back of the room and James turned around and scanned the empty room, his eyes coming to rest on the sleeping form of Sirius moodily rolling over in his bed out the way of a beam of particularly bright sunlight and muttering,
"...pickled vole..." murderously into his pillow in his sleep.
James stifled a laugh and wished for a second that he knew what Sirius was dreaming about, but then quickly changed his mind when he remembered that Sirius frequently did tell him about his dreams and they weren't very reassuring, or in fact very sane and often involved blood, and large quantities of it.
James turned back to the window and sat down on the rickety old chair left there by Peter who was too short to open the windows without it ("and too stupid to think to open them buy magic" James thought moodily) he gazed out of the window and looked down onto the lush grounds surrounding Hogwarts. He sighed deeply with satisfaction and closed his eyes dreamily as a beam of bright sunlight warmed his face, intensified by the glass of the window pane – even if everything else in his life seemed to be falling apart at least the solidity of Hogwarts was something he could always rely on.
Breathing in the musty, solid scent of the curtains once more James opened his eyes and creakily stood up and faced Sirius's four poster and the now heavily snoring Sirius Black. "Time to have some fun!" he thought quickly, giving a wicked grin and retrieving his wand from his back jeans pocket, left there from the night before, in the half gloom.
"Accio duvet!" he said quietly, pointing his wand at Sirius's duvet cover.
The second the spell had been cast the duvet stood almost as though to attention and began to hover about two inches above the sleeping Sirius, perfectly strait, like an immaculate and pristine piece of new parchment. The duvet then commenced to raise itself from its position and gently began to hover towards James. But the sleeping Sirius wasn't going to give up without a fight. Still in a deep sleep he felt what he thought was the duvet begin to slip off of the bed and muttered grumpily,
"Gerroff you..." and tugged the duvet back towards him. However as the duvet was in the process of being enchanted it seemed to take on a personality of its own and also take great offence to being tugged at in such a way and cuffed Sirius firmly on the top of his sleeping head.
"Oi!" Sirius mumbled sleepily, "Come ere." and with that he grasped the duvet with both hands and yanked it firmly back down over himself and rolled over. James watched in amusement as the duvet began to tremble violently with what could only be described as extreme feathery fury at its treatment, and then rip itself from Sirius's grasp and proceeded to leap onto his head and attempt to suffocate him. James was so caught up in the hilarity of it all he actually quite forgot that Sirius was actually being suffocated by a very angry duvet and would probably be awake and turning purple by now. He jumped up and hurriedly called off the duvet with the counter curse, relived when it finally lay still over Sirius once more.
James stood for a second unsure if he should move at all; Sirius lay motionless, the duvet completely covering him from head to toe. James grasped his wand in his right hand tightly and walked forward quickly and snatched the duvet from the bed with his left hand, revealing, as it seemed, Sirius to still be sleeping peacefully. James heaved a huge sigh of relief and stepped forward intending just to make sure that he was alive and he hadn't killed him or anything too serious.
Leaning over Sirius James put his own ear to Sirius's mouth to check his breathing. Fine. all fine. Thank god...he was just about to straiten up and go and get dressed when Sirius, with the speed of lightning, grabbed him around the head and bellowed raucously in his exposed and lowered ear:
"YOU BLOODY GREAT IDIOT!!"
He let go of James's head just long enough to push James hard away from him and his own fuzzy, overheating, buzzing head.
James's ears rang violently, Sirius's shout echoing cruelly 100 times amplified and rattling around and around his poor stunned head. He staggered two steps backwards and then, being a bit accident prone, tripped over the duvet that was now lying on the floor and fell spectacularly over it on to his arse with a resounding 'smack' of the wooden floor.
There was silence in the small dormitory, broken only by Sirius's ragged breathing as he fought to bring his heart rate back to normal. James looked up at Sirius and after a moment's pause they both suddenly broke into peals of booming hysterical laughter, tears of mirth streaming down their faces. The sound of it was so loud that it shook the walls of the small room and made a thin layer of dust trickle and float down from the ceiling. When they both had finally gotten over their laughing fit (which took several minutes as each time they looked at one another they were off again)James said:
"That, padfoot old friend, is the sort of thing that will cost me thousands of galleons in therapy in later life."
Sirius, still wheezing with laughter, wrenched himself off the bed and stretched an open hand down towards James on the floor and replied:
"That is provided, god willing, that you actually manage to get a life James!" said Sirius in mock earnest with a small laugh.
James took the proffered hand with a wide grin and Sirius heaved him upright. James threw a friendly arm about Sirius's shoulders and said,
"I shall choose to ignore that deeply unfair comment you just made, as you are clearly suffering the after-effects of extreme oxygen deprivation and don't know what you are saying! Come on padfoot. We may have missed breakfast – but we will certainly not miss lunch!"
And with that the pair of them hurriedly threw on some clothes (and James sculpted his intentionally messy black hair with a hand and a flick of his wand of course) and made their leisurely way to the great hall for lunch.
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"James is obviously crazy about you Lily." Henrietta, Lily's best friend in the entire world said over lunch that very Saturday lunchtime, earnestly gazing across the table with her deep brown chocolatey eyes staring into Lily's own emerald green ones. She reached an arm across the dining table and placed her small manicured hand on top of Lily's.
"What more do you want?"
Lily thought about this for a second, raised her fork to her lips and took a bite of her pasta, swallowed hard and said ironically,
"..God Henry...how about someone who is sweet, honest and nice to me, Knows who I am and respects my principles and those of other people, Someone who is caring and sensitive and responsible and knows me for who I am and not for my looks or what he thinks I am." she finished and forked another lot of pasta into her mouth and grabbed a beaker of pumpkin juice from in front of her before trying to continue, but Henrietta cut her off,
"But James is all those things Lily – why can't you see that?" Lily snorted into her pasta and looked up into Henrietta's honest face, before continuing on her rant,
"And that's not all I need Henry, I need dedication!" she said gesturing wildly with her hands, slopping pumpkin juice from the beaker she was holding onto the table top,
"God, I am old enough now to know what I want for myself, and James Potter is certainly not it!" she took a huge slug of juice from the beaker, replaced it on the table away from the spillage and continued to eat her lunch.
Henrietta sighed deeply and said,
"Dedication? Lilly, do you not call six years of following you around like a droopy eyed puppy dedication? Girl, you are out of your mind!" she pushed her own half finished bowl of pasta away from her and reached instead for the basket of garlic bread to her left. She withdrew her hand with a large chunk and took a huge bite and in between mouthfuls said:
"If only you would stop trying to hate him for what you think he is and not what he really is for two seconds you would probably start to like him," she swallowed the chunk of bread she had been chewing and continued, "...and you would also realise he's actually quite a decent bloke really and not the monster you think he is, and, you would most importantly see that he is actually pretty perfect for you."
"Sorry?" Lily said in mock distracted voice "I was a bit preoccupied with the half chewed bread rolling around in your huge gob." she smiled sweetly and chuckled with laughter. Henrietta stuck her tongue out at her and shook her head wildly, sending her tangle of copper curls spilling from their restraining pins and grips.
"Admit it Lily." she said lightly whilst trying to force her hair pins back into her hair with the end of her wand,
"It is inevitable, he will win you over in the end –and in the end you'll let him, because you want him really, no matter what you say." Henrietta finished her bread and looked at her watch; grabbed her beaker of pumpkin juice, took a large swig and then got up to leave the table.
"Got to go Lil." she said, "I've got extra transfiguration homework to do from the professor for turning Peter Pettigrew's nose into a carrot in yesterday's class." she looked at Lily, her eyes twinkling wickedly and smiled evilly at her own wickedness, waved goodbye to Lily and left the great hall at a brisk walk.
Lily watched her best friend leave and chuckled to herself as she helped herself to some more pumpkin juice. As she sat at the end of the Gryffindor table finishing her own lunch she saw out of the corner of her eye James and his three cronies swagger in to the great hall. She turned her head and watched them sit down together at the other end, she watched intently as she saw James look around and seemingly scan the room. "Probably looking for another simpering girl who fancies him to go and snog." she thought disgustedly. She watched as he scanned down the length of the Gryffindor table and was startled to see him smiling directly at her!
"Bloody cheek!" she said quietly. But then she remembered what Henrietta had been saying about giving him a chance and instead of giving him a glare and looking away or simply ignoring him like she usually did, she looked him in the eye and gave him a small smile back. "That doesn't mean I like him!" She thought furiously to herself "It just means I am going to be nice to everyone today, including him. That's all."
And with that she stood up and left the great hall, making sure she went the long way around all the other house dining tables so as not to have to look at James as he was probably boasting to his mates that she fancied him already knowing him, typical!
If she would have looked over at James however, she would no doubt have been (secretly) slightly pleased and a little surprised to see that he was not boasting to anyone, in fact, he was not speaking at all for once, he was just simply staring directly in front of him with his mouth hanging open in disbelief – did this mean he was actually getting somewhere with Lily Evans? After six whole years?!
He sat there in his daze until someone (namely Sirius) jammed a large and muscular elbow into his rib cage and Remus told him to start eating before Sirius ate it all for him. James came back to reality with a jolt and gave himself a small secret grin and continued to eat his lunch in silence with a loopy smile on his face.
Chapter two.
A syrupy, honey -gold sun filtered lazily through the large sixth year Gryffindor boy's dormitory window, fragmented and dimmed somewhat by the heavy, dusty, ruby red drapes hanging at the window, the only obstacle in its path. The tentative branches of light that did pierce the darkness of the small circular room through the gaps in the curtains however were bright gold and carried a cheery note of summer with them into the sleep filled darkness.
One person who was not feeling so cheery however was James Potter, who, upon waking early opened a bleary sleep filled eyelid and gave a rumbling disgruntled groan. In his hurry to lose his sorrows in sleep last night he had not only forgotten to remove his clothes, resulting in a very stiff and creaky neck, but, he had also forgotten to pull shut the hangings surrounding his four poster bed and the dancing golden light played across his face causing him to stir, and ultimately to wake up in a very bad mood.
Waking up so early, especially on a Saturday morning, was a very rare occurrence in the Gryffindor dormitories, especially in the third floor boy's room. The girls in Gryffindor admittedly weren't so bad at getting up as the boys, preferring instead to get an early start on their homework, or go shopping in Hogsmeade. But then as they say, boys will be boys -and as it was often said by some, the boys needed the beauty sleep more than the girls did anyway.
Generally speaking, it was James and Sirius who were usually the ones who liked to have a long leisurely lay in on a Saturday morning whilst Remus and a few of the other Gryffindor's often preferred to go outside and enjoy the early morning sunshine, and, especially for Remus, a few quiet moments of solitude away from the wild, busy, prank filled times with his friends.
James put his lack of sleep down to simply having too many thoughts about how stupid he had been the night before and of course his own bruised pride swimming around in his head and so, sighing heavily, he resigned himself to the fact that he was now fully awake and swung his legs heavily out of his four poster and padded silently to the window.
He stood for a minute or two by the heavy drapes and inhaled their musty scent as he drew back one of them letting the glorious light flood one half of the room and chase the darkness away into the corners with the cobwebs and spiders. There came a loud and irritated grunt from the back of the room and James turned around and scanned the empty room, his eyes coming to rest on the sleeping form of Sirius moodily rolling over in his bed out the way of a beam of particularly bright sunlight and muttering,
"...pickled vole..." murderously into his pillow in his sleep.
James stifled a laugh and wished for a second that he knew what Sirius was dreaming about, but then quickly changed his mind when he remembered that Sirius frequently did tell him about his dreams and they weren't very reassuring, or in fact very sane and often involved blood, and large quantities of it.
James turned back to the window and sat down on the rickety old chair left there by Peter who was too short to open the windows without it ("and too stupid to think to open them buy magic" James thought moodily) he gazed out of the window and looked down onto the lush grounds surrounding Hogwarts. He sighed deeply with satisfaction and closed his eyes dreamily as a beam of bright sunlight warmed his face, intensified by the glass of the window pane – even if everything else in his life seemed to be falling apart at least the solidity of Hogwarts was something he could always rely on.
Breathing in the musty, solid scent of the curtains once more James opened his eyes and creakily stood up and faced Sirius's four poster and the now heavily snoring Sirius Black. "Time to have some fun!" he thought quickly, giving a wicked grin and retrieving his wand from his back jeans pocket, left there from the night before, in the half gloom.
"Accio duvet!" he said quietly, pointing his wand at Sirius's duvet cover.
The second the spell had been cast the duvet stood almost as though to attention and began to hover about two inches above the sleeping Sirius, perfectly strait, like an immaculate and pristine piece of new parchment. The duvet then commenced to raise itself from its position and gently began to hover towards James. But the sleeping Sirius wasn't going to give up without a fight. Still in a deep sleep he felt what he thought was the duvet begin to slip off of the bed and muttered grumpily,
"Gerroff you..." and tugged the duvet back towards him. However as the duvet was in the process of being enchanted it seemed to take on a personality of its own and also take great offence to being tugged at in such a way and cuffed Sirius firmly on the top of his sleeping head.
"Oi!" Sirius mumbled sleepily, "Come ere." and with that he grasped the duvet with both hands and yanked it firmly back down over himself and rolled over. James watched in amusement as the duvet began to tremble violently with what could only be described as extreme feathery fury at its treatment, and then rip itself from Sirius's grasp and proceeded to leap onto his head and attempt to suffocate him. James was so caught up in the hilarity of it all he actually quite forgot that Sirius was actually being suffocated by a very angry duvet and would probably be awake and turning purple by now. He jumped up and hurriedly called off the duvet with the counter curse, relived when it finally lay still over Sirius once more.
James stood for a second unsure if he should move at all; Sirius lay motionless, the duvet completely covering him from head to toe. James grasped his wand in his right hand tightly and walked forward quickly and snatched the duvet from the bed with his left hand, revealing, as it seemed, Sirius to still be sleeping peacefully. James heaved a huge sigh of relief and stepped forward intending just to make sure that he was alive and he hadn't killed him or anything too serious.
Leaning over Sirius James put his own ear to Sirius's mouth to check his breathing. Fine. all fine. Thank god...he was just about to straiten up and go and get dressed when Sirius, with the speed of lightning, grabbed him around the head and bellowed raucously in his exposed and lowered ear:
"YOU BLOODY GREAT IDIOT!!"
He let go of James's head just long enough to push James hard away from him and his own fuzzy, overheating, buzzing head.
James's ears rang violently, Sirius's shout echoing cruelly 100 times amplified and rattling around and around his poor stunned head. He staggered two steps backwards and then, being a bit accident prone, tripped over the duvet that was now lying on the floor and fell spectacularly over it on to his arse with a resounding 'smack' of the wooden floor.
There was silence in the small dormitory, broken only by Sirius's ragged breathing as he fought to bring his heart rate back to normal. James looked up at Sirius and after a moment's pause they both suddenly broke into peals of booming hysterical laughter, tears of mirth streaming down their faces. The sound of it was so loud that it shook the walls of the small room and made a thin layer of dust trickle and float down from the ceiling. When they both had finally gotten over their laughing fit (which took several minutes as each time they looked at one another they were off again)James said:
"That, padfoot old friend, is the sort of thing that will cost me thousands of galleons in therapy in later life."
Sirius, still wheezing with laughter, wrenched himself off the bed and stretched an open hand down towards James on the floor and replied:
"That is provided, god willing, that you actually manage to get a life James!" said Sirius in mock earnest with a small laugh.
James took the proffered hand with a wide grin and Sirius heaved him upright. James threw a friendly arm about Sirius's shoulders and said,
"I shall choose to ignore that deeply unfair comment you just made, as you are clearly suffering the after-effects of extreme oxygen deprivation and don't know what you are saying! Come on padfoot. We may have missed breakfast – but we will certainly not miss lunch!"
And with that the pair of them hurriedly threw on some clothes (and James sculpted his intentionally messy black hair with a hand and a flick of his wand of course) and made their leisurely way to the great hall for lunch.
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"James is obviously crazy about you Lily." Henrietta, Lily's best friend in the entire world said over lunch that very Saturday lunchtime, earnestly gazing across the table with her deep brown chocolatey eyes staring into Lily's own emerald green ones. She reached an arm across the dining table and placed her small manicured hand on top of Lily's.
"What more do you want?"
Lily thought about this for a second, raised her fork to her lips and took a bite of her pasta, swallowed hard and said ironically,
"..God Henry...how about someone who is sweet, honest and nice to me, Knows who I am and respects my principles and those of other people, Someone who is caring and sensitive and responsible and knows me for who I am and not for my looks or what he thinks I am." she finished and forked another lot of pasta into her mouth and grabbed a beaker of pumpkin juice from in front of her before trying to continue, but Henrietta cut her off,
"But James is all those things Lily – why can't you see that?" Lily snorted into her pasta and looked up into Henrietta's honest face, before continuing on her rant,
"And that's not all I need Henry, I need dedication!" she said gesturing wildly with her hands, slopping pumpkin juice from the beaker she was holding onto the table top,
"God, I am old enough now to know what I want for myself, and James Potter is certainly not it!" she took a huge slug of juice from the beaker, replaced it on the table away from the spillage and continued to eat her lunch.
Henrietta sighed deeply and said,
"Dedication? Lilly, do you not call six years of following you around like a droopy eyed puppy dedication? Girl, you are out of your mind!" she pushed her own half finished bowl of pasta away from her and reached instead for the basket of garlic bread to her left. She withdrew her hand with a large chunk and took a huge bite and in between mouthfuls said:
"If only you would stop trying to hate him for what you think he is and not what he really is for two seconds you would probably start to like him," she swallowed the chunk of bread she had been chewing and continued, "...and you would also realise he's actually quite a decent bloke really and not the monster you think he is, and, you would most importantly see that he is actually pretty perfect for you."
"Sorry?" Lily said in mock distracted voice "I was a bit preoccupied with the half chewed bread rolling around in your huge gob." she smiled sweetly and chuckled with laughter. Henrietta stuck her tongue out at her and shook her head wildly, sending her tangle of copper curls spilling from their restraining pins and grips.
"Admit it Lily." she said lightly whilst trying to force her hair pins back into her hair with the end of her wand,
"It is inevitable, he will win you over in the end –and in the end you'll let him, because you want him really, no matter what you say." Henrietta finished her bread and looked at her watch; grabbed her beaker of pumpkin juice, took a large swig and then got up to leave the table.
"Got to go Lil." she said, "I've got extra transfiguration homework to do from the professor for turning Peter Pettigrew's nose into a carrot in yesterday's class." she looked at Lily, her eyes twinkling wickedly and smiled evilly at her own wickedness, waved goodbye to Lily and left the great hall at a brisk walk.
Lily watched her best friend leave and chuckled to herself as she helped herself to some more pumpkin juice. As she sat at the end of the Gryffindor table finishing her own lunch she saw out of the corner of her eye James and his three cronies swagger in to the great hall. She turned her head and watched them sit down together at the other end, she watched intently as she saw James look around and seemingly scan the room. "Probably looking for another simpering girl who fancies him to go and snog." she thought disgustedly. She watched as he scanned down the length of the Gryffindor table and was startled to see him smiling directly at her!
"Bloody cheek!" she said quietly. But then she remembered what Henrietta had been saying about giving him a chance and instead of giving him a glare and looking away or simply ignoring him like she usually did, she looked him in the eye and gave him a small smile back. "That doesn't mean I like him!" She thought furiously to herself "It just means I am going to be nice to everyone today, including him. That's all."
And with that she stood up and left the great hall, making sure she went the long way around all the other house dining tables so as not to have to look at James as he was probably boasting to his mates that she fancied him already knowing him, typical!
If she would have looked over at James however, she would no doubt have been (secretly) slightly pleased and a little surprised to see that he was not boasting to anyone, in fact, he was not speaking at all for once, he was just simply staring directly in front of him with his mouth hanging open in disbelief – did this mean he was actually getting somewhere with Lily Evans? After six whole years?!
He sat there in his daze until someone (namely Sirius) jammed a large and muscular elbow into his rib cage and Remus told him to start eating before Sirius ate it all for him. James came back to reality with a jolt and gave himself a small secret grin and continued to eat his lunch in silence with a loopy smile on his face.