“Oh, I’m making more of a deal out of it?” James snorts as they turn onto their corridor and head for their rooms. “I mentioned I think she’s attractive once and you have to act like a teenager about it. You’re thirty-seven, for fuck’s sake.”
Sirius scoffs behind him. “Oh, like you can talk!”
James swings round and glares at him. He lowers his voice—the walls in the Gryff are paper-thin—and hisses, “What that’s supposed to mean?”
“Forget it,” snaps Sirius in reply, rolling his eyes.
“No, c’mon, you’ve got something to say, so you might as well say it.”
James Potter is a right fool, but Lily Evans knows just what to do with him.
Rated T, 3.8k, Seventh Year Jily, Matching Patronuses, Defining the relationship.
| AO3 |
14 November 1978
Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch
08:37pm
Lily Evans was no stranger to a Gryffindor quidditch practice. One of her roommates and dearest friends was one of the Chasers, after all, and had been for three years now. Lily had accompanied Marlene to many a quidditch practice in the years leading up to her time on the team and had continued to sit in the stands and watch the players fly and dive and shoot and play at least once a week even after Marlene had made the team. It was a good way to pass the time; Lily enjoyed watching quidditch as much as the average Gryffindor. More, even, since she had been fascinated by the graceful way her classmates were able to move through the air since she was a wee little firstie with barely any knowledge of the wizarding world.
So when the players started to trickle out of the locker room after practice, their brooms over their shoulders, no one paid her much mind as she waited on the edge of the pitch. They nodded and greeted her as they passed, and kept on walking up to the castle. Except for Marlene, who cocked her head as she approached Lily.
“Hey, Lily!” Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, hair windswept. She looked beautiful and lively. She always did, really, but Marlene’s beauty was always elevated when she got off the pitch. “What are you doing down here?”
Lily shrugged. She usually stayed up in the stands until Marlene was already headed off the pitch and met her near the path back up to the school. Tonight was different. “Just waiting around.”
“Oh.” Marlene frowned. “Did I take too long? I’m sorry. We can head in for dinner now.”
“Actually,” Lily said, wrapping her arms around herself against the bitter cold. She had her red and gold striped scarf wrapped around her neck and her heaviest cloak on and she had done a Warming Charm not even half an hour ago, but she was still freezing. “I wanted to talk to James.”
“Oh,” Marlene said again, and there was a knowing glint in her eyes now. “Well, alright then. But he might be a while. He likes to fly a bit longer after the rest of us head in.”
“Yeah,” Lily said, glancing past Marlene to the lone figure high in the sky. “I know he does.”
Marlene studied her for a moment longer, and then sighed. “Here, take my cloak as well since you’re determined to freeze yourself over a stupid boy.”
“As if it’s my fault I don’t like girls,” Lily grumbled, but gratefully accepted the cloak Marlene draped over her shoulders.
“Actually, I’m glad for that,” Marlene said with a cheeky wink. “I’d hate to be in competition with you.”
“No one could ever hope to compete with you.” Lily batted her lashes flirtatiously at her best friend.
“Too right.” Marlene flipped her long blonde hair over her shoulder – it would have had a much more majestic effect, Lily knew, were it not in a tangled plait down her back – and then shivered violently. “Merlin, I’m heading in before I freeze to death. See you.”
“Bye, Mar,” Lily said. “Save me some treacle tarts, will you?”
Marlene lifted one hand in the air in acknowledgement as she jogged off, leaving Lily alone with the flyer high above her. Eyeing him, she wandered out on the pitch until she was standing in the center, in the exact spot he stood before each match when Madam Hooch made him clasp hands with the opposing team’s captain.
He was flying in lazy circles over the stands, but every now and then he would put on a burst of speed or wheel around in a sharp turn. She loved the rush of adrenaline she got herself when he randomly dived, streaking for the ground at the end of the pitch as if he were a Seeker and had spotted the snitch, and she knew the rush she got paled in comparison to his. He really was a fantastic flyer. When they were younger she had resented him for it. Now, she admired him.
She was a fair flyer herself, but she wasn’t on the same level as him. She would be hard-pressed to name a better flyer in the entire school. Madam Hooch herself likely couldn’t outfly him.
“How long do you plan to pretend you don’t know I’m here?” she called out to him when he dived again and feinted inches from the ground, careening back up into the sky.
He was grinning when he turned his broom to face her. “Please, I’ve been showing off for you the whole time.”
She felt herself smile back, felt her cheeks flush when he drifted toward her. “You could have at least said hello.”
“Maybe I wanted to see how long you were planning to wait for me,” he shot back.
“As long as it took you,” she told him.
He hovered in place less than a foot from her, legs bent with the tips of his toes almost brushing the dirt floor so that they were exactly at the same eye-level.
“You fancy me or something, Evans?” he taunted, but his eyes were soft and fond.
“Shut up, Potter.” She scoffed and rolled her eyes. “As if you’re not the one who’s been pining for me since third year.”
“Second, actually,” he corrected shamelessly, tone completely matter-of-fact. “You just caught on in third because I asked you out. Couldn’t figure what to ask you to do as a twelve-year-old who wasn’t allowed on Hogsmeade weekends yet.”
“I’m surprised you never asked me to watch you fly,” Lily said haughtily.
“Didn’t need to,” he said with a laugh. “You were always here with Marlene anyway.”
She hummed. He was right. Even back then, when she had thought he was arrogant and annoying, she had loved to watch him in the air. She hadn’t come with Marlene only for him, but he was a big reason.
“You look cold,” he said when a violent shiver wracked her body. “We should head in.”
“No,” Lily protested, stepping up to his broom and laying a hand over his to stop him from dismounting. An all-too-familiar glint flashed in his eyes when they met hers. Her stomach flipped pleasantly. “Take me up.”
“It’s colder up there, Lily,” he said softly.
“You look warm enough,” she observed. It was mostly the adrenaline, she knew, that kept him warm when he was flying. But he also ran hot. She knew that as well. His loose ties, rolled up shirtsleeves, and penchant for not buttoning his shirts up to the collar until being scolded by a professor – usually McGonagall – weren’t just a lesser form of rebellion; he overheated easily.
He looked skeptical, but didn’t move to stop her when she swung a leg over his broom. He smirked when she did it so that they were face-to-face, though.
“Normally people face the handle when they fly,” he teased.
“Oops,” she said carelessly, matching his smirk when she slid her arms under his flying jacket and pulled herself closer to him. He jolted and gripped the handle tighter, a bit caught off guard, when she kicked off for him.
“Lily!” he admonished, his mouth close to her ear when he had regained control of his broom.
“What?” she asked innocently, pulling her head back to blink at him. “Can’t handle it?”
“You know I can,” he said, and she felt his arms tighten around her as they started to rise higher.
“I know you can,” she agreed, and pressed her cold face to his warm neck. He hissed and flinched, only a little, as they glided through the air. After a few peaceful moments, she broke the silence in a whisper of breath against his throat. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” he murmured.
She pulled her head back so she could look him in the face. “Why did you pretend you can’t produce a corporeal Patronus?”
Professor Binns had mentioned Azkaban prison in their History of Magic lesson first thing in the morning, and the awful soul-sucking dementors that guarded it. Emmeline Vance, a friend and roommate of Lily and Marlene’s had asked how to defend against a soul-sucking demon and Professor Binns had mentioned the Patronus Charm before droning on about the history of the prison. When they had made it to Defense Against the Dark Arts a little later, Marlene had managed to completely derail Professor Bickett’s planned lesson on selkies in favour of an impromptu lesson on the Patronus Charm.
“Maybe I wasn’t pretending,” he hedged.
Lily rolled her eyes. “I heard you bragging to the boys about how you’d already done it before class.”
“So you caught me grandstanding.” He shrugged and leaned slightly to guide them into a gentle turn. “Wouldn't be the first time.”
He was right. It wouldn’t be the first time. But saying she’d caught him when she was walking hand-in-hand with him when he’d said it was certainly a choice; she knew he was withholding information. “James.”
“Lily.” He mocked her serious tone, but she refused to allow herself to be baited into an argument simply because he didn’t want to come clean.
“I know you. I know when you’re lying-bragging and when you’re truthfully bragging.” She met his gaze resolutely, pleading with her eyes for him to tell her the truth. “You’ve produced a Patronus before.”
He looked away, out into the rapidly darkening sky and swallowed hard. “Maybe I was nervous.”
She scoffed. “You don’t get nervous.”
“That’s not true, Lily.” He sounded almost offended. “You’ve seen me nervous plenty. You’re usually the one making me nervous.”
“Not nervous enough to completely choke,” she insisted. “You don’t get performance anxiety. In fact, when you’re nervous you normally perform even better than you otherwise would.” Hell, the first time he had truly, earnestly snogged her he had been a trembling mess and completely rocked her world out on her bedroom terrace when her parents thought he had already gone home. “Why did you lie in front of the whole class?”
“I didn’t want to take away from your moment,” he admitted.
“My what?” Lily stared at him horrified.
She had been the first one to produce a fully corporeal Patronus when Professor Bickett called them up to the front of the class one at a time to make their attempt, but there had only been two people called up before her, and they had each managed at least the cool, silver wispy shadows that would eventually, with enough practice, become corporeal. The swell of pride Lily had felt when the silver deer had burst from the tip of her wand to canter around the room the second time she said the incantation had not been dimmed by Remus’s success, or Sirius’s, or Dorcas’s later on in the lesson. It would not have been dimmed by his.
“What, do you think yours is that much cooler than mine?” she demanded, offended. It wasn’t as intimidating as Sirius’s huge dog had been, or Remus’s wolf which he had swiftly vanished after producing it, but her little deer had been pretty and sweet and had made her smile. “I love deer!”
“No, no! That’s not what I meant!” James shook his head feverishly, something akin to panic flashing in his eyes at the thought he might offend her. “Your Patronus was magnificent. I loved it. But, well…it wasn’t just a deer. Lily, it was a doe.”
Lily frowned and narrowed her eyes on him. “James, a doe is a deer.”
“I know!” he exclaimed, and the broom jerked to a halt so they were hovering a hundred or so feet off the ground. “But it’s not just a deer. Lily, it’s a female deer.”
Lily stared at him, slightly concerned for his mental state.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “It is.”
“Your Patronus is a female deer,” he said weakly, but then the words began to rush out of him in an almost pleading tone. “And I didn’t want to go after you and make you uncomfortable or make you think I was trying to steal your thunder or make your accomplishments somehow about me or…overwhelm you or anything because…”
“Because?” she prompted, but something in the abject terror on his face made her suspect. Her heart thundered in her chest; her blood sang in her ears.
“Your Patronus is a doe,” he said softly, almost tremulously. “And mine is a…”
He paused again, and she couldn’t take it. She couldn’t wait. She knew. She hadn’t seen it yet because he had pretended he wasn’t capable, but she knew.
“I thought of you,” she said when he took too long to tell her, because she was a Gryffindor, but she was still a seventeen year old girl and she was too nervous to take this particular admission from him.
“You what?” he asked, shaking his head, bemused by the apparent subject change.
“Professor Bickett said we had to think of our happiest memories to achieve it,” Lily said, forcing herself to hold eye contact. “I thought of you. I mean, not only. Marlene was there a bit, and my parents, but I thought of you a lot. Last year, when you kissed me for the first time in that empty compartment on the Hogwarts Express right before we reached the station, and when you showed up at my house over summer and shook my dad’s hand and let my mum bully you into having dinner with them, when you snuck away from the boys in Diagon Alley and pulled me away from my parents and snogged me behind Madam Malkin’s, and when you…”
He cut her off with a heated kiss, one hand lifting from the handle of his broom to cup her cheek. Slowly, slowly, they began to drift back down to the pitch.
“A stag,” he breathed against her mouth when their feet brushed the dirt a moment later. “My Patronus is a stag, and I didn’t want the fact that we’re soulmates to become the main focus of the entire class because I’m bloody in love with you and I wanted you to have your moment.”
The word soulmates shot a thrilling shock through her body. She remembered what Professor Bickett had said, of course, as the lesson had been only a few hours ago.
The Patronus is the embodiment of the caster’s soul. Sometimes, when the connection between two people is strong enough, when their souls are mated, their Patronuses will reflect that fact in a similarly mated pair.
“I’m bloody in love with you, too,” Lily told him, chilled hands gripping his waist beneath his warm jacket.
“Lily,” James said, cradling her face in both of his hands. “Being as we’re soulmates and we’re in love and all, will you be my girlfriend?”
Lily smiled and nodded, then laughed at his goofy grin and pressed herself tight against him.
They’d had a rough start of things back in first year and she hadn’t been his biggest fan for a while, and then he had asked her out to Hogsmeade in third year and she had rather unkindly turned him down. Then in fourth year they had formed a tentative sort of almost-friendship when she had grown closer with Remus, and they had had their ups and downs for a couple of years. But last year had been a good one for them.
They had been friends – truly friends – since very early on in the school year after he had earnestly apologized to her for his part in the awful row they had had at the end of fifth year, and he had begun to shamelessly flirt with her when they had returned from Christmas holidays. He had even shared his broomstick with her a few times after practice, with her actually facing the proper direction. She had waited months for him to finally ask her out again for the first time since the third year disaster, but he never had. She had been heartsick over him as the year had drawn to a close, had driven Marlene mad with her yearning for him and had all but resigned herself to a life of pining for him alone with a pride of cats when he had quietly pulled her away from their friends using the snack trolley as an excuse and had kissed her soft and sweet and shy and asked if she wouldn’t mind if he wrote her over the summer.
They had exchanged countless letters, sometimes two in a single day – his poor owl – and he had come round her house and met her parents after only two weeks of letters, and had come back a few days later, and a few days after that, and then again, and again until her parents began to ask why he wasn’t around if he took too long to turn up. Her mother was half in love with him herself, and her father liked him a whole lot, so much so that they had both pretended not to notice that she had clearly just had the daylights snogged out of her when she and James returned to them in Diagon Alley after lying that they were going to say a quick hello to some friends.
Then they had returned to Hogwarts for their seventh year, and they were both the Head students and he still hadn’t asked her out. They still talked all the time, and flirted, and he still pulled her aside for private moments and sweet kisses and heated snogs, and on Hogsmeade weekends they were always together, but usually with a group. He never kissed her in front of anyone else, though. Not even their friends.
Marlene half believed Lily was lying about all their snogging.
Remus and Peter acted like nothing was different. Even Sirius never mentioned it, making her wonder if James hadn’t even told his best friends.
But.
He clearly cared for her. Deeply. Even before she knew he was in love with her, she had known he cared deeply for her.
And when she had asked him about it just a few nights ago when they were alone in the Prefect common room tidying up after a meeting, he had been completely reasonable with his answer.
He didn’t realize she wanted people to know.
Not their friends, of course. Their friends knew. Hell, he had admitted that he had told the boys what he had planned for her on the Hogwarts Express the night before they boarded the train home. The boys all knew he had spent the majority of his summer with her. They simply pretended not to know because James had thrown an absolute fit and sworn he would make their lives hell if they ruined this for him.
But everyone else who had thought she hated him for years. He had been holding himself back from her for fear of her discomfort with the entire school suddenly realizing she didn’t hate him.
She had told him he was a right fool for that, and had taken his hand in hers in the corridor on the way back to Gryffindor Tower, and he had fixed her a plate of food when she was running late for breakfast yesterday morning, and she had sat right next to him, squeezing into a non-existent space between him and Sirius that had Sirius shooting her an affronted, disgruntled, sleepy glare as he moved over to make room for her. He had taken her hand in the corridors between classes, had carried her books for her, had made a point of waiting for her at the door after the one class they didn’t share. He had even stayed in the library with her until closing time last night when she had been nervously revising for their Charms exam.
He still hadn’t kissed her in public yet.
“I’d better get you inside and fed before you freeze to death,” James said. “Being a good boyfriend and all.”
“I’m perfectly cozy right here, the besotted girlfriend I am.” She snuggled closer to him, protesting when he shifted so his feet were flat against the ground and bearing some of their weight.
“You may be cozy, but my ass is sore after three hours on a broomstick,” he complained, but she could hear the grin in his voice.
“Your ass is fine, Potter,” she said, pointedly checking it out as they dismounted together.
“You’re insatiable, Evans,” he teased, but he turned and walked ahead of her in silent invitation for her to continue staring.
She laughed and caught up to him quickly, slipping her hand into his in a now-familiar move as he lifted his broom over his other shoulder.
Before they made it off the pitch, she pulled him to a halt. “Wait. Will you do me a favour?”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I want to see your Patronus,” she told him and suddenly, now that she had said it aloud, she was absolutely desperate to see it.
He looked at her for a moment, and then silently reached for his wand in the inner pocket of his flight jacket. Pointing it at the center of the pitch, he said, “Expecto Patronum,” and a brilliant, majestic, beautiful, massive stag with high, symmetrical, many-pointed antlers erupted from his wand. Its movements were sure and powerful as it cantered around the pitch.
Awestruck, Lily drew her own wand. “Expecto Patronum.”
Her Patronus, a pretty little regal doe half the size of his stag, met his in the middle of the pitch. They circled each other for a moment, and then the stag went still, and the doe nuzzled against him, their long necks meeting in a sort of embrace.
Lily let out a shaky breath. “Thank you.”
“I feel like I should thank you,” he said, eyes brighter and perhaps a bit damper than normal. “But I’ll just say you’re welcome.”
“Smart man,” Lily murmured, and kissed his cheek. “Come on, you’re right, I am freezing.”
They turned again to leave the pitch and behind them, their Patronuses lingered for a brief moment standing together in the evening light before they silently faded away.
“One more favour?” she asked as they made it into the blessedly warm castle and headed toward the Great Hall for dinner.
“Anything,” he promised.
“When you wallop Ravenclaw on Saturday, will you snog the living hell out of me right there in front of the whole school?”
He stopped in his tracks and turned to stare at her. She met his eyes with a steady gaze. The grin that spread across his face was quick, and wide, and ecstatic.
“Yeah, I think I can make that happen.”
__________
I posted this on AO3 the other day, and posted a snippet of it here. I was in a rush to get to work and I was trying something new, but I couldn't help myself. I had to post the whole thing here as well. It's engrained in me.
Sirius's actual death and his multiple symbolic deaths
Sirius being murdered (intentionally or not) on Ministry property by a family member who embodies the worst of his family’s ideals is incredibly tragic.
The Black family and the Ministry create the two defining prisons of Sirius’s life (Grimmauld Place and Azkaban), and his death happens at the point where those two systems symbolically converge.
Both the Black family and the Ministry try to claim Sirius at the level of the body, the name, and the soul (if we take the soul to mean the true essence of the self). For the Black family, the claim is dynastic and ideological: being born Black is supposed to determine what Sirius is and what he believes in (his selfhood is expected to be absorbed into the family’s lineage and blood-purity politics). For the Ministry, the claim is carceral: once Sirius has been named as a criminal, the state can use that label to supersede his personhood (what is done to him becomes easier to justify because it is being done to a prisoner/criminal rather than to a man/law-abiding citizen).
And these claims become symbolic deaths before they come together in his actual death.
First, the family symbolically kills Sirius. Walburga saying that he is no son of hers is the intimate interrelational form of that killing, because it attempts to sever the maternal relation itself, while her burning of his name from the tapestry gives that severance a physical and dynastic form. The tapestry is the family’s material record of belonging and legitimacy, so to burn Sirius from it is to remove him from the lineage (something the Blacks take excessive pride in- so to them this is quite a punishment). Because the family cannot destroy Sirius’s will and cannot stop him from carrying the name Black, it performs the only death available to it: it makes him dead to the family while he is still alive, leaving him as a kind of living absence, still marked by the Black name but denied any legitimacy as a person within the family structure.
Then the Ministry symbolically kills him through criminalisation, while the media gives that criminalisation a public form. Phrases like “mass-murderer” and “Voldemort’s right-hand man” attach themselves to his name until his personhood is pushed beneath the state’s account of him. The category of criminal allows the Ministry to claim his body and justify his erasure. He can be removed from his life and sent to Azkaban because the Ministry has already made him into the kind of person Azkaban is built to contain. When he escapes, the same logic follows him: the Ministry authorises the Dementor’s Kiss as once Sirius has been reduced to “criminal,” the destruction of his soul can be treated as a bureaucratic necessity.
Azkaban turns that symbolic death into a prolonged execution. The Ministry keeps the body just alive enough to keep calling it imprisonment, but the conditions are built around the slow destruction of the person (both physically and mentally), with Dementors feeding on the emotions of the people held there, allowing them to feel nothing but despair and blunting their access to interiority, in a similar way to how Sirius’s family would not allow him his own personhood (which is why he weaponises his inner life against them through physical objects like the photographs of his friends and motorcycles).
Thus, in the Department of Mysteries, his actual death gives bodily form to the symbolic deaths that have already been staged around him. The family that made him dead to itself acts through Bellatrix, and the Ministry (having already condemned him to a form of living death) becomes the place where that earlier violence is made final. The Veil completes the erasure because it removes him completely, taking away the body that would usually remain after death and denying him even the residual presence of a corpse.
The person the family tried to define and the prisoner the Ministry created are swallowed in the same act, so that the symbolic disappearances imposed on him throughout his life end in literal disappearance.
Why do people make it look like it's Sirius who goes along with whatever james wants when it's clearly the other way round?
In the one scene we get from their teenage years it's pretty clear that james is the one who keeps trying to get Sirius's attention. He looks for Sirius's reaction after he yawns hugely and ruffles his hair in the exam hall, then stops showing off only for Sirius (despite his inflated ego being a huge part of his personality at the time), and bullies Snape because Sirius just says he's bored. Personally I see Sirius as having a more independent personality that doesn't rely on external validation, given that he rejected his family's pure blood ideology and ran away at 16, while james at that age was ruffling his hair to look like he just got off his broom, showing off with the snitch, enjoying wormtail's admiration, constantly looking to see if lily was watching him, etc etc(and all of this is just from 1 memory lol).
Also Sirius has no qualms about disagreeing with him (unlike how he's portrayed to be james's yesman in the fandom), he asks james to stop showing off and points out that he's conceited when he wonders why lily is turned off by him. I just can't see Sirius blindly following someone even if it is james, because I think he would have learnt early on that he couldn't blindly trust the people he loved, so while he would trust james with everything, he simply wouldn't be inclined to behave that way. Even so he's way too independent for something like that. The real simp was the spoilt and pampered guy tracing the initials of his future wife lol
mother fuck, while doing research for my james potter essay for @annabtg, I came across THIS quote:
Madam Rosmerta: “Of all the people to go over to the Dark Side, Sirius Black was the last I’d have thought … I mean, I remember him when he was a boy at Hogwarts. If you’d told me what he was going to become, I’d have said you’d had too much mead.”
Sirius Black was, even to someone who barely knew him, SUCH a deeply good person that he was the last person you'd have thought would become a death eater. THE LAST PERSON. Not the loyal, Gryffindor-bred James Potter, not quiet Prefect Remus Lupin, SIRIUS FUCKING BLACK, the firstborn son of a blood supremacist family with several family members who actively served Voldemort.
Young Sirius Black was so full of goodness that if someone said he was going to be a death eater, Rosmerta would have thought they must be drunk.
And Remus and McGonagall and Dumbledore and everyone else who knew him so much better let him go to Azkaban without a trial, never tried to get him out, never gave this boy the benefit of the doubt.
And then what did he do when he broke himself out of Azkaban? He forgave Remus in an instant. He rejoined the Order. He trusted Dumbledore enough to willingly stay locked up again. He handed his house over to be used for the Order, welcomed people to come and go as they pleased, to stay long-term if they needed -- even Snape, who had recently been eager to have him killed. And in a matter of two years, showed Harry more parental love and support than anyone had before -- to the point of dying for him, exactly as his parents did.
So when you actually look at canon Sirius, I think it's very clear why he was the last person you'd expect.
“The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate? Moony, what in the name of Merlin’s crusty toenails is this?” asked Sirius, derisively squinting at the cover. “‘Mate,’ is that some werewolf shit?”
“I told you, it’s a Muggle book. I think it could help James. Listen, this bloke says there’s five ‘love languages,’ and they’re different ways of showing your love for someone depending on what’s important to them: physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, gift giving, and acts of service. Our boy has been doing none of these, and look where it’s gotten him. He’s got to woo her.”
Love languages, James thought, sounded about as woolly as divination, but if they somehow helped him win Lily over, he’d do anything. He’d even probably attempt to fight the giant squid. Not bare-handed, though, he valued his life, lovelorn as it was.
OR—Lily has been unimpressed with James' efforts to win her over, so he tries a new tactic. A Muggle one.
Rated T, 5.3k, part of the Jily Gift Exchange 2026
academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches
Which in turn is rooted in the idea that k-12 schooling doesn't matter, which in turn comes from the fact that teachers and parents alike delight in making sure every single student knows that so they can suffer as much as possible. After all, their job doesn't matter, so why should you feel like yours does?
Apathy culture, I'm calling this. Where no one thinks anything matters and people just dissociate their way through existence because it's been so driven home that existence is a mundane responsibility and not something really worth experiencing.
the things we carried ll chapter 23: blitzkrieg bop ll playlist
M, (mostly) canon compliant, jily fifth year. part 1 of 3.
“Good game, Potter,” said Evans over one shoulder as James brushed past her in the common room.
She said it so casually and he was so absorbed in his own thoughts that her words landed on a delay. Quickly, he rewound them, scanning for sarcasm. But…no. She’d sounded, actually, quite sincere.
James whipped around, suddenly and keenly aware that his lips were still buzzing from his snog with Xena. “What?”
“I said good game.”
His stomach swooped. He might’ve blacked out for half a second, even. “Sorry, have you been Polyjuiced?”
But she was already turning away, flicking her hair over her shoulder as she did. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to milk a compliment?”
Sirius’ notes are written in the most beautiful clear handwriting ever, but are an incomplete mess missing half the vital information because he thought it was obvious, so they’re useless to everyone else.
James’ notes are the most complete notes ever written, they’re better than the teacher with examples and clarifications and everything, but they are written in the most horrendous, illegible, chicken-scratch, garbage handwriting, so they’re useless to everyone else.
James and Sirius can understand each other’s notes perfectly.
There are currently more than a hundred of my absolute favourite Jily fics here which are organised in alphabetical order and into the categories Hogwarts, Post-Hogwarts, If They Lived, AU and One-Shot Collections. Because there are so many, I’ve put them under a cut, so you’ll have to click ‘keep reading’ to see the rest.
All fics are complete because I can’t handle unfinished things (that’s why The Life and Times and Commentarius aren’t officially on here, in addition to the fact that everyone has already probably read them). I would recommend checking out other fics by these authors, too, these are just my absolute favourites. You can comment on this post or message me with any fics that you think belong on this list (including your own, if you’re so inclined). Also, please let me know if there are any broken links so I can try to fix them.
NOTE: If your work is on here and you want it removed or amended, please message me and I’ll fix it ASAP!
hogwarts fics:
19½ First Dates by xylodemon - In which James finally lands a date with Evans, Sirius’ brilliant plan isn’t so brilliant after all, Peter doesn’t really remember what he did, and Remus thinks the lot of them are daft. (rated M)
An Accidental Date by @takeharryandgo - James and Lily get stood up, so they resolve to go on a “make-up date” together. Except it’s only a pretend date. Right?
Alarming and Beautiful by stolen-whispers - What she didn’t realize until after she agreed to go out with him was that these things were piling on his shoulders until he was hunched under the weight of the world and it was all he could do not to throw it off and watch it shatter. (rated M)
All Right, Evans? by @madmajwithabox - The thing about being Lily Evans and James Potter was that you couldn’t do anything without everybody else saying something about it. (rated M, multi-chapter)
Ambitious for the Lovely Lily by silent-entrance - “James Potter, is it possible that you’re not quite currently alone?” “Why yes, Padfoot, it is.” In which Sirius hears things he would rather not.
and it burns like me for you by @suchastart - She’s almost to the library when a hand grabs her wrist and yanks her into what appears to be an empty classroom. It is. They’ve been here before. She’s intimately acquainted with the desk nearest the door. But it’s a good thing she’s not honest.
I just realized that Sirius's death parallels Lily and James's death. Both of them spent the last year of their lives sitting behind a fidelus while everyone else fought in the war, struggling because they weren't able to contribute. A traitor emerges, leading to a confrontation with Voldemort/Death Eaters, and all three of them die protecting Harry.
“You don’t really know much about things, do you?” James says casually, leaning back on the table. His crooked glasses hadn’t bothered her before but now she has the sudden urge to smack them off his face.
“Well, you don’t either Mr. ‘I don’t know what a car is.’”
“Hey! I do know what a car is,” James yelps, “I’ve just never been in one. Very important difference, that.”
Read on A03
Dusting off my fic writing cobwebs with a cute little 1st year jily moment. Hoping this will kick start me back into all my WIPS! Thank you everyone who has sent me really loving and kind messages this past month as I've been going through it <3
