Sidebar Image courtesy of astralsymphony.
Sidebar Image courtesy of astralsymphony.
“Your ears are overly large, did you know that?”
James cracked open an eye. “I’m sorry?”
Lily shifted on top of him, propping an elbow next to his head. Her chin fell into her palm. “Your ears,” she said. “They’re large. Enormous, even.”
“My ears are bloody fine.”
“They’re really not.” She shifted again—to get a better look at his ear, James suddenly realised, and instantly batted her away. But the girl proved determined. She merely swung around to gawk at the other one. “I can’t believe I’ve never noticed before. They’re positively disproportionate.”
“They’re fine.” But James’s hand seemed to lift of its own accord, tracing the outline of the appendage with uncertain fingers. Lily’s grin broadened. James’s hand snapped back down to the bed. “They’re not!”
“Oh, don’t have a cry about it. It’s not complete rubbish.” Lily’s fingers followed the same path his had. “I bet your hearing’s stellar.”
“Your eyes are squinty,” James returned, then caught her hand. “And you’ve the longest, boniest fingers I’ve ever seen. Like claws.”
“Is that the best you’ve got?”
James sifted his hand through her hair. “And you’re a ginger.”
He earned an indelicate snort at that, one muffled against his shirtfront as Lily dropped her elbow and buried her face against his chest. James kept his fingers hidden amidst the ging. Her claws scraped a gentle pattern against the skin above his collar.
“Just face it,” she sighed. “You’ve got big ears and shitty wit. I’m better looking and infinitely more clever. You’re never going to do better than me, Potter. Not ever.”
“We’ll see, Evans. We’ll see.”
art by astralsymphony; drabble by bcdaily
She spots them purely by accident, an unfortunate run-in in the narrow corridor just off the main Potions classrooms. Concentrating as she is on trying to remember whether it was indeed the Potions dungeons where she’d left her library book earlier, Lily isn’t paying much attention. She only vaguely notes that the quick clip of her footsteps is no longer the only sound reverberating off the stone dungeon walls and that she is not alone in the lower hallway. Her mind registers the high-pitched giggling only a moment before she turns the corner and sees Liza Alton dragging James Potter’s grinning lips down to hers.
There is frantic blinking and a burned image, but Lily keeps walking.
“An entire castle filled with empty classrooms and this is where you choose to carry on?” Her voice is heavily droll. The couple springs apart, Liza giggling and James looking amusedly chastised. Lily rolls her eyes. “Honestly?”
“Don’t mind her,” James says, shooting a friendly grin Lily’s way. “Bit of a voyeur, our Lily is.”
“Don’t make me dock points, James,” Lily replies. “Gryffindor’s already in sad straits.”
She receives another grin and a short salute for her lenience. An embarrassed Liza quickly tugs James away. Lily continues on through the corridors.
But over the next few days, Lily begins to feel a bit like the voyeur James had accused her of being. That burned image—that damn unsettling picture of James Potter and Liza Alton snogging in a corridor—is suddenly her brain’s default. She’s never paid much attention to the nuances of James Potter’s features—dark hair, nose, eyes, and mouth all in their proper places—but suddenly, it’s all she can do but constantly stare at the boy, examining the every slope of his face.
He has a long jaw, one that angles sharply at the chin. He’s let his hair grow longer this term, the messy locks brushing just past his ears. And his lips…they’re firm lips. A bit thin, maybe, but as her memory hasn’t quite let her forget, thorough nonetheless.
Looking back, it was really only a matter of time, but the morning she wakes up and realises that the burned image has finally infiltrated her dreams, Lily’s shocked. Worse, it’s no longer Liza Alton dragging James Potter’s firm lips down to hers. As she remembers her fingers brushing along that sharp jaw and sifting through that dark hair, her own lips testing out the firmness of his, Lily buries her face in her hands and groans loudly.
- Art by astralsymphony, Drabble by bcdaily
I whipped around in my seat, grabbing at the Gryffindor scarf wrapped securely around my neck, only to find not a group of angry, blood-thirsty Hufflepuffs ready and foaming at the mouth for a nice Gryffindor-themed lynching, but rather the quite happily smiling face of Gryffindor’s very own recent-drama-causing Quidditch Captain.
What was he up to now?
“You take it off,” James told me in a rather surprisingly stern voice for one who was smiling so brightly, securing the scarf around my neck now that he could properly reach the front of me, “and I can personally promise that I will disown you.”
I stood there gaping at him like a mindless idiot, trying to figure out just what in the hell the bloody moron thought he was doing. Disown me? Ha! As if he could! I was about to go on and tell him and his prattish self off, but in the end, I didn’t have to.
-Commentarius, BCDaily
*finally some drawing! inspired by beedaily’s commentarius. read it if you haven’t!
