A/N: For Jilytober 2022 Prompt: "Hey, don't worry. You've got this."
It didn't come as a surprise. Perhaps it should've, but Lily was long past being surprised about anything when it came to one James Potter. Even as Marlene guffawed and Snape turned a shade of red so furious it was almost violet, Lily only sighed and spooned mashed potato onto her plate. James sat surrounded by his friends with the shiny badge gleaming on his chest, proclaiming her predicament for all to see. The problem, if you asked Marlene, was that the badge rightfully belonged to one Remus Lupin, who was currently giving James a sidewards smile and sipping his mug of tea.
The problem, if you asked Lily, was that James deserved the badge.
He'd always been bright. Even when he'd downplayed it, turning to quidditch and mucking about rather than debates and competitions, he'd consistently scored high on their exams. It was all the worse because he made such a show of not trying. Sometime after he turned fifteen, he'd grown allergic to the library and the study hall, and the allergy had proved contagious. More than once, Professor McGonagall had encouraged Lily to descend upon some woe-betided O.W.L student, and more than once, upon inquiring about their revision schedule, had they exclaimed:
"James Potter never goes to the library, and he topped Defence!"
And while they were always happy to accept that Potter's abnormal aptitude for quidditch was a statistical anomaly, they never wanted to hear the same thing about his marks.
And he was well-liked. Even his ex-girlfriends could only condemn him in the way they condemned all members of the male gender when they were particularly lovelorn, and always saved a soft, obliging smile for the fond memories of the times they'd had together. His opposition on the pitch played pick-up matches with him over the holidays, and while the Slytherins hated 'blood-traitor' families like the Potters on principle, most begrudgingly acknowledged that he flew well and did 'alright' in their subjects. Only two people had Lily never known to give James Potter a single due: Argus Filch and Severus Snape.
That was all without mentioning that, over six years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he had been involved in almost every club or society. Yes, most of it had been when he'd been the bright-eyed eleven-year-old Lily had shared biscuits with and shouted at on alternating Tuesdays, but he'd never given up sport or the Transfiguration Society, and since the spring he'd been slipping, unofficially, into more and more meetings. Lily had had the fright of her life one sunshiny Saturday when he'd spoken up in Charms Club on Boot's Theorem of Illusionary Spellcrafting; it had been a late afternoon, torches beginning to light, when he'd leaned over as Professor Binns lectured on magic wielded by the viziers of Egypt in the Fifth Dynasty and rapped a squinting Hufflepuff's textbook until the words enlarged enough for her to read. Never mind that he'd developed a habit of miraculously appearing each time a gang of burly Slytherin boys started on the heels of a scrawny first-year muggle-born. He was still looking for trouble, but these days he broke it up rather than instigating it.
Lily liked Remus. He was kind, with quietly cutting observations, and he was diligent if not exemplary in his work. But there had only ever been one possible candidate to be Head Boy. She had been more sure of James's getting it than she was of herself; her mouth had dropped open when the badge fell out of her owl-delivered envelope.
"Head Boy," Mary repeated, shaking her head. "Can you believe it?"
Yes, Lily thought. "Not at all."
Unfortunately, knowing that he deserved the position didn't ease Lily's reservations about working with him. Over the intervening months, she had played back his apology, and those five words – I can never hate you – on repeat, like a virtuoso who only knew one song. She hadn't known what to say then, and she'd regretted it every day since. In the shower and in her bed in the middle of the night, she found the words she wished she'd had, but they fled by the time she changed scenes. She wasn't about to rush out of the bathroom in only a towel and blurt out half her life story to James Potter in front of the entire school. Marlene might say she was batty on an ordinary Monday, but she wasn't absolutely mad.
On her first morning of her seventh year at Hogwarts, many of those phrases, and arguments, and shaky-breath explanations came back to her when she descended the stairs and spotted James Potter with his arm around a sniffling boy whose feet didn't touch the ground as they sat on the sofa.
"It's perfectly normal, mate," James told him quietly. "I missed my mum and dad something dreadful. I was too stubborn to admit it, though. Wish I had. You're a lot braver than I am."
"I'm not," the boy insisted, blinking furiously.
"Agree to disagree." James surreptitiously looked around, and caught Lily's eye. Lily froze. James's easy expression faltered for a moment, and he mouthed a 'sorry' before turning back to the kid. Lily frowned. Sorry for what?
"Now, before the Head Girl skins me alive," James whispered, but it was loud enough to reach her ears. "Do you want a chocolate frog for breakfast?"
The boy sniffed hard. "A chocolate frog?"
"They really move." James pulled one out of his bag and handed the box over. The boy lifted the lid. His exclamation filled the room when the frog hopped towards him, but he managed to catch it. James nodded encouragingly and he took a bite.
"Woah."
"Good, yeah?"
Lily didn't scold him for encouraging healthy habits, or intervene to insist that the typical protocols around homesickness were observed (two years ago, the prefects had devised a five-step programme after a spate of runaway attempts). She hooked her bag over her shoulder and passed the sofa. James looked up at her, and she hesitated a moment before giving him the smallest possible smile. 'Good job,' she mouthed.
September browned the leaves and scattered them across the paths like rose petals, and Lily and James moved from lesson to lesson almost in synchronisation, never straying far. Sure, James ambled down to Care of Magical Creatures and Lily's leather shoes clicked on the narrow staircase down to the Potions dungeon, but James had become a permanent object in Lily's orbit.
"It's like I've adopted a satellite," she told Marlene, watching as he ambushed a nervous-looking second-year further down the table. That couldn't be good, could it? But no part of her felt anxious. Maybe she ought to have been.
"I don't know what that is," Marlene replied, stuffing her mouth full of Battenberg cake. Rain stopped just short of their hair, and the din of near a thousand students rose over the excitement of dessert. James said something to the second-year, a brown-skinned girl with long curly hair and coke-bottle glasses. She frowned and shrugged, biting her lower lip. A jolt of surprise ran up her spine. No, he couldn't be. Not after the past few weeks – not after how attentive he'd been in meetings, and how he'd been making groups of the younger kids laugh, and the roll of parchment she'd found in the Heads' office detailing a plan to organise regular pick-up Quidditch matches and involve some of the shier kids in the teams.
"What's he -?" James reached into his robes, leaning his other hand on the smooth wooden tabletop. The second-year girl edged away from him. He withdrew his wand. Lily got to her feet at once, heart hammering. It didn't make sense. She'd thought – she'd believed, stupidly, against all good sense –
"Where are you going?" Marlene called, but Lily practically flew towards the pair. James screwed his (stupidly, unfairly handsome) face up and began an incantation as other students turned to watch, eyes wide, and the girl inched back.
"Potter!" Lily flung her own wand out before he could blink and thought, Expelliarmus! The wand flew from his grasp. Only then did she remember she was on the wrong side of the table. Lily lunged to grab it, throwing herself in the gap between two surly fifth-years. James's hand snapped up. Quidditch reflexes. His fingers curled – Lily slammed her knee into the bench and propelled.
"Evans," James said coolly, eyebrows raised above his glasses, grasping his wand, her hand now wrapped around his. "Alright?"
Thank God the dessert was sufficiently delicious, because Lily was about a breath away from dissolving into a puddle of embarrassment, and the checkerboard cake was the only thing keeping eyes off her. His hand was warm under hers, the ridges of his knuckles against her palm. Soft hairs drifted under the pads of her fingers. She'd never seen them before. Only in touch did she uncover them.
Oh, she was touching him. Crap.
Lily's hand flew back as though scalded.
"You're Head Boy," Lily hissed, fighting the colour in her cheeks. James's hazel eyes crackled with something like amusement.
"I noticed."
"Then what on earth are you doing jinxing a second-year in the middle of the Great Hall?" The words tumbled out of her mouth, hot and angry and – confused, more than she had any right to be. After all these years, Lily ought to know the answer. For a laugh. Sirius dared me. To get your knickers in a twist.
She really shouldn't have thought of James and her knickers.
"You think -?" James broke off in a laugh, lowering his wand. "Merlin, how thick do you think I am?" His lips turned up at the corners, but something about it unsettled her. It wasn't his trademark James smile. The one she was coming to know too well.
"She looked scared," Lily argued, and gestured to the second-year, whose eyes were positively bulging behind her thick lenses. "Are you alright?"
"I am a bit scared," the second-year admitted, chin against her chest. Lily gestured.
"There you go."
"She's not scared because I'm going to jinx her," James scoffed.
"No? She's just scared of – what, the candles?"
"You probably scared her, throwing yourself at me like that."
"Throwing myself? Oh, you wish," Lily snorted, and waited for James's cutting retort. It didn't come. He twisted his wand in his hand and took a deep breath, virtually ignoring her, and bent to talk to the shy little second-year again. Honestly, what was he playing at? "If you –"
"Give it a rest, Evans," James said tiredly. Lily blinked. He adopted a gentler tone with the girl. "Now, I'm just going to give this a try, alright? And I'll be sure to check afterwards. Maybe Evans can help us check too, yeah?" He looked up at her. Part of Lily wanted to say no, or to push further – to find some proof that she was right and he was in the wrong. Marlene would glory in it. Mary would nod and smile and pat Lily's hand. It would be as though the world had returned to normal – if Potter was still a prat, then the world had reverted back to her early years at Hogwarts, where enemies were easy and friendships were simple and nobody bothered to read the newspaper.
"Yeah," Lily said quietly, dusting off her skirt and ducking out of the road. "I'll check too."
James's shoulders rise with an inhale. She's surprised him, somehow.
"Really?" asked the girl – Lily really should've known her name. She was vaguely familiar from the common room, but she had never had an issue that flagged a prefect. How did James know her? What was James even doing?
Lily supposed she had to trust him.
It was easier than it had any right to be.
"Really," she promised.
The second-year girl met her eyes and smiled, uncertainty melting away like spring snow. Maybe the united-front approach worked better than Lily gave it credit for. Something to consider.
"Alright," James said, back to his natural easy confidence. He rolled up his sleeves. "Patented by yours truly, mind." What, the signature smirk or the dramatic sleeve-roll? He brandished his wand, focus fixing on the red-and-white slice of cake on the girl's plate. Lily's brows furrowed, curiosity sizzling within. She mentally flipped through her spellbooks, trying to think of some new charm he could be showing off. Nothing came to mind. But then, this was James Potter. A bit of N.E.W.T-level coursework wouldn't be worth making a big deal out of. This had to be something good.
With a flourish, James intoned an incantation Lily had never heard in her life. Not one syllable. And her Latin was south of horrid, so no luck extrapolating there. Only the movements gave her an idea. He slowly drew his wand back towards his body, swirling it counter-clockwise, gaze never leaving the dessert. A Banishing Charm, she thought. Then he flicked his wand to the left before loosening his grip, letting it sag in his hand. If she were being tested on it, she'd hazard a guess that the flick had a distinctive duelling edge to it. And the relaxing of his wand was a move hotly debated by Transfiguration scholars – some cited the long tradition of its use to end a spell as proof of its effectiveness, and others refused to allow superstition to supersede plain logic, especially in a science as grounded as Transfiguration. Lily remembered the lesson on it quite well, because ever-sensible Professor McGonagall had astonishingly come down on the side of intuition. Perhaps it was to do with being an Animagus. After all, that was the most esoteric branch of Transfiguration there was.
Somehow, Lily thought that if James transformed into an animal right before her eyes, it wouldn't even be a shock.
"Did it work?" the girl asked eagerly, prodding the cake with her fork. There was a hitch in James's smile, but he shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair. It looked awfully soft, especially for how unkempt it was. If he did take care of it, why couldn't he use a brush?
"Let's find out, shall we?" His spell was wordless, but Lily thought she recognised it by the scrunch in his nose – after all, they had been working rather closely of late. Was that weird, that she could identify his spellwork by the look on his face? It was the same way she could tell he was coming by the sound of a laugh down the corridor, or the pad of his inexplicably shiny leather loafers on the flagstones. For years, the information had been buried somewhere in her subconscious, bringing a tightness to her shoulders and a set to her jaw. Now, it poked a nest of butterflies.
"Can I?" the second-year asked, gently easing a bit of cake onto the tines of her fork. Disappointment flashed across James's face. He quickly plastered on a smile.
"Ah, not yet," he said. "I'll just… refine." The girl's face dropped. James squeezed her shoulder. "It's going to work," he added hurriedly. "I promised, didn't I?"
The pieces started to slot together. Whatever the unfamiliar incantation was, it held the key to making the cake edible for the second-year. She'd had this problem before, and James had vowed to solve it. So James had been paying attention to the younger students – he'd even found something that Lily had missed! Her heart surged with affection. He'd gone out of the way to resolve this, all so the girl could enjoy some dessert.
"I don't know," mumbled the second-year. "If you don't think…"
"James will get it," Lily proclaimed. James blinked at her owlishly. "Sometimes things just take a second try," she continued. James inclined his head to the side.
"Experimental magic," he said, by way of explanation. "Came up with it myself. It's nice you've got faith in me, Lily."
Lily. James. God, they had ended up on a first-name basis, hadn't they?
"Don't let me down," she said, raising her eyebrows. He smirked. Not bloody likely. He brandished his wand and tried again, following the longer set of movements with the spell she recognised from his face – Revelio.
No luck.
"Sorry," the second-year girl said, her voice a low squeak, and James opened and shut his mouth. He was at a loss for words – Lily wondered if this could really, truly be the first time he'd failed. That was ridiculous, wasn't it?
"No, don't be," James said. "I – ah, I don't…"
Maybe that was the difference between Lily and James. James had waltzed into Hogwarts with more magical knowledge in his little finger than Lily had scraped up with all of her and Sev's riverside chats, and continued coasting through school in that same vein. He had a natural, inborn talent one couldn't teach, with an added dash of overconfidence and burning intellectual curiosity. His mind held concepts well, and he clearly came from the kind of family where magical theory and advances in potioneering and the state of the Wizengamot were discussed over the dinner table. Mostly Lily's family talked about Corrie and Mrs Next Door's overflowing rubbish bins. James's journey through Hogwarts had been one of outstanding, almost instantaneous academic success, tempered only by fumblings in the social and behavioural spheres – a couple of disgruntled ex-girlfriends, a rap sheet the length of his arm, poorly-thought-out hexes and a few rivalries he'd pretty well earned. None of it ever seemed to bother him. He swept into the next sphere with his wand and his wit and never, ever, fell.
Lily had fallen a thousand times. In her very first Charms lesson, she held her wand by the wrong end – and not for lack of practice. Nerves had scattered her mind, and nothing had made sense, and the Slytherins hadn't missed the opportunity to snigger at the stupid little mudblood. She and Sev had sat together, back then, and the veins in his neck had throbbed. He'd not stood up for her, though. Not the way she would stand up for him, in time, when Sirius Black started lobbing little balls of parchment at the back of his head. Nobody had ever missed an opportunity to let her know how crap she was. It wasn't that it didn't get to her – she cried for her first week of fifth year, after floating into school with the prefect's badge affixed to her robes, finally satisfied that her professors saw something in her, that her years of clawing up the class rankings and attending extra-curriculars had all been noticed.
And then Stephen Selwyn had come up behind her as she led a group of glowing first-years out of the Great Hall, and muttered a curse out of the corner of his mouth. Her hair wept mud. Brown sludge had slid down into her robes and dripped over the floor and Filch had run in, shouting at her, right as the rest of the student body exited dinner.
Professor Dumbledore himself had fixed it in a jiffy, but he couldn't stop the whispers, or the snide remarks. She'd been too sick to eat until Sev had braved the Gryffindor table to pull her aside.
"Langlock," he'd whispered, and showed her how it was done. It was a nice thought. But even then, it had made Lily shift uncomfortably as she thanked him, though she hadn't known why.
Now, she thought maybe it was the principle of the thing. It felt a bit like cheating. Stopping people from talking didn't stop them from thinking – didn't stop them from silently loathing her – didn't change that the curse had been a dig at her heritage, and that she was surrounded by people who thought she was scum, and that she had no way of escaping them.
Lily knew what it was like to be at the bottom of the pile. She knew what it was like to mess up when there are eyes on you. She recognised the hesitation and confusion in James's face, the embarrassment that he hadn't pulled it off the first time. How the weight of it settled in his shoulders.
"Hey," she said, getting his attention. "Don't worry. You've got this." And before she could overthink it, she reached out and gave his hand the lightest of squeezes. Just a bit of encouragement. His touch burned through her skin. His palms were softer than she had imagined, and his hand larger. The ghost of his flesh smarted against the creases of her fingers. His lips parted. His eyes bore right into her, like he was peeling back the very layers of her skin. Something entirely unfamiliar glinted in the gold of his irises. The corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled.
Oh.
Oh.
Lily's legs turned to rubber.
"'Course I do, Lily," he said, in that same-as-always James breeze, but for the first time she could see what lay underneath it. To shed the performance of patented Potter arrogance would be to admit defeat. "Alright," he said, turning back to the second-year. "One more time."
This time, as he completed the motion and incantation, the slice of cake shimmered in a shower of brown sparks. An odd colour for magic, but now that Lily had a theory on what he was trying to accomplish, she thought she understood.
"May I do the honours?" she asked, when James had finished. A sheen of sweat broke across his forehead with the effort of the spellwork.
"Sure," he shrugged. "You know what you're looking for?"
"Revelio," Lily said, in place of an answer.
The spell was a simple diagnostic, and it came back in an instant. "Nut-free," she reported, and the second-year girl's face broke into a smile.
"Really? Are you sure? Oh my gosh – so I can –"
"Sure can," James smiled. He didn't check the cake himself. He trusted Lily's spell. When had he started having faith in her? When had he stopped taking every opportunity to knock her down a peg? With baited breath, the pair of them watched as the little second-year dug her fork into the cake and lifted the morsel to her mouth. Lily's stomach clenched. She ran through every medical spell she knew. Her gaze flickered to James, who watched with his face full of his own apprehensions. How had she never seen it before? She'd taken the smile at face value and never noticed the death grip of his hands. Of course James wasn't a god, or an idiot – he had his own fears like everybody else. His own hopes.
And she wanted to understand them. She wanted to hear about them. She wanted to climb into his head and learn more about the boy who had dominated her thoughts for so many years.
The second-year chewed the checkerboard cake carefully, and swallowed. They waited. A second passed. Two, three. And she smiled again.
"It worked!"
"I told you it would, Maria," James beamed, tucking his wand away. "There you are. No nuts. No problems."
"That's –" Maria struggled for words, "magic."
"Certainly is," James agreed. "What do you think, Lily?" Lily. It was transformed into something different in his mouth – not a sigh of exasperation from her mother, or a snap from her sister, or even the laughter of her friends. It meant something new.
"It's magic," she said, biting her lip, unable to hide her smile. The words burst out of her. "You know I have about a million questions."
"Yeah? Always knew you'd become a fan."
"Oh, bugger off," she retorted, shifting her weight onto her toes. How had he come up with the incantation? Where had he got the idea to combine movements from different disciplines? How had this come to his attention in the first place? She had never really thought about how the wizarding world dealt with allergies – and if she'd had to have guessed how they did it, she would have imagined some potion to mitigate the effects, not a spell that could remove the allergen from the food altogether. Had he removed it? Or transfigured it into something harmless? God, she wanted to shove a vial of Veritaserum down his throat and interrogate him all night long. Did that sound totally mad? She couldn't help it. If there was one thing she loved to learn about, it was magic. It always had enchanted her.
And now, James Potter had too.
"What about a press conference over dessert?" James asked, raising a dark eyebrow. "I haven't had any of this cake yet. Supposedly, it's delicious."
"It is," Maria piped up, shovelling more food down her throat. Lily folded her arms across her chest, pretending to consider it.
"Alright," she allowed. "Dessert. My side of the table or yours?"
He grinned.