Jily Oneshots (pt2)

Broken ovens, bad dates and other beautiful things

by over_caffeinated_introvert on archiveofourown.org

The fact that she was only on chapter one of her linear algebra book, yet somehow 50 pages in, was inducing a slight panic. She had three more chapters to study before her exam in the morning, and if they were all fifty pages long, Lily Evans was about to throw her maths book out the damn window and take a failing grade. She couldn’t even complain that she didn’t know what use the mind numbing subject was going to be in practical application of her field.

Lily’s first assignment had been to submit a paper on the real life applications of linear algebra and how life as humans knew it today would be impossible without studying it. As far as Lily was concerned, she was ready to go live in the stone ages and never look back because currently, her understanding of the subject was hopeless. If Lily had to go about 20 pages back to check what a stupid greek letter represented one more time , she was going to burst into tears... again .

At this point, if someone came up to her and said that all the bridges built in London are kept standing by a wand-waving wizarding community that exists as a secret society, or that facial recognition software uses a tiny elf who sits inside your device to see who comes in front of the camera she would accept their theory without question, declare the subject to be a farce, thank them for putting her out of her misery, and go get some much needed sleep.

And yet here she was, fifty pages into linear algebra with no sense of how the problems worked and that made her want to rip her hair out in frustration.

Lily picked up her phone to google some good resources to study but then she remembered that google used linear algebra to sort it’s searches and felt an overwhelming sense of frustration towards everything in life. It felt like the universe was punishing her for thinking herself to be of above average intellect. She felt like chucking her phone out, along with her book, but then Lily remembered that she couldn't afford to buy either of them again seeing as she was a poor university student running on zero sleep and anxiety.

Realizing that she was not focusing on her studying in any productive way, Lily slammed her book shut. She stared out across her tiny flat to the kitchen where she kept all her baking supplies. If there was anything that helped Lily calm down, it was baking cookies. Lily stood up promptly from her sofa and gave in to the itching need to mix ingredients together into a tasty treat. She had about twenty five different recipes memorized and she didn’t even pause to think as she started gathering bowls from underneath her cabinets. Once she had bowls lined up she started gathering eggs, flour, sugar and all the other things she needed to make her favorite double chocolate chip cookies.

All too soon she’d gotten lost in a trance of mixing up cups of flour and softened butter together. She remembered to add her secret ingredients (cinnamon and a dash of coconut) as she danced around the kitchen in her socks, licking her mixing spoon. She’d turned on her radio and it blasted happy tunes that pulled her out from her exam funk. She’d finished prepping the last bowl of double chocolate dough when she realized her fatal mistake.

Lily reached out to her oven to press the bake option, when her brain registered that her oven had been broken since Friday night. The maintenance blokes hadn’t stopped by yet to figure out why the old oven had suddenly stopped producing heat of any sort, leaving Lily to fend for herself all weekend. She’d been living off granola bars and sugary sweets for the last two days, unable to cook anything inside the oven or on the stove. It gave her an unholy type of glee, because she knew her sister would be absolutely horrified at the thought of living without a stove. Her dear sweet sister, who drank disgusting health milkshakes every morning and tried new diets every month, who looked down on Lily because Lily’s go-to stress management was baking cookies and eating the lot of them. Lily loved every minute of her sugary, unhealthy diet this weekend because the sweet lingering taste of shortbread and jam was almost as satisfying as imagining the disgusted look on her sister’s face.