Jily Oneshots (pt2)

Hair

by scriibble

By the time Horace Slughorn's annual Slug Club Christmas party rolls around, James Potter hasn't fancied Lily Evans for months, thank you very much.

As 1977 nears its close, they're friends, certainly—good friends, even best friends, as she sometimes teases Sirius just to pique his faux indignance. They serve as co-Heads, laugh with their friends in the common room, study occasionally in the library, and patrol together on the evenings that their schedules mesh, but he doesn't fancy her. He's long since moved on from losing his train of thought when her skirt shifts even a fraction of an inch, or his heart fluttering with something as simple as a flick of her eyes his way, or his full body convulsing when she grazes his arm during mealtimes or nudges his shoulder teasingly. He can hold a bloody conversation with her without fumbling his words or bungling a joke or ruffling his hair—something fourteen-, fifteen-, and even sixteen-year-old James had never managed for long. He even succeeds in keeping his wits about him when she shows the occasional crack of something real and honest and vulnerable past the bright, cheeky, chipper brilliance of the way she approaches the world, and he acts relatively normally when those moments happen with more and more regularity. Sure, his throat sometimes threatens to close when her voice drops into shades of melancholy as she tells him quiet tales about her sister or confides in him some of the worst ways their Slytherin peers have given her a hard time over the years, but that's certainly normal, isn't it? It's normal because they're friends, best friends, and he cares about her and sees her as a complex person, and no longer solely as the star of the majority of his fantasies from puberty's onset.

And yet—

And yet it's her hair, her fucking hair, that finally undoes him. Swept up in a chignon, one so loose that soft tendrils escape around her face and brush against the exposed length of her neck and trail between her bared shoulder blades like curled flames, her hair unravels all of the growth he's managed in months' worth of stern lectures he's given himself behind the curtains of his four-poster bed. He can only stare at her, open-mouthed like a fish out of water, as she brushes a stray curl from her face in the crowded chaos of Slughorn's office. Truly, he feels like a fish out of water, one thrust out of comfortable denial and into distressing truth: of course he fancies her. He's never stopped fancying her, no matter his best efforts and furious attempts to the contrary.

"You look…different," he says eventually, words difficultly pulled from a throbbing throat. A second later, the idiocy of his statement—hammered further home by Sirius' sideways glance that reads really, mate?—floods his body with heat.

She doesn't so much as blink. "Thanks," she says dryly, a smile tugging up one corner of her lips. She's painted them a deep, captivating red that matches the shade of her hair near exact, and, fascinated, he can't tear his eyes away from the words that form there. "That's what I was going for. Different."

"Good." He hears Sirius snort behind him, a sound muffled into his fist, and just barely suppresses the urge to shove him. "Sorry. I meant good. You look good."

"Thank you." She passes a hand over one smooth hip, flattening down the navy fabric of her dress robes that sparkle in the dim amber light like a sinful stretch of stars. He spies a similar constellation in the soft scatter of freckles that grace her chest, freckles typically hidden by the careful buttons of her uniform. Chancing a glance at them—and then a second, and then a quick third—

Well, he's suddenly never appreciated Astronomy more.

"You could have at least tried to comb your hair," she adds. "You look like you just rolled out of bed."

The dam has burst. He can see no other explanation for the uncontrollable wave of longing that comes over him at the thought of bed and her, and it feels like the careful suppression of his feelings has only increased their fervor once recognized. Watching her red mouth form the word and her fingers linger over the soft swell of her hip, he can easily visualize her right there along with him. He can almost see her brilliant hair spread softly across his pillow; can almost feel the heat of her skin through the slick fabric of her robes; can almost hear his name from her lips, that same, taunting James that he's enjoyed hearing from the moment they'd—mostly—moved past surnames. Heat rises further up his neck, flooding his collar, and his tongue swells with an anxiety unique to her, an anxiety he hasn't felt in at least a year of denial that has stalked his waking hours only to collapse most nights when he chases sleep. He's done his best not to ruminate over those vivid dreams in the light of morning, insistent to his captive audience—his own tortured mind—that Hogwarts probably doesn't house a straight bloke who doesn't dream about Lily Evans once in a while.