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jilymicrofics · 1 year ago

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Look who’s back! Angst ahead, pay attention to the CWs!

@jamesunderwater

@jilymicrofics - sept. 18th: thaw - words: 834 - cw: mental illness, self-harm

Storms

The vegetables were disappearing in the blur of her tears, but she didn’t care. Thwunk, thwunk, twunk. The knife kept coming down, and each time she thought, it’s going to be my finger this time Thwunk this time Thwunk this time Thwunk.

“Lily!” His voice did nothing to disrupt her rhythm. This time - thwunk, this time - thwunk. Though in the back of her mind, she did picture him calling out to her from the top of a lighthouse, while her boat kept steering right for the rocks below him. She knew this was how he saw her. But James wasn’t on the boat; he couldn’t see that it was sinking, anyway.

She still hadn’t blinked the tears away when he grabbed her wrist, pulling the knife from her grasp. “You weren’t even looking, Lils! Please.” The desperation in his voice was heartbreaking, stabbed through her like the knife should have. Lily blinked.

Her husband (husband, husband, husband, husband, she rolled the word around in her mind like a piece of sweet, forbidden chocolate) with his wild hair, his skewed glasses, his stained night shirt, made unrecognizable by the stiff flat stretch of his mouth, the lines of worry sliced between his eyebrows. She wondered if he thought she looked unrecognizable, too.

“If you need me to help you with something, just ask! What are you even doing, dicing vegetables in the middle of the night?” James put the knife in the sink and pulled the cutting board away from her, already starting to package up her work before she could even tell him what it was for.

Lily would have answered him a few weeks ago, would have told him the whole thing in one breath. I was staring at the ceiling fan go round and round hoping it would make me tired, and then I tried to time my breaths with two rotations of the fan, and then I was counting my breaths, and I got up to 33 but then my foot itched so I tried to itch it with the bedsheet slowly enough that it wouldn’t wake you, but that made me lose count on my breaths and then I couldn’t get the blasted itching to stop and then I swear, James, I swear it started crawling up my leg, the itch did, it was coming after me, I just knew it, so I had to get out of bed, you know, to get away from it, and I did manage to slip out quietly, without waking you, I was proud of that, but then the itching leapt from my foot to my hand so I scratched and I scratched but I was so scared that nothing was going to stop it so I thought, I’ve got to do something with my hands, I’ve got to do something that would scare the itch away. So I thought, stew. James will wake to a proper pot of stew and the itch will leave and it will have been a good night in the end, and it worked, you know, chopping a bit carelessly, threatening the itch like that, it disappeared altogether.…I can’t tell you why that made me cry, though. I just felt so lonely, once it left.

Instead she said, “I don’t know,” and chewed her lip, because she’d learned it was much easier to be looked at with sadness than alarm.

A tupperware lid snapped closed with a pop! She bit down her lip to draw blood and sucked hard, waiting for him to turn around. Why had she scared the itch off? It only wanted to be near her. “I wanted to make stew.”

James turned away from the tupperware and met her eyes. His were so heavy - too heavy for twenty-one, just a boy playing lighthouse keeper without any experience with storms. The old Lily inside of her wailed at the sight of him. She sobbed so loudly her temples throbbed with the pressure of it. She banged against the glass walls in her mind, crying, Look at his eyes, he’s crumbling! I have to hold him, I have to... I have to get out of here. I am going to die if I can’t touch him, please! I have to get out of here. How do I get out of here? As if she could manifest it into reality, she pictured reaching out to take his head in her hands, his arms pulling her into him with the desperation of a first breath after nearly drowning, and with these simple touches, everything healed.

Lily thought it was almost funny he was so worried about the knife, when it was these vestiges of her old self that would likely kill her in the end.

“Stew?” James had righted himself, burying whatever had been in his eyes before. Crumbling like a poorly built house in an earthquake. Her husband, so young and foolish, believing he could withstand her destruction. “Sure, yeah. Let’s get the roast out to thaw.”

#jilymicrofics #maker: itsjamespotter #maker: jamesoutofwater #jily #jple #James potter #lily evans

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jilymicrofics · 2 years ago

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A smutty order! Jily treat on a Friday from @itsjamespotter

Limited Vocabulary

based on the @jilymicrofics prompt, urge. word count: 2,625. NSFW.

They’d been lucky to make it out in one piece—though one could argue that James was hardly in one piece, exactly, with a deep gash through his forearm and cuts from debris peppering his face. Lily had been on the other side of the pub, battling with two masked death eaters simultaneously, heart pounding, desperately trying not to think about James on the other side of the building. Last she’d seen, he was fighting off an attack from both sides, but was managing very well considering. If he hadn’t been such a talented spellcaster Lily would have been more worried, but she’d been in enough battles with him to know that James could hold his own against two opponents with fairly little effort. She, on the other hand, gifted as she was, didn’t excel nearly as well at dueling, and needed to keep her mind on the present moment in order to not be blasted across the room…or worse. Every time they were in a battle it was clear that their adversaries were much more interested in ending her life than they were anyone else’s, especially if her partner was a pureblood. This fact had resulted in many fights between her and her friends, especially James, Sirius, and Marlene, all of whom felt it was their responsibility to focus on defending her in a fight. She’d finally convinced them to focus on their own battles by emphasizing that if they died for her benefit, she’d never forgive them. And they were all much more likely to make it out alive if they kept focused on their own fight.

Which is why she’d been being a hypocrite as she worried over James in the middle of sending a hex toward one of her assailants, meanwhile ducking a spell from the other. She’d just begun to gain some focus back when a loud crash echoed across the room, and in the moment she turned to see what had happened, a spell from one of her opponents flew past her head, missing her by inches. She didn’t care—across the room from her lay James, crumpled just beyond a large pile of rubble. She darted to him, ducking spells while throwing her own, aware that it was now four against one, aware that she was probably moments away from both of their deaths. When she made it to James’s side, a brief thought crossed her mind that the fates must have some stake in keeping them alive. In the next breath, she was apparating them to the safe house they’d been assigned in case of emergency, which had already been protected by wards to keep them from being followed.

James was still unconscious when they appeared on the floor of the dark living room. Lily felt his chest for a heartbeat, the rise and fall of it assuring her enough to take a breath. She lit the sconces in the room with a flick of her wand, ignited the fireplace beside them with another, and then got to work. She’d been apprenticing as a healer for nearly a year when the war took a turn for the worse, and it was no longer safe for her to be out in public. But in that time she’d learned enough to be one of the most useful members of the Order, at least when it came to tending the wounded. By the time James awoke, she’d fully healed the cuts on his face, and his arm was tightly wrapped. It would be sore for a day or two, but would mend fine.

“What…?” He looked around, groggy, until his eyes landed on hers in the firelight. “Are you alright?” His voice pitched up in worry, and James sat up against the cushions of the couch, placing an arm on hers.

She laughed at him, her throat suddenly tight. “I’m fine, obviously—I’m the one sitting up, aren’t I?”

He didn’t seem to find this funny, only breathing out a sigh of relief. He looked around the room, taking in that they were safe now. “You got us out?”

She nodded, and swallowed hard as he stared at her. She’d never gotten used to the way he looked at her, with such admiration, with such love and tenderness. They’d been through so much together now, and yet nothing had happened beyond those looks. She never fully understood why, except that the war kept everyone so scared that the idea of letting oneself feel anything hopeful and good felt unnatural, or somehow unkind to those who they’d lost. Marlene had told her that she deserved happiness even in the darkness, that they all did, but somehow reaching for it felt impossible, scarier than being in battle against multiple death eaters. She could hardly stand to lose the love she already had—the idea of having anymore, and risking losing it too…it didn’t feel like a bridge she was ready to cross.

Read the rest on AO3.

#jilymicrofics #maker: itsjamespotter #2000 to 3000 words #jily #jple #jily smut #jily fic #james potter #lily evans

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jilymicrofics · 2 years ago

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@itsjamespotter you just tell us when it’s officially a @jilymicro-oops 😜

a jily microfic: May 3rd - Hagrid

word count: 1,971 - @jilymicrofics (just gonna keep tagging you until the chapters get beyond the microfic allotment xD)

It had been a very long night.

James had wanted to go after her, of course, and did at first. He watched her sea of hair fly around the corner and out of view, but being undressed himself, he couldn’t exactly leave the safety of the dark corridor without repercussions. And he didn’t much fancy meeting McGonagall in his birthday suit.

He dressed in a haze, replaying and replaying every moment, desperate to find where he’d gone wrong. At the end of it all - shirt half buttoned, trousers on, glasses found - he figured he’d been wrong to say yes at all. But say yes to what part? The first kiss? The second? Her hand pulling his under her skirt? Her undoing his shirt, the kisses she’d peppered all down his chest, whispering about how she’d always wondered? At what point had he been meant to say, No, wait, I’m confused because I’ve loved you for so long and I thought you couldn’t stand me, are you well? He’d measured her comfort by how easily she laughed, and the more they met, the faster she was throwing her head back, cheeks turning red with the exertion of it. James had even learned that when Lily Evans really found something funny, she let out tiny chuckles from the bottom of her stomach long after she’d stopped fully laughing. He knew that about her. He knew what she looked like standing in candlelight, the exact shapes the shadows made underneath her breasts, just how deep her belly button went, whether she preferred socks on or off (he’d found it quite daring that she took them off).

And yet, there was nothing for it. No way to talk himself back on this one. It may have only been his first time, but he knew enough that if a girl left crying when things were done, you had done something terribly wrong.

He couldn’t wake Sirius, who would want every detail from him, who would jump to his defense, who would insist they could fix it, together. But he did know Remus was patrolling the floor below them - they’d only managed to go uncaught this long thanks to his playing watchdog.

“Moony,” he whispered from beneath the cloak, and despite everything still gaining a small shot of satisfaction from the sight of his friend jumping slightly. (Remus was generally the least entertaining Marauder to spook - nerves of steel, that one.) Emerging from the invisibility cloak, Remus swatted his arm.

“Aren’t you supposed to be with Evans? It’s only one, you lot are generally at it till at least two.”

He must have seen the way James’s face fell, because he angled his body firmly towards his friend and said, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not…I’m not sure, honestly,” James pulled at the hair at the back of his head, face flushing now that he was saying any of it out loud. “We…we… And then she- I’m not sure what I did, Moony.”

Read the rest on AO3!

#jilymicrofics #jilymicro oops #maker: itsjamespotter #jily #jple #James potter #Lily evans

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jilymicrofics · 2 years ago

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All the angst!

But did we read that correctly @itsjamespotter? This is gonna become a @jilymicro-oops ?

a jily microfic - may 2nd: mourning

A/N: okay this is evidently turning into a greater fic, so I've named it and given it a banner, but the plan is to challenge myself to continue it each day with the jily microfic prompts. also...i am so sorry, in advance. @athenasparrow here is your continuation </3 thank you for reading!

a continuation of this fic! word count: 1607 - @jilymicrofics content warnings: underage drinking, underage sexual content, minor manipulation, implied parent death, implied parental abuse

leave out all the rest - linkin park Forgetting All the hurt inside you've learned to hide so well Pretending Someone else can come and save me from myself I can't be who you are I can't be who you are

Lily remembered the sag of his shoulders as he walked away, so caught in the image of it that she failed to blink until her eyes stung and watered. In all the years she’d known him, she had never heard James Potter’s voice sound in one moment so raw, so feral, and in the next so empty. Dead, as though he’d just finished burying her body and was looking down at the padded earth unfeeling.

She could handle his ferality. In fact, she’d hidden a smirk at first, her body finally coming back to life as he screamed at her - yes, I’ve made you feel something, now make me feel something. Tear me in two. But it was the emptiness that had her mind suspended in midair hours after he’d stormed off. “Good riddance,” he’d said. Good riddance good riddance good riddance good riddance. Yes, she was a phantom that needed banishing. He’d done a good thing.

The whole thing had not started off as an attempt to use him. Really, it had started with very little thinking on her part. She had returned from break determined not to shed another tear for a man who had done nothing but hurt her. Good riddance. Instead, she discovered it did not take much firewhiskey to turn her brain to static, that she could schedule patrols to always avoid Remus, that long, empty corridors filled with sleeping portraits were an excellent place for a prefect to drink unbothered late into the night.

And one night he showed up, seemingly out of thin air, voice loud and boisterous and always with her name at the tip of his tongue. “Evans! Now what is our diligent prefect doing on the stone floor at 2am?”

A multitude of universes hung in the air before her, and Lily will never really know why she chose the one in which she teased him into joining her, offered him her flask, and held her breath while his radiance poured warmth over her numbed body.

It was 4am and they’d spent the last 30 minutes impersonating Binns lecturing on the lewd sexual history of the Hogwarts founders when she noticed him staring, mouth open in a silent laugh, and what she should do next suddenly seemed clear.

“Where is this side of Perfect Prefect Lily Evans in the daylight hours?” He asked, genuine despite how he tried to tease.

She shrugged, smirking, “Maybe not everyone deserves to see this side.”

His eyebrows rose. “And I, the lowly James Potter, am deserving?”

“Evidently so.”

His eyes dropped to her lips for the briefest moment, and the anticipation she felt was the first thing in weeks to cut through the endless ache. She let him watch her eyes dart to his mouth, too, and saw the way his chest tightened as he held his breath. It was sweet, that he thought he could ruin the moment. That he thought he had any control at all.

She leaned forward, catching his eye, and there was hunger there. She felt it too, some creature that had been living inside her for who knew how long, more eager than she’d expected. She didn’t know, then, whose hand reached up first, who closed the final inch between them, only that a moment later his hand was in her hair and the heat of his lips on hers was better than any static the firewhiskey offered. She breathed his name between kisses and he groaned, losing whatever control he might have had before. He was pulling her on top of him and she was scrambling to feel his body and they were swimming, they were underwater, they had to be, how else could she feel nothing but his hands on her?

He’d stopped things, that first night. The gentleman she’d never expected, and didn’t want. But every night after they pushed things further, and soon she didn’t need the firewhiskey. The waiting to be with him each night was intoxicating enough, their looks across classrooms flooding her with desire, a dam against the rising current.

It had been six weeks of this, of meeting in quiet corridors and abandoned classrooms, of her pushing him against the wall before he could say a word, of him nervously slipping a hand up her skirt, of her leaving hickies just beneath his collar line, of him making her laugh even in the middle of the heat of it all, of her pulling back from a kiss just to see the way he grins when he opens his eyes and it’s her standing there.

But March 14th was her father’s birthday, and no amount of lust kept the thoughts at bay. He would have been 51, he would have been 51; good riddance good riddance good riddance good riddance.

When James found her that night, she was a few shots into her flask of firewhiskey and eagerly offered him some. “Are you alright?” he asked, and the concern in his voice made her want to slap him. He didn’t know. He didn’t need to know. No one did.

“Yes, and I’ll be much better when we’ve got some of those clothes off…” He rolled his eyes with a smirk, but she thought she noted a hint of falsity in it. “Drink up!” she declared, motioning to her flask in his hand.

He did, and she was grateful. They seemed to share the same buzz - the feeling that nothing could quite touch them, that time slowed and bowed to their every whim. They stood on abandoned desks and tables and declared the classroom their kingdom, giggled into each other’s arms at the childishness of it all. When things did start, it was somehow sweeter than usual. James touched her earlobe tenderly and she softened into his touch, sighing into their kiss. When he unbuttoned her blouse it wasn’t with the same impatience, and she felt each and every time his fingers brushed over her breasts. This was good - different, enough to distract her wandering thoughts. But she needed more.

They were pressed bare-chested together, he without any trousers, when she said it. “You–you do?” He stuttered, and she felt the hammering of his heart reverberate through her.

She stood on her toes to capture him in another kiss and said, “yes, please, James,” against his open mouth and when he moaned, she knew he’d acquiesce.

There was a wide-set bench at the back of the classroom they’d used before. It wasn’t without its awkward moments, but just before, when James had leaned up and looked down at her with the most earnest, caring eyes and asked if she was sure, she’d said, “Yes. I just want you,” and part of her had meant it. Most of her, though, just wanted to feel something different.

After, she was lying on his chest, and he was tracing images on her back, when she felt it. He traced a flower. And she remembered. And the sob escaped her before she could stop it.

“Lily?” James’s voice was almost frantic with worry as she scrambled off of him, holding a hand to her mouth. The tears fell, fell, fell, and she couldn’t stop them despite the embarrassment staining every inch of her. “Lily, what’s wrong?” He was reaching for her, but she was stumbling backwards, shaking her head.

“No,” was all she croaked out, and then it was her flying around the room trying to find her discarded clothing, and him chasing after her, and her shaking him off, and him with those eyes, devastated.

“Lily, I’m so sorry, I didn’t-”

“James, no, I’m - I’m sorry.” She didn’t meet his eye. Her shirt was buttoned haphazardly, her skirt crooked, socks gone. “I thought - but I can’t. I’m sorry.” And she left him standing there, naked, confused, and - he hadn’t been wrong - used.

They didn’t speak for five days.

James gave it every effort to meet her eye, to catch her between classes, even came to sit beside her during dinner in the Great Hall, but by the third day he’d evidently decided to respect her space. She still saw his eyes, though. Devastated, no matter where they were looking.

Then, one morning, he walked up to her so quickly that she didn’t have the chance to flee. “You’re in mourning.” No greeting, no preamble. He looked down at her on the stone bench and spoke as if he’d solved something. Not proud, but with some feeling like now he understood.

She stared at him for a very long time. How had he found out? And who was he, to think he knew anything at all? The affection she’d felt toward him slithered down her skin and pooled at her feet. He thought that because he’d had her body, he deserved her tears. That he could dry them.

“Fuck you, James Potter. You don’t know me.”

He faltered for a second, then seemed to recover. “Don’t I? Why didn’t you just tell me? Lily, I want to be there for you-”

She stood so suddenly that they were toe to toe, knees nearly knocking together. “Did I ask you to? No. I asked you to fuck me, and you did, and that’s that. Leave me alone.”

“Lily!” He’d called after her, and she could still hear it in his voice: care, hope. She threw up in the nearest bathroom before heading to Charms.

#jilymicrofics #maker: itsjamespotter #1000 to 2000 words #jily #jple #lily evans #james potter

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jilymicrofics · 2 years ago

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Jily angst coming your way from @itsjamespotter !

Passage - a Jily microfic

Author's note: I know this seems to paint them in a negative light, but I imagine that the mixture of being teenagers (who are inherently not the best communicators and have heightened emotions) and the stress of studying for N.E.W.T.s when you're about to be launched into a world strife with war could lead to a lot of meaningless arguments. So, have a bit of angsty jily and remember that they probably made up in an annoyingly cute way.

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“No, it does not make any sense!”

His voice was low, as if trying to coax her to lower hers. “No, Lily, it’s—it does, just—”

“James, I swear to god, if you talk down to me with that tone, I will—”

“I’m not talking down to you!” His voice raised, and he groaned, noticing as they fell into the same old pattern. He threw himself back into his chair, tossing his arms into the air in exasperation. History showed that, by this point, there was no stopping the landslide of the argument.

Lily turned her body towards him, eyes narrowing into daggers. “Oh, what, you’re fed up with me? God, you can be so condescending!” Her delicate hands held down the Transfiguration book, and for a moment he had an image of her chucking at him. Not that he thought she really would, but the anger of Lily Evans was not to be trifled with.

James’s eyebrows flew up at her derision, heat pooling at his cheeks. He’d been trying to help her understand the same damn passage for nearly 45 minutes, and while he understood she was frustrated, his patience was also nearing its end. “I’m being condesce--?” He shook his head, his jaw tightening. “You know what, Evans? Yeah, I’m fed up,” he said icily, standing. The look of shock on her face was a little too satisfying to him, but he shoved his guilt down as he grabbed his satchel. “Feel free to come find me when you’ve got your ego back in check.”

That last bit was really a terrible idea, he knew, but the two of them had a particular way of pushing each other past their limit. He winced as the high-pitched sound of her shriek flew at his back. “My ego?! James Potter!”

He walked out of the library just as Madame Pince started telling off the Head Girl for being such a terrible example. Immediately, any sense of satisfaction soured to shame.

@jilymicrofics

#jilymicrofics #maker: itsjamespotter #<500 words #jily #jple #james potter #lily evans

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