Most commonly, it would take the fumes of Amortentia to make a young woman sway, make her blue world drown into a romantic haze of magenta and blush-pink. For Lily Evans, it was jazz records that harmonized with the strings of her heart. Whether it be experimental and boisterous, with trumpets playing so loud and carelessly that the section almost sounded dirty, or the slow, beautiful “chorale-like” sound of tracks like Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” that could bewitch her into proposing to most anything, most commonly her (very plain) dorm walls. The wizarding world would simply never understand the magic of the Mid-Atlantic accent, the beguiling nature of a good brass section. The few choice songs inscribed into vinyl records that she could pop onto her turntable never got tiring– she could sustain herself for months with “Fly Me to the Moon” alone, feeding herself with its sheer beauty.
The chords struck her from the pads of her thumbs to the valves in her heart, making her steps light as if she had bouncing between clouds, eyes glimmer as if the stars had somehow become ensnared in them. She had ascended beyond any worldly realm, into the heavens above– the effects of a swoon-worthy tune were much more potent than any drug.
There Lily sat, her arms swaying rhythmically with the occasional snap and her head gyrating as if it was hanging on by but a sliver. A huge, tawny-hued book sat in her lap, splayed carelessly. She was only taking in about a quarter of its grandiloquent lines, acknowledging it with her currently-subpar-functioning brain rather than her rather loud heart. Her unfortunate roommate Mary MacDonald occasionally glanced over and tutted her tongue, knowing the once-pragmatic girl had lost all her sense. She had half the mind to throw the turntable out the astronomy tower and let a Hippogriff eat it, even if the “oeuvres”, as Lily had dubbed them, were somewhat swell.
“Lily, you know the people in London can probably hear your music? I don’t have a clue how every one of this dorm’s inhabitants still have their hearing intact!”, the irritated girl practically yelled over the sound of Sarah Vaughan’s cover of “That Old Devil Moon”.
Lily heatedly replied, a tinge of cherry dotting her features. “You’re just lucky I’m not blasting pop songs or playing show tunes! If you don’t like Frank Sinatra, then you’ll surely be sick of French Disco!”
“Can’t you be, like, normal and listen to the Weird Sisters or something?”
“Lighten up, Mare! You secretly like my music, I know you do! I mean, look at you now! It seems as if you’re about to levitate!”
“Do not!”
“Do to!”
Mary slammed shut, with a rather frightening amount of force, a magnanimous text, glaring at Lily in faux-vexation. The ginger simply released a cheeky grin and began to bellow heaps of guffaws straight from her belly as Mary exited in the most dramatic manner she could, flashing the bird in the process.
“You dirty orangutan! Quit your cackling before I give you a reason to myself in a manner that isn’t just verbal!”, Mary called to Lily, flashing her an awfully sturdy fist, thumb resting on the outside of her fingers and clenched red from sheer force.
“Uh oh, Mary! That awfully vulgar comment of yours has me shivering down to my booty hairs! Do you want a visual?”
“LILY! YOU’RE POSITIVELY REVOLTING!”
Lily’s medium-leveled laughs ascended into something resembling a belt as she scrambled out of the rather disheveled sheets of her bed and onto the hardwood floor, cracking on a pair of indigo slippers as she trailed her dear friend. A chase then unfolded, Lily trying in most futile attempts not to stumble on the tough hem of her charcoal-black robes. Though her lack of grace slowed her down considerably, she still managed to tackle Mary onto the carpets some employee had crocheted centuries back just outside of the portrait hole.
Lily, though very adept in the speed department, was no match for Mary’s super strength: the girl may have been a professional power-lifter if not bound to the wizarding world. She plied Lily’s feeble arms off of her torso as if wading through water, unable to contain the chortle bubbling in her stomach like a pile of caterpillars stacked up in the organ. “You go on and on about how you’re going to be Head Girl and how exemplary of a Prefect you are and then behave like this. You behave just like an animal out of a sty!”, she managed through her guffaws.
“C’mon, Mary, I know you find papa’s actions alluring”, Lily taunted in mock-coquettishness, batting her rather luscious eyelashes at Mary. To her great surprise, a tinge of rise lighted the subject’s cheeks as she tried to manage an expression of vexation, failing miserably.
“Well, maybe you just do! You’re red as a serving of Durmstrang Borscht, Mare!”, Lily spoke, always eager to jest.
“Am not! I’m just severely taken aback by your lack of propriety, that’s all! You know very well the only gay people in our year are Black And Lupin! I would think that you are because of your so-very-scandalous flirting except for the fact that we all know you harbor a not-so-secretive crush for James Potter”, Mary said, slightly abashed.
But instead of spitting a disdainful remark at the rather stiff school-girl, Lily became suddenly shy, eyes down and a stream of giggles coming from her rather worn vocal cords, face lit like the red supergiants they had studied in astrology. It had also expanded in happiness, an emotion that can easily become addicting to the one who wields it, like one of those caramel-apple lollipops that she can never get enough of.
Mary smirked rather triumphantly, always one to gloat when proven correct. “She she doesn’t deny it–”
“Do I need to perform the Heimlich on Evans?”
James Potter himself sauntered into the scene, looking slightly exhausted as he closed the frame of the Fat Lady’s Portrait behind him. He had no doubt come from a scene less filled with jollity than Evan’s “study session”, his scent like that of the aged sandalwood from a deep corner of the library, heady in a way. But it was a talent of his to make an entrance into any scene with an air of grace and opulence, demanding respect from every person who happened to even try so much as look his way.
Just a few months ago, James Potter’s presence was like that of a gallon of water drowned in mounds of ice poured over her warm skin, sending her into a rather unsavory form of shock. But in that moment she supposed she could bear his grotesquely sultry tone, his tanned skin and his jawline that looked as if it had been carved by Michelangelo from soft but hard-cut marble. Though in her fifth year she would have rather stabbed herself with a blade in the chest than dwell on such nonsensical thoughts, she couldn’t help but succumb to the newfound-drunkenness that made her flush with delight at his gaze, yearn for his plum-tinted lips upon hers.
“No, Potter! There is nothing wrong with–”, Lily started.
.“She’s a druggie and just got her first hit of the day. You can’t really blame her, James.”, Mary said unabashedly, having interrupted her best friend without much remorse at all. Privately, Lily was flashed with an irrational bit of vexation towards her best friend for using his first name when she had not yet dared to, no matter how friendly they had become with each other. She had gotten a lot of those, lately– waves of envy towards anyone who was friendlier with James than her own self.
Casting Mary a glare, she rushed to defend herself.
“No, I didn’t! Everyone at this school knows how much I loathe illicit substances. I was merely laughing, that’s all!”
(Privately, Lily was scolded herself. Why did she have to sound like such an utter prude when he was around? What happened to the merry, twittering girl she was in the presence of her friends?)
“And why don’t you tell him why you’re so red in the face and why you were laughing so… girlishly?”
“Girls. That’s all you can seem to think about, Mary.”
The poor James who had not anticipated such a… perplexing conversation stood still as one of those Renaissance statutes, eyes darting between the two as if his pupils were both professional snooker players. “Well, I suppose I’ll take my leave. I wouldn’t want to distract from the focal point of your very… captivating chatter.”
Mary looked at the school-boy in some imitation of horror. “You’d best not leave, James”-- the sound of his first name on her best friend’s mouth earned the girl yet another glare–”Lily has so, so much to say to you! I’d best be the one to leave!”
“Oh?”, James whispered, his beguiling hazel eyes capturing her as if he was a lion encircling his prey. The gold sparks that sat just near his pupil seemed to illuminate the hazy common room.
Mary cast a wink to her best friend, mouthing something incomprehensible to Lily’s mind. She bit her tongue in vexation, not quite believing that the little imp would thrust her into the spot like this. She had yet ascertained her feelings of kindredness towards the young Potter, but wasn’t too keen on sharing them. Simple conversations and soft gazes were enough to keep her entertained– she didn’t quite believe James still fancied her as he once did. She thought it would take much more than a conversation teeming in the high she received off of jazz to woo him into sharing his heart to her yet again.
James, however, was already there. If he had been able to read her thoughts, know that there was hope yet for this knight to have a love-affair with the princess whom he thought was beyond all of his charm, he would have been able to die without a drop of regret, whether it be in a few moments or at the age of a thousand fifty-five. He had dreamed for their love to be as potent as some tale from a book of mythologies, in which Hades himself could do naught but behold their torpid passion from the underworld. Where death itself acknowledged the lovers with fear, not bothering to tear them from each other’s tender arms. All she was required to do was like him, no, tolerate his own self for but a few minutes– then he would prove to her that he endeared her beyond a few words of intimacy, the feeling of her fingers interlocked with his.
“And what is it that you wished to say to me, Evans?”, he spoke with all due tenderness, his gaze like that of a firefly floating towards the night sky, illuminating it brighter than a celestial body ever could. He was her light, the only one that could ever stir her from a slumber or blind her with its magnificent rays. Surely, he must be doing this out of friendliness alone, she managed to evince into her mind as he combed her layers of auburn hair, grazing her velvety skin in the process.
“Oh, that”, Lily practically whispered, struggling to meet James’s gaze. “Mary was just trying to embarrass me, that’s all. There’s not much I wanted to say.”
“Well, if you don’t want to say anything, you could always just snog me senseless. We don’t have to say a word to each other.
Lily exploded into a burst of red like pizza sauce exploding through the metal seams of a can. “POTTER! You know that is NOT what I mean!”
“No need to get your panties in a twist, Evans! I know what you really want to do with me is much more obscene-”
“JAMES! I’M WARNING YOU!”
She fought back the instinct to cover her mouth after having said his given name for what may have been the first time ever. The boy must have realized it too, judging from the way his eyebrows spiked up like that or a heartbeat, but wisely chose to remain silent.
James stepped further into the common room, empty in an almost eerie manner as of the contemporaneous second. The only signs of life were a band of three sixth-years, splayed across a red-leather couch, sharing the last copy of “The Tales of the Beedle and the Bard” that they could manage to purloin from the library, as well as a calico cat, grooming itself while attempting to glare simultaneously at every one of the room’s inhabitants.
“Ah, well, if you really don’t enjoy my company, I suppose this is where we part.”, he said ever so softly, tone somewhat cloying.
“You know very well that I never said that, Potter.”, she whispered, quieter now.
“Well, one wouldn’t believe that so easily. It’s clear that you hate me-“
“I don’t hate you! Quite the opposite, actually.”
Just as Lily had spotted her foul, James’s usual smirk conquered the rest of his features.
“So you love me?”
“You dirty cheat! You tricked me into saying such a thing!”
“But you do, don’t you? You never denied it. I think it would be such an awful betrayal of your own self to refute such a thing.”
Just as Lily had opened her mouth for a hot-headed rebuttal, an opening guitar sequence she cherished very much rang out like an Organ would in a reverberation chamber, deafening the sixth years and causing the feline from earlier to fly into the air as if it were a bird in flight.
“What in Merlin’s name is that?”, James spoke as the opening lyrics of "Somethin' Stupid thundered from directly across the hall. It took her all but a second to recognize that she was the only girl in the whole of Hogwarts who kept a Vinyl tape of the particular track or even owned a turntable for that matter, and that her musical library wasn’t particularly hard to find or search through.
Mary! Lily practically cursed the girl with the power of a million suns in her mind, face red as if beets had been smeared over its entirety. Whenever she blushed, the tint went right up to her hairline, beyond her cheeks. In her eyes, it made her appear as a form of sweaty ogre.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know–”
“Well, how about we go investigate then? What do you say, my lady?” The smooth-talking boy held out a single hand. Lily briefly gazed at a single, white-faded scar fixed upon his forearm, pondering its origins.
“I’m sure it’s nothing. Why don’t we–”
“C’mon, Lils! You’re no fun.”
It soon became apparent that there was no need. A levitating turntable flew into the common room and found its way to the pair, hovering in the empty space next to them. “God, it’s Jazz! Who listens to that, psychiatric ward inhabitants? Turn it off or I might just have to sign myself into a clinic!” called out one of the troika of sixth-years that Lily now recognized to be muggle-born. “Jazz? Hahaha, that sounds an awful lot like ‘jizz’!”, another called out rather dumbly before going onto a long-winded tangent about how his American cousin had taught him some of the nation’s “lingo”. All of this added to Lily’s hearty embarrassment as she pressed her hands onto her freckled face, regretting it as soon as the cold brought on by the body part burned like pin-prick needles onto her cheeks.
It was James who would break the silence with the candid remark “Why, what is this music? It sounds simply resplendent, anyway. You wouldn’t happen to know it, would you?”
“You actually like this stuff?”
“Well, yeah–”
“Really?”
“Oh, shut up. You don’t need to badger me for it.”
“I’m not badgering you, Potter! This is one of my favorite songs of, like, all time!”
The sixth-years, who had thus been following the exchange with all due meticulousness, made rather blaring gagging noises. “I just threw up in my mouth” the muggle-born told their friends, green in the cheeks. “The only muggle music I listen to is from The Eagles and Led Zeppelin. Have you ever heard of them? They’re pretty obscure.” the one with the American cousin said in a tone teeming with pride for his “superior” tastes. “Duh, I think even my dead granny knows of them, and she died in the 50’s!”, replied the boy of non-magical origins, rolling his eyes. The third member whomst Lily had thought to be taciturn was actually fixed in a deep slumber, drool dripping off his blackhead-dotted chin, oblivious to the current state of affairs.
“Well then, my darling”–Lily’s face bloomed red-velvet–”Would you care to dance?”, James whispered in an air of humorously-exaggerated chutzpah, puckering his lips and quirking an eyebrow. Lily couldn’t contain the girlish giggles that bubbled from the inside of her belly and outside through her mouth.
“Oh, James”, she said with due fondness, not even noticing her use of his given name, “you know how… discomfiting such a thing is.” She leaned closer, propping herself onto the tips of her toes and tilting her head to get somewhat near his ear. “There are people here. Ones who aren’t afraid to chastise us, nonetheless.”
“And since when did you care what others thought of you? What they thought of us?”, he whispered back to her, breath warm against her soft skin. If the poor girl had been shy under his presence previously, she now couldn’t manage to get a single word out. But just as she had nodded her head, joined a delicate hand in his, the music came to a not-so-abrupt stop, the last iteration of “I love you” having been spoken at an almost undetectable volume after the melody had undergone a slow diminuendo.
“Well, there’s no need now, is there?”
“C’mon, you know how to operate these things, don’t you?”, he practically pleaded, gesturing to the turntable.
“I suppose…”
But as soon as Lily extended a tentative hand, the first notes of a Frankie Valli song she was very well acquainted with came blasting out of the machine, slow and romantic in spite of the heavy volume. The poor girl practically shrieked, backing away from the machine and into James’s warm, rather familiar torso. “She wouldn’t dare”, Lily muttered almost incomprehensibly, face lit white like that of some spirit, ghostly and severely pale.
But she soon came to ascertain that Mary had, in fact, dared as the soft lyrics ‘You’re just too good to be true…’ came reverberating from the machine, ringing in Lily’s ears like a sharp attack from the ailment Tinnitus would. She had believed since her fourth year at the school of wizardry that she had lost the vinyl and hadn’t bothered to replace it since. It reminded her of a distant time, brought hokey tears to her eyes. It was an image of the life she had traded in, the one she so dearly missed with a family she wasn’t yet estranged with.
“I know this one!”, James called, a grin cracking like that of a firework across his bewitching features. Clasping the appalled Lily’s hands, he swung her, dipped her into the crook of his arm and sang along somewhat inaccurately to the sentimental lyrics of Can’t Take My Eyes off You, gazing at her in an almost lovesick manner.
She gyrated and spun, tap danced and waltzed. There was no pattern to any of her movements but still a giddy sort of purpose, like that of a Basquiat painting. He followed her movements, grinning dumbly down at her as if the expression was a default setting he couldn’t change. The former pain from the song was rewritten in those few moments, almost as if the lyrics had been changed. No longer did it hurt her to strain her ears to detect the sound of the beautiful trumpets, listen to the plucking of guitar strings. Of course, James had to ruin the moment with his rather repulsive crooning.
“You’d be like Heaven’s gates… I wanna kiss you so much…”
“James!”
And suddenly the world had dissolved around them, faded into some other form of matter. Nothing was solid except for his hands against hers, their bodies touching and his jesting voice, spewing butchered lyrics. She was in her own idyll, trapped between worlds but held down by him, the anchor that kept her from drowning in the murky seas below. She couldn’t find the strength to bother herself with the seething remarks the sixth-years were spitting from behind their backs, concern herself with the fact that she was drunkenly swaying to a song that she once remembered with immeasurable pain.
“But I do, Lily. I always have.”
“Huh?”
Everything seemed so peculiar in that moment; James’s eyes upon her, the alluring green that shut out of them like the light of a lamp casting beams across the floor, her heart that had begun in its own dance, being a galop with no rhythm and a tempo that kept accelerating. That in spite of the pink world around her, the fact that the man of her dreams had just confessed his desire to kiss her, all she could manage was a dense, almost inarticulate ‘Huh’.
“I’m going to need more than that.” James spoke against her ear, eyes sweltering with affection that Lily could not yet comprehend. It was too much, too stimulating for someone as she stupid as her with love. Her throat was glued shut with some viscous substance, chasing her words back into her stomach. And she just stood there, dumbfounded, as James’s hands started to flee from her and he backed away from her, face disconsolate and melancholic.
He was almost 10 feet away from her when she managed to find her voice.
“Of course you can, you idiot! Don’t you know you shouldn’t throw something like that upon a girl so suddenly, it–”
Whatever Lily had wished to say next was interrupted by the crashing of his lips against hers as he rushed back to her, eager and desperate. Just as the second iteration of I love you, baby ran its span across the spacious Common Room, he practically threw himself on her. The kiss was hungry, heady and yearning; the girl grew dizzy, dizzy as if she had just shot up off of the ground, consumed with some odd sort of vertigo. Her eyes were shut as if stitched together as she relied wholeheartedly on the boy whom she once wished to drown in the Great Lake. It was poetry how just a few months could turn loathing into a most beautiful romance.
It was Lily who broke the kiss, slightly taken aback. She had not anticipated him to return her feelings of endearment, much less kiss her as if the world was ending, as if she would fly off the face of the Earth if he didn’t kiss her right then and there. She panted somewhat pathetically before spitting the few words she could manage out of her throat. “Merlin, you’re making out with me like some alley cat–”
The poor ginger never managed to spit her sentence out, interrupted by a quartet of very familiar students who had barged in on their… session.
“That was nauseating.”, Mary exclaimed, going as far as to fake a gag.
The couplet glanced tentatively over to their right to see not only Mary, but Sirius, Remus, and even a ragged-looking Peter standing behind them, staring at them with equal-parts mutiny and triumph. “Oh god”, Lily muttered over and over under her breath as if performing a sort of seance. The poor girl was simply appalled. She shared a single, abashed glance at James, who didn’t look an ounce regretful. He simply shrugged at her, a smirk stretching out the seams of his mouth.
“What is, two people making out in a very empty place? I mean, I hope I’ll be doing much worse than this soon.”
“POTTER!”
–
A/N:
Um… guys.. I just realized that my italicized text doesn’t show here. Ugh, I’m so mad right now I could castrate someone with toy scissors. Guidance on how to incorporate this feature would very much be appreciated!!
Anyways, thank you so much for reading this to the end, I very much appreciate it and am so grateful that you cared enough to finish it!! This is the first piece of fanfiction I’ve ever written, so please tell me if it’s bad or not!! Comments and critiques are very much appreciated. ALSO, I didn’t really grammar-check any of this because I’m a lazy bum so… sorry!!
Love you all and thank you again for reading this!!