sugar〻oneshots

james potter

lover by taylor swift was written about them what can i say 🤷‍♀️ ladies and gentlemen will you please stand? with every guitar string scar on my hand i take this magnetic force of a man to be my LOVERRRRR my heart's been borrowed and yours has been blue! all's well that ends well to end up with you! swear to be overdramatic and true to my lover!! and you'll save all your dirtiest jokes for meeee and at every tableeee i'll save you a seat loverrrr

James bursts into her life when she is eleven years old, and she hates him right away. He's cruel and smug, and Severus tells her to stay away from him, so she does. He knows these things much better than her.

This is also the reason she finds it so hard to understand why Remus loves him so entirely. The James he tells her about, who cried the first time he shaved, is so different from the James she knows, who makes her feel like a prize for him to win and thinks being mean is funny.

But Remus is talking about him, again, and his eyes are so fond she could cry. "I was in the hospital wing for a week last month, I'm sure you know, and James brought me all the notes I missed and-and a box of my favorite chocolates. He's just the best."

Lily tries not to show her shock. "He did?"

He gives her a knowing smile. "He takes good care of me, Lily. He's good."

She finds it hard to believe.

Lily does not truly see the good in James Potter until her fifth year.

No one has told her what's wrong, yet, but she hasn't seen anyone since she heard Sirius telling James, quietly, "I fucked up."

James comes back, finally, early in the morning. She knows he hasn't slept, but her hand clutches his arm and turns him back before she can change her mind. She almost feels guilty. "What happened? Please, Potter."

He looks like he could start crying any moment. He stares at her, and right then Lily hates that his eyes aren't sparkly like a prince in a storybook. That's how she always pictured them. James sighs. "You know Remus is a-"

"A werewolf?" she cuts him off. She doesn't even realize her hand is still gripping his forearm. "Yes. Yeah. I mean-I'm not an idiot."

"Sirius is-he fucked up." He tells her what happened, and Lily kind of hates how gentle his voice is. She wants to be the one taking care of him. "I w-I already took care of Snape and I d-I'm not sure where Sirius is. I don't know what to do."

Lily only realizes her hand is still rubbing his forearm because he starts shaking. She has to force herself to let go.

She doesn't really see much of any of them other than Remus, after that. She sleeps in the common room with him, most nights, and he cries.

The first time she talks to James again, actually, is at a party. Sort of. She had been trying to stop a very drunk Remus and an equally drunk Marlene from kissing her (they really loved Lily, apparently, after a bottle or three of firewhiskey), and performing a duet of Don't Go Breaking My Heart, but well, they didn't sound half bad, and she was kind of tired of being their mother.

She had left the room and, immediately, a very stressed James whipped around, breathed a sigh of relief, and gave this pathetic little smile.

"Oh. Hey, Evans." He runs a hand through his hair. "Didn't really feel like performing with Remus tonight."

"I can see that," she says carefully, a hand still on the doorknob. "Why not?"

He gives her a small shrug. "I um-I've been kind of lonely." His voice is weak, and she finally realizes he's been crying. She realizes a lot of things about him. "My best mates hate each other, you know, I don't really know how to handle it."

"Yeah." It comes out just as small. She thinks it doesn't fit either of them.

For a moment, they're both quiet, just them and the moonlight on James' face. He could've been beautiful if he didn't make her so mad. But then she says, "Do you want me to sit with you?"

She's not sure why the shock on his face hurts so much.

"...Yeah. Um, please." So she sits next to him. Their knees touch and she doesn't even move. He falls asleep on her shoulder.

She doesn't think James remembers that, though, or if he does he doesn't mention it.

He goes back to being a jerk. Lily goes back to hating him as wholly as she can. It's always a little bit less, though, because sometimes when she looks at him she just sees a boy with gentle eyes that never gets taken care of.

Well, things change when she returns for their seventh year. James opens her cart to show her his head boy badge. Lily is pretty sure she screamed.

She doesn't really hate it, though. In fact, she almost enjoys it. She finds out James will do anything to make people laugh and that he likes to make girls feel beautiful. He figures out exactly what Lily finds funny and one day, after a particularly awful sex joke, he tells her he likes her smile. Lily doesn't feel like she's just a prize anymore.

Well, Lily can't pinpoint when her heart decided, apparently, that they were done hating him. If she had to put a date on it - it'd be sometime in February, 1977.

They were doing the nightly rounds. She thinks the conversation had started on Sirius and ended with siblings (the same thing, to James. That's how they got there).

And well, James got her started on Petunia and she guesses she hadn't realized just how much of that she had bottled up, because soon she's ranting about how unfair it is. And James is still listening.

"Do you think I'm a freak?" she blurts. It just bursts out of her. She realizes she'd still worried everyone thought that.

James looks appalled. "What? No! I-I've been asking you out all these years for a reason, Lily. It was never a joke. Merlin, what even-I love you."

And Lily laughs. She's wholly, entirely, in love with James Potter. She kisses him.