Tomb it may concern, I’m currently toiling away on what can only be described as the worst Marauders fanfic ever written. Read at your own peril, expect nothing, and know that somehow, you will be severely disappointed. Sincerely, Your humble, masochistic narrator.
When Lily was having Harry she absolutely used ‘I’m pregnant’ as an excuse to boss people around, and the it worked every time.
Those two words and suddenly, Remus? He’s in the kitchen making her a toastie. Mary? Painting her toenails. The worst is James of course. He becomes a chef, butler, housekeeper and part-time masseuse.
I think one of my favorite jily tropes is when James is a cocky, arrogant prick and he's teasing Lily about how he knows that she's attracted to him or that she likes him or something and then Lily is like, 'yes, I fancy you' and James trips over every pair of shoes he owns, falls on his face and loses every iota of confidence he's ever had. He doesn't believe her, he can't understand why she would like him. He's baffled. Bamboozled. And she's like ??? you just told me that you knew I liked you? and he's like 'yeah but I was making shit up???'
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the birth of James Fleamont Potter—a young man who, much like Sir Paul fucking McCartney or a particularly loud alarm clock, is impossible to ignore, frequently causes incurable migraines, and utterly wrecks one’s emotional well-being.
In a true masochistic fashion, I plan to celebrate this momentous occasion by carrying heavy trays of mediocre food to individuals who believe the absence of a lemon wedge is a personal declaration of war, nodding politely while said individuals also complain that the medium rare steak they ordered is 'too pink,' and losing my hearing to the relentless, rhythmic screech of a printer that births a never-ending stream of tickets from the very bowels of hell, all while dreaming of a peaceful life where I am a stray hubcap abandoned on the side of a highway.
In an act of unprovoked hostility, fueled by a profound and ever-deepening hatred for things that have eroded my moral compass—myself, my life, and especially my job—I have decided to allow a fit of temporary insanity to steer my hand toward the 'post' button two hours, nineteen minutes, and thirty-three seconds early. To honor James’s special day, I have chosen to erode your moral compass, your evening, and perhaps your general faith in the human ability to form coherent thoughts, all by subjecting you to another excerpt from the worst marauders fic of all time: Childhood’s End. It is a decision that will surely haunt my descendants for generations to come, or at the very least, haunt me while I am refilling endless ramekins of tartar sauce.
This fic remains—as it always has been, and likely always will be—catastrophically unfinished, remarkably terrible, and destined to stay buried in the digital grave of my google docs until the sun eventually burns out and leaves us all in a very cold, very silent mass grave.
I am not choosing to share this with you because I believe it has potential or merit, words which here mean "lies we tell ourselves so we don't have to face the cold, hard reality of our own mediocrity,” but because I am a masochist of the highest order and find a perverse joy in the act of artistic self-flagellation, and also see no reason why I should suffer alone when I can drag you into the grave with me.
I can only ask for your forgiveness, though I have done nothing to earn it and fully intend to repeat this mistake until the death of the universe renders my grammar irrelevant. I would like tell you that my prose has improved, but I am both morally and legally obligated to tell you that it remains an explosive, slow-motion car crash and I am currently tied up, trapped, and screaming in the trunk.
Sincerely,
Your humble, masochistic narrator.
Lily handed over the carton to James with a bright smile. “There,” she said, triumphantly. “Mission accomplished. Now Ziggy can relax.”
James flashed her a boyish grin, hefting the apple juice like it was Excalibur, “Behold! Ziggy Mckinnon’s holy grail. This is destiny, Evans. One day, when historians write about the great quests of our time, they’ll say: James Potter and Lily Evans—seekers of truth, defeaters of dark wizards, bearers of apple juice.”
Lily smiled as she leaned against the handle of the trolley, watching him brandish the carton with such genuine pride that, for a second, the fluorescent lights didn't seem quite so soul-sucking.
"I hate to break it to you, 'Sir James of the Orchard,' but I think the historians might focus less on the 'defeating dark wizards' part and more on the time a packet of prawn-flavored crisps nearly led you toward an existential crisis," she teased, her eyes sparkling.
“It was a crisis of integrity! Those crisps were claiming to be ‘prawn-flavored,’ yet not even the slightest bit shrimpy,” James argued, brandishing the apple juice. “A so called “prawn-flavored crisp”should possess a certain shrimpy essence, Evans. An aura of shrimpiness.”
Lily let out a breathy sigh. “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘fishy,’ you absolute loon. Not shrimpy. Nobody says shrimpy.”
“I say shrimpy!” James declared, his voice rising in the quiet aisle. “Just think about it. If I were a prefect, I’d be boring, yeah? I’d be a shrimpy little footnote in the annals of wizarding history. Alas, I am not a prefect, but I am a man of conviction. When I see a crisp that promises a shrimpy experience and delivers only vinegar and lies, I must speak out. It is a shrimpy injustice! A shrimpy betrayal of the highest order! People look at me and they think, ‘There goes James Potter, he’s may not be a legend, or a prefect, but man does he know the shrimpy struggle.’
He paused, pointing a finger at a confused-looking elderly man near the tinned peas.
“Does that man want a hero who doesn’t know the shrimpy struggle? No! No, he does not! He wants a hero who knows that a prawn flavored crisp should be, at its core, shrimpy. If we lose our shrimpy standards, what do we have left? We have a shrimpy society filled with shrimpy people eating shrimpy-less crisps!”
Reader, do you also feel the sudden urge to flatten yourself with a boulder and jump into the nearest paper shredder?
The word "shrimpy" has now lost all linguistic value. It has become a hollow, clicking sound, like a beetle trapped in a tin can. If I were a kinder narrator, I would spare you the repetition. I would redact the word "shrimpy" and replace it with something dignified, like "briny" or as Lily stated, “fishy.”
If I were Paul fucking McCartney—that tireless, soulless prat with a bass—I would likely find a way to rhyme "shrimpy" with "blimpy" and put it over a jaunty tuba solo.
But I am not Paul and I am definitely not kind.
I am a masochist sitting at a wobbly desk, envisioning James shouting the word "shrimpy" in the middle of a Tesco, all while recognizing that Lily’s grin was clear symptom of a brain that has been turned into a lukewarm smoothie by the power of affection.
Lily stared at him, caught between the urge to call a healer and the terrifying realization that she found this rather endearing.
“It’s a shrimpy, slippery slope, Evans, and I, for one, refuse to take a single, shrimpy step down it. If that’s my greatest flaw, then so be it. Merlin knows historians love a flaw. Achilles had his heel. Arthur had his Lancelot. I have a deep-seated distrust of falsely advertised snacks. It humanizes me. It makes the legend accessible to the common man.”
Lily scoffed, the sound echoing slightly in the sterile, air-conditioned air. “The common man? We’re in a Tesco, Potter. You are the common man.”
James glanced at the humming fridge beside them, then back to her, his grin widening into something dangerously charming. “Maybe. But the common man doesn't have a carton of apple juice by his side now does he? Apple juice, Evans, is a superpower.” He tucked the carton under his arm like a quaffle. "You know," he added, "I actually thought finding this would be a lot harder. I was genuinely prepared for a struggle."
Lily sighed, already sensing the impending disaster. "And why is that?"
James grinned, wide and shameless. "Because I thought the juice would be concentrate, but it turns out... it was 'apple-y' available.”
She stared at him for three long seconds, the silence stretching out between them until a nearby shopper cleared their throat awkwardly.
James cocked his head to the side. "What? That was core-quality humor!" he argued. "Don't be so sour, Evans. It’s a fruitful conversation!"
A grin slowly creeping on her face, then against her better judgement, she laughed, the sound cracking loudly through the fluorescent aisles.
James’s grin flickered, softened, then widened in something brighter, something almost disbelieving.
To understand the significance of Lily Evans laughing at James Potter’s joke, you must first imagine trying to make a stone statue giggle. Not just any statue, but one carved from the hardest marble, polished to a glare, and set firmly on a pedestal for all the world to admire. You could pull faces, juggle flaming torches, sing out-of-tune ballads about geese—it wouldn’t matter. The statue would only stare back, unimpressed.
James had been trying to make Lily laugh for years. Not a polite little exhale, not the faint twitch of lips one gives a teacher when pretending to understand their joke, but a laugh. A real one. The kind that escapes like it’s been locked up too long, the kind that makes your chest ache and your eyes water.
And now—against all odds—he’d done it.
If you’ve never longed for something with your whole heart, only to finally glimpse it in your hands, then I cannot explain to you the weight of this victory. If you have, then you will know that for James, it was not simply a laugh. It was a bloody miracle.
“Holy shite! You’re laughing!” he exclaimed, his voice full of both shock and pride.
Lily clapped a hand over her mouth, but it was useless. Her giggles came anyway, spilling out of her in great, unrestrained bursts. “I’m not—” she gasped, “—it wasn’t even that funny.”
”It was!” James declared, still staring at her like she’d just performed a Patronus charm in the middle of Tesco. “You’re laughing, Evans! Honestly, I was expecting a polite little ha, maybe a hmph, or even a pitying chuckle, but no. You’re full-on, doubled-over, trolley-gripping, can’t-breathe laughing!”
She bent slightly against the trolley for balance, her shoulders shaking as she tried and failed to stop herself.
He pointed at her, triumphant. “This is a giggle fit! A rare, wild, mythical giggle fit!”
A giggle fit is one of the most dangerous conditions known to mankind. Unlike spattergroit or a broken arm, which have clear symptoms and occasionally clear cures, a giggle fit sneaks up without warning. One moment you are composed, respectable, and perfectly dignified; the next you are bent double in public, hiccupping and wheezing like a malfunctioning accordion.
I once saw a man in Cardiff fall victim to a giggle fit during a funeral. It began with a stifled chuckle at an unfortunately squeaky pew, and before long, he was shaking so hard the entire row trembled with him. By the time the vicar reached ashes to ashes, the man was on the floor, clutching his ribs, tears streaming down his face. The deceased’s widow was not amused.
You see, a giggle fit cannot be reasoned with. You may command your body to stop, to compose itself, to remember that you are, in fact, a serious person with responsibilities and dignity—but a giggle fit, well, giggles at such commands. It takes your lungs hostage, steals your breath, and leaves you with your cheeks sore, your eyes damp, and a reputation forever altered.
And the worst part? It spreads. One person’s giggle fit can infect an entire room, as though laughter were not merely an emotion but a virus—one with no cure, no antidote, and no escape.
Which is why James, at that very moment, was in grave danger.
“I, James Potter, caused Lily Evans to have a giggle fit! Me! I should bottle this moment, sell it, and retire young.”
Lily was still laughing, her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkling in a way she knew he’d never seen in his entire life. Every time she tried to straighten, another laugh escaped her and she doubled over again, nearly wheezing with the effort of stopping.
“Merlin’s beard, Evans, look at you,” James said, grinning so wide his cheeks hurt. His voice was part awe, part delight, all ridiculousness. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m going to tell my grandchildren about this. Or better yet! I’m going to put this in a Pensieve and watch it everyday until I die. The day Lily Evans laughed at my joke. Someone put it in the history books, mark the date, carve it in stone, alert the Prophet—”
“Oh, shut up!” she said, swatting at his arm, but the command was ruined by another wave of laughter. Her stomach hurt. She couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed this hard.
James pressed a dramatic hand over his arm, staggering a step back. “Ah, she wounds me even as she laughs at my joke. How tragic—”
And then it happened. A little snort, sharp and completely unintentional, slipped out between Lily’s giggles.
Both of them froze.
Lily’s eyes widened in horror. “Potter,” she warned through her giggles, already trying to bury her face in her hands.
James didn’t even try for restraint. He let out a full bodied laugh. It started in his chest, rolled through his shoulders, and spilled out in waves so loud that a woman pushing a pram in the next aisle paused to stare.
He staggered back against the trolley, the carton of apple juice still clutched like a holy relic, and bent double. “Evans—you—you —oh, I’m done for—I’ll never recover—I can’t—”
James’s laugh was contagious, too wild, too shameless. She tried to smother her own giggles, but the effort only made them worse. Soon she was doubled over again too, one hand braced against the trolley, the other clutching her ribs. The sound of both of them laughing together echoed down the aisles until people started peering down from other rows to see what on earth was happening.
James straightened for a second, trying to catch his breath, but another thought struck him and he dissolved again, laughing so hard his shoulders shook. “My life’s complete,” he wheezed, “just bury me right here, in Tesco, next to the bloody prawn crisps—”
That was it. Lily burst into another helpless peal of laughter, stumbling sideways until her knees buckled. “Evans!” James gasped between laughs, reaching out like he could steady her. But she was gone—sliding down to the cold tile floor in a graceless heap, her shoulders shaking.
For a moment he tried to hold it together, half bent over her with one hand still outstretched. Then he saw her red face, her watery eyes, the way she was practically gasping from laughter—and lost it all over again. With a laugh that cracked his own voice, James just gave up and followed her down, collapsing beside her.
The two of them sat there, backs to the trolley, shoulders knocking together as they laughed so hard they both began crying. It was a scene of pure, unadulterated chaos—the kind of chaos that makes store managers reach for their walkie-talkies and makes sensible people reconsider their loyalty to a supermarket chain.
A shop worker pushing a stack of crates slowed, frowned, then kept going. A man with a basket full of bread shot them a confused look as he swerved around. None of it mattered. The world had shrunk to the two of them, laughing until their sides hurt, their cheeks wet, and the fluorescent aisles seemed almost golden.
And then, as if the universe decided that a giggle fit wasn’t quite enough torture for the dignified soul, the supermarket’s sound system hummed to life.
There are certain sounds in this world that signal impending doom: the click of a locked door when you’ve left your keys inside, the low growl of a hungry werewolf, or the first three notes of Silly Love Songs playing from the speakers above.
Now, I have spent a great deal of my life explaining why Paul fucking McCartney is a menace. He is a man who looks at a world full of tragedy, woe, and very sharp rocks, and decides to write a melody that sounds like a sunshine-flavored marshmallow. He is infuriating. He is relentless. He is a bloody prat who decided to write the atrocity that is Silly Love Songs, which, quite frankly, is the musical equivalent of someone tickling you while you are trying to have a very important mid-life crisis, or to put it more simply and infinitely more accurately: a lobotomy.
The lyrics—sentimental, repetitive, and offensively catchy—began to swirl around the fluorescent aisles.
“You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs...”
Oh, fuck off, Paul!
Fuck you!
Fuck your bouncy bassline, which is currently thumping against my skull like a caffeinated woodpecker, fuck your "la-la-las," which are a linguistic insult to every poet who has ever died in a garret and, most importantly, fuck me for being the kind of person who sits here, at a wobbly desk, in the dark, scribbling about the romantic awakening of a teenage witch while this sugary lobotomy plays on a never-ending loop!
Fuck! People should have had enough. They should have had more than enough. They should have reached a point of absolute, nauseating saturation sometime around 1976 and collectively decided to pivot toward Gregorian chants or the sound of industrial machinery grinding rusted metal. We should be listening to dirges! We should be contemplating the fleeting nature of joy, the inevitability of the grave, and the fact that most supermarket floors are cleaned with a chemical that smells faintly of despair and artificial lemon!
But no. Instead, we have this.
Paul fucking McCartney has spent the better part of a century committed to the idea that if you put enough "la-la-las" over a bouncy bassline, people will forget that the world is cold and endlessly indifferent. If I were in charge of the cosmic playlist, Silly Love Songs would be replaced by the sound of a very old man sighing deeply while looking at a faded photograph of a woman he once loved then lost. That is real art. That is substance.
I once spent three days in a damp basement in Prague just to avoid a radio that was playing Wings on a loop. My only company was a freakishly large spider and a collection of broken cuckoo-clocks, and I have never been happier. We should be focusing on the clocks! The ticking away of our mortal hours! Not—
I’ve lost my place.
Where was I? Right. Tesco. The floor. The tragedy of Lily experiencing the mental equivalent of a short circuit while looking at James, listening to Paul, and realizing for the first horrifying, world-altering moment in her entire life, she wasn't annoyed by either of them.
James shoved his glasses up his nose, still breathless, grinning like a fool. “Best shopping trip of my life,” he declared hoarsely.
Lily, still shaking with laughter, shook her head and whispered through her giggles, “You’re ridiculous.”
“Ridculously happy,” James wheezed, wiping at his cheek with his sleeve. “All thanks to you.”
Lily froze mid-laugh, her chest still rising and falling with shaky giggles. The words hit her in a way that made her stomach flutter and her heart pinch all at once. She blinked at him, caught between amusement and something warmer, something she wasn’t used to. His hair was mussed, his glasses slightly crooked, and yet… he looked impossibly perfect. Ridiculous, and perfect.
The world outside the fluorescent glow—the aisles, the trolleys, the pram-pushing strangers—seemed distant, irrelevant. It was just them and the lingering echoes of their laughter, a little bubble of absurdity suspended in the middle of Tesco, but beneath it, something quieter and unfamiliar bloomed in Lily’s chest. Gratitude. Affection.
“You know,” she said between shaky breaths, “everyone in here probably thinks we’re mad.”
James tilted his head, “It’s your fault. You’re the one who snorted like a hippogriff.”
“I did not!”
“You did!” He jabbed a finger toward her, grinning like a child caught sneaking sweets before dinner. “Admit it, Evans. That was epic. Snort-of-the-century. People should pay admission to see that.”
Lily groaned, but there was a smile tugging at her lips. “You’re an idiot.”
“I’m an entertaining idiot,” James said, the apple juice carton still clutched like a trophy beside him. “And besides, I think you secretly enjoy it. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone… except maybe the Prophet. They love a feel-good story.”
Lily’s grin softened. She leaned back against the trolley, looking at him with something closer to fondness than teasing now. “How do you do it?”
He raised a brow. “Do what?”
“Make everything feel ridiculous in the best way possible. Even this.”
James blinked at her, startled, then smiled slowly, a quieter, warmer smile that didn’t quite reach the mischief in his eyes but had its own kind of gravity. “It’s my greatest talent.”
Behind him, the speakers began to swell with that insufferable, bouncy horn section.
James leaned a little closer, his voice softer now, falling perfectly into the lull of the melody. “But truth be told, Evans, I think it’s easier when you’re around. So really, you have to take some credit here.”
“How can I tell you about my loved one?” Paul chirped, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.
The sound of his voice—so similar to James’s in its relentless, irritating optimism—was usually enough to make Lily want to hex the record player. But as she looked at James, whose messy hair was currently backlit by a fluorescent light that made him look like a very disheveled angel, the song started to make sense. A horrible, wonderful, terrifying kind of sense that made her heart squeeze inside her chest.
Dear reader, a heart-squeeze is a physiological anomaly. It occurs when your chest decides to become several sizes too small for the organs contained within it.
I fell in love with a woman who experienced a heart-squeeze while watching a particularly clumsy puppy attempt to climb a staircase. She spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of bewildered melancholy, unable to explain why a creature with four legs and no coordination had caused her such emotional distress.
She also—and it pains me to even write the words—was a devotee of the Cult of McCartney. She possessed every record, every single, and, most devastatingly, a poster of Paul from the White Album era that she insisted had "kind eyes." I spent years trying to convince her that those were not "kind eyes," but the eyes of a man who was calculating exactly how many meaningless syllables he could cram into a chorus before the public realized it was just unintelligible gibberish.
She would spin Ram on Sunday mornings, dancing through the kitchen with a spatula as if Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey was a masterpiece of avant-garde composition rather than a disjointed fever dream about butter and tea. I would sit at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of black coffee and a mounting sense of betrayal, while she sang along to the harmonies.
"How can you hate it?" she would ask, spinning past me with a laugh that, much like Potter’s, was dangerously contagious. "It’s a good album. It’s supposed to make you feel happy."
I did not feel happy. I felt the gravity of the Earth pulling me toward a respectable, well-earned grave. Still, she would pull me up, forcing me to sway to a 4/4 beat that felt like a personal insult to my intellect.
But I digress. This is not my story. This is Lily and James’s story, which is—at this exact moment—becoming a series of unfortunate sentiments involving a great deal of eye contact and a very questionable bassline.
I should be telling you about the danger of their situation—how the cold floor led to a localized case of numbness, or how the store manager was currently squinting at them from behind a display of discounted sponges. I should be warning you that love is a bonfire, pleasant and warm, until you realize your sleeves are beginning to singe, but somehow you have no intention of moving away from the heat, leaving you in a heap of ash.
Instead, I am forced to report that the silly love song had claimed another victim.
Lily felt her heart squeeze again, triggered by the way James looked at her—not with the arrogant swagger of a Quidditch captain, but with a raw, bright-eyed wonder that suggested she was the most interesting thing he had ever seen, more fascinating than even the most cryptic ingredient on a bag of prawn cocktail crisps.
She nudged him again, lighter this time, her shoulder lingering against his just a second too long to be accidental. “Well, you’re lucky you’re insufferable and charming,” she said, her voice competing with the upbeat rhythm. “Otherwise I’d never put up with it.”
He let out a breathy laugh, more gentle than the last, and his eyes sparkled in time with the percussion. “Insufferably charming, you mean.”
Paul asked once more: “What's wrong with that? I'd like to know...”
Lily looked at James, and then at the floor, and then back at James. She realized, with a sinking feeling that felt suspiciously like floating, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with silly love songs, or Paul fucking Mccartney, or even worse, James Potter.
I am going to commit a rather heinous crime—a violation of literary decency—by sharing yet another agonizingly long excerpt from my ongoing, unpolished, unfinished, and unpublished wip, "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything."
It has been accurately described by those with semi-functioning moral compasses (myself) as the "worst marauders fic of all time."
Instead of reading this absolute dumpster fire, I suggest you instead spend your evening color-coding your sock drawer, or perhaps reading a pamphlet regarding the migration patterns of geese. Either activity would be infinitely more productive and significantly less likely to cause permanent psychic damage than the atrocity I am about to present.
Sincerely,
Your humble, masochistic narrator
Broom cupboards at Hogwarts are what lawyers call “repeat offenders.” Year after year, term after term, trial after trial, they are dragged into the courtroom of adolescent mischief with the same damning evidence: mussed hair, rumpled uniforms, and the sort of expressions that suggest the occupants were not, in fact, reorganizing brooms.
One might ask why Hogwarts has so many broom cupboards in the first place. The charitable explanation is that the Founders believed in cleanliness. The less charitable—and infinitely more accurate—explanation is that the Founders, in their endless mischief, constructed a small army of broom cupboards knowing full well that centuries of students would treat them not as storage spaces but as dens of chaos, lust, and terrible decision making.
It is a matter of public record that:
Case #119 involved two Ravenclawas and a suspiciously sticky jar of Honeydukes Fizzing Whizbees.
Case #1578 featured a Hufflepuff who swore up and down that he had simply “tripped” into the arms of a Gryffindor prefect, and that their lips meeting repeatedly was, and I quote, “just physics.”
Case #2340 saw five Slytherins attempting to host a raunchy and rather frightening “band rehearsal” inside a cupboard barely large enough for a mop and a dustpan.
And now, here we are at Case #3942, in which James Potter and Delilah Cameron stand accused of turning yet another broom cupboard into a crime scene of hormonal catastrophe.
“Oh. My. God!” Florence squealed, which was not the proper reaction to discovering a crime scene but certainly a common one.
James’s head jerked up like he’d been doused in cold water. He practically leapt off of Del, his cheeks flushed crimson. His lips were swollen, his chest rising and falling too quickly, and his eyes darted straight to Lily.
Del, by contrast, was as cool as a mastermind caught red-handed but utterly unbothered. She smoothed her skirt, smiled sweetly, and said, “Oh! Um—hi! Sorry—er, we were a little…caught up.”
Caught up?
Caught up!?
Lily’s brain supplied about fifteen more accurate verbs: pawing, mauling, groping.
I, however, would like to submit into evidence a few additional ones:
- face-mashing
- tongue-wrestling
- kissing so vigorously one might require physical therapy to recover
And my personal favorite:
- the ancient ritual of trying to inhale one another’s souls through means of mouths
None of these terms are particularly pleasant to imagine, but unfortunately, dear reader, it is my duty to provide them.
Now, If I had to draft an official case file for this horrific event, it might look something like this:
Case File #3942-B: The Great Broom Cupboard Tragedy
Date: Approximately Too-Late-O’clock
Location: East Wing Corridor, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft, Wizardry
Reporting Officer: Anonymous (but very handsome and perpetually annoyed)
Victim(s): Fairwater, Florence — Prefect, upright citizen, now thoroughly entertained
Evans, Lily — Prefect, upright citizen, now emotionally compromised
Perpetrator(s): Potter, James — Shirtless, hair criminally unkempt
Cameron, Delilah — Serial flirt, unrepentant
Observed Crimes:
- Oral Trespassing of the First Degree
- Felonious Fondling in a Confined Space
- Reckless Endangerment of Uniform Buttons
- Grand Larceny of Oxygen
- Attempted Esophageal Burglary
- Second-Degree Mandible Jousting
- Mutual Suffocation via Saliva Exchange
- Unauthorized Spelunking of the Nasal Passages (nearly)
- Public Indecency with Intent to Emotionally Traumatize Evans, Lily
Chief Complainant: Evans, Lily — badge wielding, furious, currently suppressing the urge to scream into her sleeve
Status: Open. Ongoing. Likely to result in shouting, point deductions, and the slow painful deterioration of Lily Evans’s sanity
Filed, begrudgingly, because apparently this is my job now.
But of course, a case file only tells you so much. A case file is cold, clinical, sterile—fit for archives, not hearts. And this particular crime, dear reader, was not sterile. It was sticky. Sticky with shame, sticky with heat, sticky with that terrible, traitorous thing called jealousy.
And so, as any responsible investigator must do, I took the liberty of reconstructing the events in their proper courtroom setting—where the suspects might be cross-examined, the charges properly tallied, and the full extent of Lily Evans’s emotional breakdown placed on the official record.
Which brings us to: Case #3829: Lily Evans vs. Her Own Traitorous Hormones.
The scene is as follows: James Potter, half-dressed and entirely flushed, Delilah Cameron, perfectly calm and perfectly smug, and Lily Evans—Prefect, prosecutor, executioner, and unbeknownst even to herself, the accused.
Florence, of course, takes the role of court stenographer, because squealing “Oh. My. God!” so loud the whole castle can hear it deserves to be carved into the official record.
James, the defendant, stands at the podium with his shirt half-open like a criminal caught mid-heist (the heist in question being Lily’s ability to think straight.) His hair looks as if he has been electrocuted by Cupid himself. His lips— swollen. His chest—unreasonably golden. His freckles—illegally placed. His abs—so criminally defined that, had there been true justice, they would have been behind bars long before this trial began.
Del is the accomplice. She adjusts her skirt, and delivers her testimony with a dazzling smile, which is the legal equivalent of pleading the Fifth.
And then there is Lily. Judge, jury, prosecutor—yet also, to her own horror, the most compromised witness of all, because the moment she looks at James Potter there on the podium, shirtless and guilty, she nearly sentences herself to death.
“Fifteen points,” Lily declares, wielding her prefect badge like a gavel. “Each.”
James blinks, scandalized. “What?”
“You heard me.”
James objects, loudly. “Fifteen points? Fifteen!? Evans, that’s—that’s ridiculous! You can’t be serious—”
“Overruled,” Lily snaps.
Del places a hand on James’s shoulder like a defense attorney guiding her client. Lily, seeing this, immediately raises the fine, “Twenty.” Then before she can even stop herself, “Plus three days detention for contempt of court.”
The courtroom gasps. Florence whispers, “Your honor, that’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?
“A bit harsh? It’s borderline cruel!” James shouts.
Del—oh, Del—merely laughs, her eyes flicking toward Lily with a sharp, knowing glint. Like she’d cracked the case herself and saw all of the cracks beneath the judge’s sentencing.
This makes Lily’s blood boil in her ears.
“You know, Potter,” she snaps, her voice trembling with fury, “I’m just so sorry to have interrupted your little broom cupboard escapade that I feel compelled to make it up to you.”
James blinks.
“Thirty points.”
This is the precise moment Lily Evans would lose her grip on reality and become, in judicial terms, unhinged. In fact, the record shows she would regret those words immediately.
“You’re insane!” James barks, “You can’t do that!”
”As a matter of fact, I can.”
He opens his mouth to object once more, but Lily cuts him off with another bang of the gavel.
“Do you want me to make it fifty?”
Gasps!
Cries of injustice!
Someone shouts, “Objection, your honor! He’s too handsome for this to be legal!”
James, meanwhile, looks ready to appeal to the Supreme Court of Gryffindor Tower, yet his jaw snaps shut. He fumbles with his buttons and drags his shirt closed.
Del tugs at his sleeve, calm as a criminal walking free on technicality. “Fair enough, your honor. We broke the law. Come on, James, let’s not make this worse.” She smiles at Lily once more—sweet, knowing, triumphant, like she had just committed the perfect crime.
Lily’s every nerve lights like a match, and her fists clench with the thought that she would burn this whole courtroom to the ground before admitting what her treacherous heart had just screamed when she saw his bare chest.
The verdict was swift: guilty. Sentence: thirty points from her own house, plus the quiet, endless torment of knowing James Potter looked good. Too good. So good that even Lily Evans—brilliant, composed, merciless Lily Evans—couldn’t quite keep her eyes where they were supposed to be.
As Del leads James out of the courtroom, the case closes with a final ruling, carved invisibly across Lily’s mind;
She hates him.
She hates herself.
And she hates—more than anything—that the jury of her own thoughts keeps replaying James’s bare chest like a bloody McCartney song she can not get out of her head.
Court adjourned.
Or is it?
Dearest reader, allow me to write into record the Sentencing of Lily Evans, by Lily Evans, delivered in the merciless Court of Her Own Mind:
Count One: Involuntary Staring.
Guilty.
Sentence: seeing the image of James Potter’s bare chest in the golden light of her wand, no parole.
Count Two: Heart Rate Misconduct.
Guilty.
Sentence: heart hammering like a woodpecker trapped in her ribcage, to continue indefinitely.
Count Three: Harboring Evidence.
Guilty.
Sentence: seeing freckles on his shoulder and collarbones and cataloguing them in memory against her will.
Count Four: Treason Against Logic.
Guilty.
Sentence: an endless loop of mental objections (“he is arrogant, he is insufferable, he is the worst boy alive”) immediately overruled by a single, traitorous thought (“he looks ridiculously good with no shirt on.”)
Count Five: Hypocrisy in the First Degree.
Guilty.
Sentence: continuing in this moment to tell herself she hates James Potter while secretly feeling something very much not hate when she sees the way his jaw catches the light.
The jury—Lily, of course, begs for the court of her own mind for leniency. “Surely,” she argues, “this is only temporary. A moment of weakness. Hormones are a disease, your honor.”
But the judge—Lily’s own furious pride—is unmoved. The gable comes down hard: sentenced to think James Potter is really really fucking attractive without consent.
It is here that I must remind you that broom cupboards are not neutral spaces. They are traps. They lure in unsuspecting adolescents with the promise of privacy and then present them, flushed and guilty, to the nearest prefect like a stage play already at its climax.
So if Lily Evans looked upon James Potter, shirtless and golden, and felt her blood boil with the impossible injustice of it all, it is not entirely her fault. She was caught in the snare of a repeat offender.
Still, a cupboard does not get detention. A cupboard cannot be docked thirty points. And so Lily, in her fury, did what any good prefect/prosecutor/judge/insanely jealous person would do: she shifted the punishment onto the defendants—while silently sentencing herself to a lifetime of replaying the evidence in her head.
Court adjourned, for real this time.
(Until the next cupboard.)
Lily stood in the corridor, every nerve in her body alight with fury—fury for herself—because she couldn’t fathom why she had just acted like that? Why the sight of James bloody Potter’s bare skin, James bloody Potter’s mouth on someone else's, James bloody Potter’s anything—could unravel her this much.
There are two things no teenager is ever prepared for: a) their first heartbreak, and b) the sight of their long time nemesis shirtless. Both are equally devastating.
“Lily! What the hell was that?” Florence demanded the second Del and James disappeared down the corridor. Her voice was half-humor, and half-scandalized.
Lily snapped her head toward her, her jaw clenched so tightly it almost ached. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Florence’s eyes went wide. “That was not nothing, that was—you nearly just docked fifty points from your own house over a snog!”
Lily ignored her, her fists balled so tightly her nails dug crescents into her palms. She spun on her hell and started walking, fast, her badge glinting faintly in the light.
“Where are you going? We’ve still got patrols!” Florence called after her.
“Do them yourself,” Lily barked without slowing.
Ah, young love. It ruins patrols, friendships, sleep schedules, and occasionally entire wars.
But we’ll get to that part later…
She stormed back to the dorms, her fury pounding in her veins like wildfire.
If you’ve never stormed into a room in such a way that the furniture looked personally offended, then you have never been sixteen.
By the time she closed the door behind her, careful not to wake the girls, her face was hot, her skin prickling, her stomach twisted in a knot of something ugly and unfamiliar.
The knot is called “jealousy,” and it is the most humiliating ailment known to man. People would rather admit to dragon pox.
She yanked her satchel open, pulling out the battered parchment she kept tucked in her Transfiguration textbook. Her list. Her carefully cultivated, ever-growing compilation of reasons she would never, ever in a million years like James Potter.
The parchment crackled like it knew what she was about to do. Her quill snapped against the inkwell as she dipped it, pressing so hard she nearly tore through the paper:
Reason #324: Caught him in a stupid fucking broom cupboard with his stupid fucking shirt off snogging Delilah fucking Cameron.
She stabbed the period so violently a blotch of ink bled out across the parchment.
(If ink blots could scream, this one would have.)
Her hand hovered, shaking. Her breath came in shallow bursts.
Why was she so furious?
A stupid question, really. One doesn't ask a bonfire why it burns. It simply does.
Still, this was James bloody Potter. The boy who hexed her shoes to sing Celestina Warbeck every time she walked back in first year, the boy who had tackled her (twice!) because he lost his cat, the boy who lived to irritate her on a near-professional level. He was the absolute last person she should care about.
So why did it feel like someone had poured molten lava into her chest?
She threw the quill down and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. The image was branded there, seared onto the inside of her skull: Del’s perfectly manicured hands skimming down the plane of his chest like she’d memorized the path. The way she hadn’t even looked ashamed. How she’d smiled—serene, confident, dazzling—as though getting caught like that was just another Tuesday for her.
Delilah fucking Cameron.
Of course it had to be her.
Not some random Hufflepuff Lily could brush off. Not some faceless Ravenclaw she didn’t even know. No—it had to be Del. Perfect Del, with her perfect hair, her perfect cheekbones, her perfect laugh that teachers never seemed to scold her for using too loudly.
Perfect, Pureblooded Del, who floated through the halls like she owned them, who smiled like the world bent toward her just to keep her happy.
Perfect, Pureblooded, Positively Happy Del, who looked at Lily with that soft, knowing glint in her eyes—as if she knew exactly what was going through Lily’’s head, as if she pitied her for it. Lily hated her as much as she hated the miserable pang of envy that was now lodged between her ribs.
Perfect, Pureblooded, Positively Happy, Irrevocably Beautiful Delilah Cameron, who was exactly the kind of girl that boys like James Potter dated, nonetheless snogged in broom cupboards.
Lily pressed her forehead to her knees, curling tight on her bed, her fury and humiliation burning hotter and hotter, She shouldn’t care. She didn’t care. James Potter was a pest, an arrogant, insufferable, maddening pest—and he could snog whoever he wanted.
So why the hell couldn’t she stop replaying the sight of his shirt slipping down his shoulders, the sharp line of his jaw tilted towards Del, the way his hands fumbled with his buttons (thank Merlin for the buttons, the only moment of relief in that entire humiliating scene), and his lips, red and swollen—
Stop.
It didn’t matter.
It wasn’t a problem.
Truly, it wasn’t.
The only problem was the blinding fact that James Potter ruined everything.
jily are so gentle none of u understand. like theyll act loud and teasing and playfight in public but in reality theyre so sweet with each other. its all soft caresses and tender kisses. theyre so soft and gentle and warm with each other and neither could imagine acting any other way
I must be an epouventable human being as i absolutely love this worst marauders fanfic of yours. We both are probably subhuman completely lacking of even an infinitesimal good tast in art or literature.
Signed
A masochist patiently waiting for more of your prose
Dear reader,
It is with great reluctance and an even greater sense of foreboding that I must acknowledge your message, as it confirms my worst suspicions: that the wretched prose I have unleashed upon the world has found a willing home in a reader as epouvantable as myself. The fact you actually enjoy reading my excerpts from the “worst marauders fic of all time,” (and I actually enjoy writing them) suggests a shared deficiency so profound that no amount of prescribed medication, court mandated therapy, or lengthy evaluations conducted by deeply concerned professionals could ever hope to mitigate, only catalogue in increasingly thick files.
And yet, (against my better judgment, and much to my personal distress) I must offer a small, begrudging note: thank you for your endurance. Your enjoyment, however ill-advised, implies that my literary crimes have not been committed entirely in vain, which is a troubling but faintly comforting thought.
That said, I am legally and morally obligated to remind you that you may stop reading at any time. For the sake of your mental health—and whatever professionals are currently monitoring it—I strongly encourage you to consider this option, if only briefly.
However, if one chooses to persevere in the face of such calamities, please know that I will continue writing this atrocious fanfic, you (against all better judgement) will continue reading it, and together we shall descend further into this literary disgrace.
kianamaiart
gracieabrams
titsay
discoholicmusic
2087
blakekathryn
gamechangershow
tangentwithtanner
