twenty-nine – diligence
He never cared for listening in Professor Alchin's lessons, focussing on the diagrams on the board and diligently taking notes, and now Lily's sitting next to him – she's not only sitting next to him, but talking to him, and properly talking too, not just the perfunctory greetings of hi and bye she bestowed on him at the beginning of the year. Being who he is, and her being so – he struggles to describe her and settles on interesting, James can't help probing her now that she's opened up to him a bit.
They've been sort-of-friends since the beginning of the year when Professor Flitwick paired them together for Charms in the seating plan, and since he found her crying in the corridor and he'd held her and let her sob into his shirt, and a couple of days later she'd shouted at him because, she said, she didn't like owing him for that, and, he said, you don't owe me anything.
She'd looked at him ever so slightly differently since then.
"What else can you do?" he whispers.
She giggles, eyes closed in thought. "Okay." Lily tears across the bottom of his parchment – "Oi!" – and rolls it into a cone. She places it in her left hand and, covering it with her right, she closes her eyes once again. When she opens them, she's struggling to hold back a triumphant grin, and allows him to peek between her palms.
"It's a –!"
"A lily," she confirms, nodding. The creamy petals curl against her skin, a dusting of golden pollen fluttering on her notes. He looks at it in awe. "I was never that impressed by it, really," Lily tells him, with the air of confessing a dark secret. "I mean, flowers seem so…trivial. Beautiful, but –" she breaks off with a laugh. Rolls the stem across her fingertips; closes her eyes again and brushes the now-red petals across the back of his hand, making sure the thorn avoids piercing his skin. "I don't know. If you want to tell someone you love them, just tell them. Don't give them a bunch of flowers that'll die after a few days."
James doesn't say anything but watches her closely, scanning her face with easier said than done flashing through his mind. He takes the rose from her and inspects it. "So you don't want flowers, this Valentine's?"
Lily smiles. "I don't know. It's a nice gesture, I suppose, if unoriginal." Her eyes light up for a moment before her face sobers. "My dad used to get us one, you know. A rose each for Tuney – my sister – and I, and twelve for my mum."
James gives her a half-smile and brushes his fingers across her hand, as she'd done to him with the flower. "It's alright, you know," he says. "To remember him. You don't have to push him out of your mind."
"I know," says Lily after a pause, and she smiles at him again, and James might be imagining it but her eyes seem to soften as they trace his face.
And he never really cared for listening in Professor Alchin's lessons, focussing on the diagrams on the board and diligently taking notes, and now Lily's sitting next to him, so James is, much to the teacher's chagrin, very much not paying attention.
"Potter!"
James snaps his eyes from Lily to the teacher. "Yes, sir?"
Alchin sighs. "Potter, could you tell me what Blishen suggests is the best model for predicting which runes will become logograms?"
"Er," says James, and Lily snorts beside him, slipping the rose into the wand pocket of her satchel. The teacher sighs again, and turns to Kevin Holmes, who's looking at James disdainfully with his hand in the air.
"The Lexi-logal model, " James says suddenly, looking entirely too smug for Kevin's liking, and he glances back at Lily to see if she's as irritated as he is but she's blinking up at James again and biting her lip. "It separates numerical runes from lexical ones and sorts those into single lexemes and lexemes likely to combine to create a logogram."
James leans back into his chair as Professor Alchin raises his eyebrows, impressed despite himself. With a last despairing glance back at the pair of Gryffindors, Kevin spots Lily biting her lip to stop from laughing. Her cheeks are flushed and she looks so happy.
With a sigh, he turns back to the front.
a/n: Lily needs to start practicing what she preaches, eh? Anyway, Happy Valentine's day, and thanks a bunch (of flowers) to all the new reviewers :)) do you see what I did there with the bunch thing or