Lily Evans and James Potter fell in love, broke apart and graduated Hogwarts. Ten years later, one failed engagement (her), a prestigious career as an Auror (him), and a diverted flight that lands them both in the middle of Muggle Ireland right before Christmas might be the thing to bring them back together.
An unreliable car is procured, emotional baggage is tossed in the boot, snow is forecast and it’s jingle all the—oh look, a detour.
Barring major roadblocks and/or construction, this should be updated daily between the 1st and the 24th. Now I scurry back to my writing cave and this (so far) 30k ridiculousness that’s barely half done to make sure that happens!
Happy pre-holidays everyone (and good luck anyone who has to make hundreds of latkes this week lol rip me)
A little James snippet below the cut. 😉
Naturally, the car breaks down twenty minutes in.
Up until that metal screeching (then real screeching) disaster, they’re the longest twenty minutes of his entire life.
Whatever insulates this shitty metal box clearly isn’t doing its job because James can easily imagine a rudimentary heating charm would improve their situation dramatically, but Lily had glared at him the second he suggested it.
“We’re driving on an icy road,” she’d snapped. “If you want to wave that thing around shooting off mad charms and bring us to an early grave, be my guest.”
“It’s a fucking heating charm. A first year could do it.”
A snort. “Forgive me if I don’t have all that much faith in the Auror Department’s ability to train your reckless idiocy out of you. Or your penchant for setting things on fire. Or your aim.”
“Chaser. I was a star chaser for five years and I was the bloody Captain—“
“And it did your ego great help, but not much else. Now shut up.”
I can think of a few things it helped you with, James had thought, but resisted the impulse to say it aloud. One, because she’d stop the car right in the middle of the road and hex him, and two, because then he’d be thinking about her naked.
So James had clenched his jaw and decided, freezing and irate, that they just weren’t going to talk for the duration of the trip.
A merry tune starts playing suddenly, at the same time that a strong buzzing emanates from that sleek black device she was carrying earlier—
James glances down to the phone sitting face up between the two car seats. The name Roger Kennedy is blinking above a picture of a smiling bloke in a winter coat. His blonde hair is swept to the side and he’s laughing at whoever is taking the picture.
James’s stomach clenches.
Lily scowls at her device though, one hand still on the wheel, and presses a red button.
Roger’s smiling face disappears and the tune cuts out. His face is replaced by the time and date (17 December, 2018) and a picture of Lily herself with someone James recognizes after a second as Dorcas Meadowes. They’re wearing matching purple Healer robes, Lily’s arms thrown round Dorcas’s shoulder as they laugh. They’re both making silly faces.
Without obviously turning his head to study it, James tries to make out where they are—maybe her flat? There’s a wall with pictures behind them—but then the phone suddenly goes black.
Lily exhales.
James doesn’t have to look over to know that the sound is full of tension, but he does anyway. Her fingers are gripping the steering wheel tightly, eyes fixed on the grey, winding road ahead. Her death-grip doesn’t feel so out of place considering his uncle’s car is occasionally making a sharp, groaning noise, as if silently protesting its two passengers.
Same, James thinks, then feels a burst of ridiculousness. He’s empathizing with a fucking car.
“Silence is too bloody loud,” he mutters, deciding a change in atmosphere is needed and reaches forward to fiddle with the stereo. This he knows how to do, from a few weeks when Sirius was obsessed with figuring out how to add one to his motorbike. (Remus had eventually squashed that particularly unsafe dream).
Lily sighs, but doesn’t respond beyond that and James’s irritation hitches higher.
That’s another thing he’d forgotten about her. Those bloody sighs.
The radio crackles, hissing and popping with white noise. James twists the dial further, more static. A sharp tug to the left.
Sigh.
James yanks and the station finally bursts to life, midway through a peppy Christmas jingle.
“—dashing through the snow—“
James twists to another station. “—ain’t nothin’ but a heartache, tell me why…”
His hand drops to his lap, the melodic crooning of late nineties boy band pop filling the freezing car. Sirius would’ve been thrilled.
Lily reaches out and turns the dial back. Christmas music declares itself with annoying bells in the background.
James stares at the radio, then twists to look at Lily.
She’s determinedly not looking at him. Maybe—just maybe—she’s still mad about the fact that she’s stuck driving her ex-boyfriend across Ireland. Maybe she’s…miffed.
There are two options, James decides. He can be petty and continue on a wordless radio war that will make the rest of the car ride a miserable hell the likes of which he hasn’t faced since the vicious days of fifth year, or he can be the bigger person and listen to this absurdly upbeat music for the next Merlin knows how many hours.
Simple decision, really.
James twists the dial back to the tail end of the boy band’s heartbreak song.
Lily’s lips tighten and she reaches out to yank the knob again.
“—what fun it is to ride and sing, a sleighing song tonight, ohhhh—“
James resists the urge to growl, glaring steadfastly out the window. Within second, his gaze catches back on her, though.
The grey-green-white scenery passes outside her window, cold pressing onto the glass. She cuts through the view like a red, angry blur.
Her bun is falling down, strands of red hair curling around her neck. One is touching her skin, right next to a small freckle that he—suddenly vividly remembering—used to trace with his tongue.
His face heats and he yanks his gaze back to the confusing, knobby dashboard of the car. The word AUX blurs in his vision as he focuses determinedly on it.
Lily sighs again, but this time it’s a softer sound. One hand stays resting on the wheel, the other comes up to slowly massage the back of her neck. Her thumb presses into the skin below her hairline, absently drawing tight circles. She exhales again.
“Try not to drive off the road,” James says, because he’s a prick and he absolutely can’t handle a second more of this.
It has the desired effect, as she was perfectly in the center and she knows it, and the look Lily directs at him is nothing short of poisonous.
Holiday chaos and accidental hook ups commencing soon 😉
18 December, 2018
Sunlight is piercing Lily’s eyes. She shifts her shoulder minutely, pressing against soft sheets, and her aching head pulses with the movement. She groans.
Her eyes crack open, squinting at the blurry, unfamiliar room. The blue and white decor jog her memory—Dazzling Lane Inn—and she stretches her arm, blindly reaching for her mobile on the bedside table.
The sheet falls from her shoulder, pooling around her waist and cold air prickles her—very bare—skin. The time is inconclusive, her eyes unable to focus and Lily groans again as she falls back into bed, irritably turning onto her back.
Her leg hits someone else’s.
Lily’s eyes open wide and her heart stops. There’s another leg against hers and a definite weight and warmth behind her and…
A rough, sleep-worn voice. “Evans?”
No, no, she did not—
Lily twists her head and comes face to face with a half-awake, hungover James Potter.
She can’t even explain the noise that comes out of her mouth then—a nameless, wordless noise of panic—and she throws herself upright and away from him. Her head spins, the urge to hurl rising so strongly that she gasps, “What the fuck—“
James’s arm flings over his face, muffling his words. “So. Loud.”
“Don’t fucking talk to me about loud, tell me we didn’t—“
He doesn’t answer, but after a second she sees his—bare, very bare, meaning the rest of him is also bare—shoulders jerk in an assenting shrug.
Lily makes another furious noise and throws herself out of bed. The sheets tangle, getting caught in her limbs and then she realizes that if she’s stumbled to her feet then she’s completely naked. Fuck—
“Do not look at me,” she spits, head spinning and cheeks bright red. James hasn’t even removed his arm from over his eyes but panic continues blooming in her chest, bright and persuasive as she lunges for the nearest article of clothing—her discarded winter coat, which is lying on the floor along with—oh Merlin fuck—her jeans, blouse and knickers. She can’t even see her bra anywhere and her scrambled brain can’t make heads or tails of the blurry memories she has of the night before to try to figure out where it went.
She did not have sex with him. She didn’t, she didn’t, they just drunkenly happened to take off their clothes and sleep next to each other, totally innocently—
“So I take it you’ve just remembered all the shagging we did last night?” James says and finally removes his arm from his face. His tone is flat, eyes droll and his gaze lingers on her hastily coat-clad figure for a second.
Lily—for lack of a better response—grabs her discarded knickers and throws them at him.
A scant scrap of lace, they only flutter uselessly through the air before falling on her side of the unmade bed. James lifts his head and raises a brow. “Now there’s an instrument of war,” he mutters. “I’m cowering.”
“Fuck you,” Lily fumes. “Fuck you, I can’t believe—“
“What, that you jumped me last night?”
“I did not jump you, you arrogant arsehole—!”
“Well, then it was mutual—and does it really surprise you considering our past track record?”
Lily doesn’t want that to hit her—stupid logic—but it does anyway and she pauses in her rage, eyes lingering on James, still covered by the blankets. “We will never speak of this again,” she says tightly. She bends and grabs her jeans, gripping them tightly. “Okay? Never. It’s a stupid mistake—and a humiliating one, at that—but we are going to deal with the car and go our separate ways and never speak to each other again.”
“Fine with me,” James grumbles.
Lily tries to push back her tangled hair, resisting the urge to collapse as her hangover catches up with her. Bloody Merlin, how much did they drink last night? Her eyes pause on a piece of parchment next to her mobile on the bedside table and she frowns, spotting the Ministry of Magic seal on one creased side.
She spots a flash of text that looks distinctly like her name.
Her stomach drops and she grabs it with shaking hands. The crumpled parchment is straightened out and her vision blurs. “Oh, fuck, no—“
“What?” James groans, lying on his back on the bed. His voice is rough and irate and really, she should be screaming at him but everything in her is focused on the hazy lines of text in front of her.
Because there it is. Her signature. Right next to his. On a very official, very real looking document that she has no memory of procuring or signing—
I am the worst (TM) at guessing but here goes nothing. Olivia (who I am already inclined to dislike because of her obliviousness to the prejudices in the Wikipedia society) pulls some bs when James and Lily get together which causes a lot of conflict between them. They have a messy break up without clearing things up. The hurt of which still lingers.
Also good luck w your school things Ange xx <3
The scenario is pretty spot on, but it’s missing some pivotal details (that are so situational I will be super impressed if someone guesses them) 😌
And thank you so much, lovely! I’ve got more school stuff tomorrow, but today went really well.
Last one tonight, so have a…very important snippet.
“You run,” James says in her silence. “You run when it gets good.”
“I didn’t run,” Lily snaps—
“Then why!” His shout rings through the room and he sucks in a breath, staring at her. “Why?” he says. His voice breaks. “Why did you break up with me?”
I think Olivia never got over James and started scheming. Maybe one night James got really drunk after a Quidditch victory and Olivia made it seem like he slept with her. We love those 2 idiots, but Lily and James have to work on their communication skills, so Lily never confronted him about it and just broke up with him(and maybe next weekend went to Hogsmeade with someone else, making it seem like their relationship was never that important and broke his heart).
interesting. The communications skills bit is definitely true 😉
And less than two weeks later she’d broken up with him in a two sentence conversation. Broken up with him and broken his heart in the same swoop—he’d been so irreparably, terribly in love with eighteen year old Lily Evans—and he’d never quite forgiven her for that.
Re: Olivia. My first thought was that there was cheating involved (or at least the talk of cheating as I just cannot see James as a cheater). Did Olivia plant the idea in Lily's head that James cheated on Lily with Olivia? And was James so hurt by the fact that Lily believed it that he didn't even bother debunking it? The problems I have with this is 1) why would Lily believe it and 2) I think the previous chapter mentions them falling apart over the space of 2 months so that would point more towards something slowly eating away at them rather than a one-off event. Although....what if Olivia used a love potion?? Hmmm 🤔
Talking, whispering, ‘did-it-even-happen’-ing…
James feels a pulse of irritation. “Why do you do that?” he says. “Whenever you hear her name, you—“
“Forgive me if I don’t have such a great opinion of her,” Lily bites out. “After—“ she cuts herself off.
@liz-lunane Well, Olivia certainly wasn’t happy with Lily after she and James broke up (which was the summer between sixth and seventh)…but the actual anger started later in the year.
It would’ve been funny, if James—twenty four at that point—hadn’t suddenly realized he’s falling into a bit of a pattern.
Olivia. Taylor.
Girls he once liked who shout at him and storm off into the night because of Lily Evans.
@raissassampaio I’m finding it VERY interesting that a lot of you seem to think James dated Olivia again after Lily 👀. I’m not saying he didn’t, but it’s interesting. hm.
Unfortunately for Lucinda, James had never paid much attention to her—there was Tanya Moren in fifth year, a few dates with Emma Vanity at the very beginning of sixth, then Olivia for the rest of the year. And then Lily.
(There is another sentence after it, but that would be counterproductive to the mystery 😉)
my guess is that Olivia plants something to make it seem like james cheated on lily with her and then she tells james something to make him upset with lily, and with the communication skills of the 17yos they are they just blow up at each other and break up???
hm.
You’re both very on the mark and very off 😂 which I know isn’t helpful, but it’s actually very true.
Snippets as promised! (some will be from 6th/7th year, some are from the present, some are in between 😉)
“I don’t think she did it,” James says. “Really, that’s not like her—“
“I know,” Lily says. Her arms are crossed, mouth tucked down and it hurts him seeing her like this. “But you have to admit she’s been weird this year.”
“Towards us?” James doesn’t really blame Olivia for being mad, because he certainly hadn’t been fair to her towards the end of the summer.
