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whyaremyfandomssocruel · 2 months ago

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I just found your page and stalked all your writing lol, it’s absolutely amazing and I’m highly obsessed now!! from the prompt list for jily: “What are we?” + “I would like us to be more than friends.” (Head students era confession?)

oh you mean my favourite jily era??? my pleasure! ps uhhh pls don't count the words on this one

from this prompt list

James has thought about the moment at least once an hour, every day, for about two months now. Putting it into perspective like that makes him come face-to-face with the fact that he’s even more ridiculous than he’s usually comfortable admitting.

And James has always known he’s ridiculous.

The conversation plays out a million different ways in his head, like a lucid dream he can only sort of control and only up until a certain point because it’s Lily, and he stopped trying to predict her next move long ago.

It’s why she always beats him at chess. He knows her—really knows her, not like he used to think he did—but he’ll never be able to anticipate what she’ll say or do. Full of surprises, she is.

Somehow, though—his brain, in the infinite possibilities it’s constructed, failed to think of even one situation in which she would be the one asking him.

“What are we?” she asks, sitting on the bench next to him outside Scrivenshaft’s, her thermos of tea warming her hands. She's wrapped in her Gryffindor scarf with a green knit cap pulled down over her ears, auburn curls spilling out and flying around with each heavy gust of the biting January wind. She's perfect and he just—

Stares at her.

“Okay,” she says, laughing, then takes a long sip of her tea, her gaze shifting to the empty street in front of them. It’s still early, so most of the Hogsmeade crowd is either having a lie-in or getting breakfast at the Three Broomsticks.

James and Lily got out of the castle as quickly as they could in order to make the most of their day. Day, not date, because they’re friends. Sort of. Most of the time. Except for when she flirts with him and he flirts back and that one time last week when he’s almost positive she was going to kiss him and that other time last week he is positive he was going to kiss her. And all the other moments that makes him absolutely lose his head.

“Never mind,” she says, and she’s bloody smiling. “I thought we…” Another slow, agonising sip. “Never mind.”

James feels the panic set in, just like when they play chess. It’s his move, he knows it’s his move, but which way can knights move, and how many spaces can bishops take, and—

“You’re freaking out,” she observes casually. He doesn’t know when she looked back at him.

“What?” he manages, the word sounding squeaky.

She might smile again, then. He can’t be sure, because she’s lifted the thermos back up to her lips.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I thought you were ready.” She tilts her head, studying him. “I’ve been trying to pick a good moment, you know. To talk about this. But…” She shrugs. “Guess I was wrong.” She caps her thermos of tea and stands from the bench then, looking down at him. “Wanna go to Honeyduke’s?”

“Do I want to—” He shakes his head, blinking rapidly, then looks up at her, sharply. “Huh?”

Lily laughs softly. “It’s almost ten,” she says, like this was the root of his confusion. “We can be first to the Pick ‘N Mix for once.”

She’s talking about candy. She’s just asked him to define their entire complicated relationship and then—without waiting even a moment for him to catch his breath—started talking about candy.

“Can you…” He frowns, struggling to find his words. (Struggling to remember how to breathe.) “Sit down…please,” he finally manages.

Thankfully, she doesn’t argue, settling back down on the bench beside him. He certainly doesn’t have the wherewithal to match wits with her right now if she chooses to be stubborn.

“I need a…a minute.”

“Okay,” she says, and pops the lid back off her thermos, gracefully pouring herself another shallow cup of tea. “You know,” she says, conversationally, “this works loads better than a heating charm. Marlene says I’m mad for lugging it all about Hogsmeade, but how else can I secure an infinite amount of tea to get me through the day? We don’t have a spell for that yet, do we?”

“Are you—” He breaks off and turns toward her on the bench. “Are you enjoying this?”

Her lips twitch up into a small smile. “Perhaps a little.”

He shuts his eyes tight and groans.

“I intend to be your girlfriend by the time we graduate, Potter,” she says, and he doesn’t know when she’s leaned toward him, but he can smell the peppermint tea on her breath and feel it tickle the hair near his ears. The bench creaks as she moves back away from him, taking his heart with her. “We’ve got, oh—” A pause. “Six more months. I’m not in a hurry.”

Not in a hurry. What the hell is wrong with him? He’s been waiting for this for six years. Well, perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but—this calls for being dramatic! She’s just admitted to wanting to be his girlfriend—his girlfriend!—and he’s fumbling the Quaffle so bad he’s about to be benched.

He can’t let this moment pass by without saying something.

“Girlfriend!” he blurts out

“Is that—” Her grin grows, even as her cheeks flush pink. “Was that an offer, or are you auditioning for the role of a caveman in a play I didn’t know Hogwarts was putting on?”

James wants to pull his hair out of his head. He wants to pull it out of his head and make a nest, so he can hide forever, like those bald little baby eagles he saw with his parents on the coast last summer.

“No, I want to—let’s talk.”

She sets the thermos on the bench between them and lifts up her hands, counting her fingers one at a time as her lips move wordlessly. “Wow. Six words.”

“Lily, can—you…”

“Okay, okay,” she says, with a giggle. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop taking the piss, I swear. Let’s talk.” Folding her hands in her lap, she looks at him expectantly. “Do you want to go first, or should I?”

He gives her a significant look, making her laugh again, but she nods.

“Alright,” she begins, “well I don’t have much to say, really.” She shrugs, her legs dangling back and forth over the bench, just shy of touching the snowy ground. “I like spending time with you. I think you’re ridiculously fit. You’re a good person and—I really want to be able to kiss you without wondering if it’ll ruin everything.”

James has always found most Muggle swears to be rather lacking in oomph, but now—

Jesus fucking Christ.

“Oh,” he says.

“So, Potter,” she drawls, nudging his shin with her foot, “what are we?”

“I would—” he starts, then pauses, clearing his throat and sitting up straighter. “I would…like us to be more than friends.”

“Oh,” she echoes, her foot hooking behind his on the ground in front of them.

“Lily.”

“Hm?”

“I’ve had a—a whole speech ready. For weeks.” he confesses. “But right now, my brain is…cold, I think. So I don’t want you to take my lack of…words…as a lack of enthusiasm. I’m…very enthused.”

Lily looks at him, jade eyes blazing. “Will I get to hear the speech in the near future?”

“Do you…want to?”

“I want to hear anything you have to say, Potter,” she says simply.

“Are you sure because—”

“Yes,” she replies, moving closer. Her wind-chapped lips stop a breath away from his. “What are we, James?”

He inhales deeply and doesn’t think again before murmuring, “Everything,” and closing the gap between them.

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whyaremyfandomssocruel · 3 months ago

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Do you think harry is more similar to lily or James

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

i think the assessment of harry's character which dumbledore gives to snape in deathly hallows is more or less the correct one:

“He is his father over again -” “In looks, perhaps, but his deepest nature is much more like his mother’s.”

which i think can be expanded upon really interestingly as an example of something which the series does really, really well - how it obscures the fact that lily is the key to the mystery right up until the last minute.

the things harry has in common with james - not only his looks, but his quidditch talent, his impulsivity, his disregard for the rules, his arrogance, his cunning, his beef with snape, his adoration of sirius, his belief that his uncle is faintly ridiculous, and his bold, flashy courage - are big and explicit and demonstrative, and the text lampshades that they're inherited from his father at every opportunity.

[and not only in how many characters mention that he looks like james. voldemort - for example - mentions james' demonstrative bravery - facing him "like a man" - every time he and harry interact; sirius and lupin never mention lily when discussing harry's personality, even when what they're talking about is how he's not like james.]

the text also goes out of its way to suggest that similarly big aspects of lily's character have not been inherited by her son - the most obvious example of which is that, in half-blood prince, the incandescent talent at potions which has slughorn raving about how like his mother harry is... is actually the result of harry cheating [and cheating from a textbook he's convinced for much of the book might have belonged to james].

the only thing the text emphasises again and again that harry has inherited from his mother are his eyes.

and - in doing this - the series is actually telling us something very clear about what it understands harry to have in common with lily.

eyes are a frequent motif throughout the text, which are almost always connected to the themes of authenticity and truth.

dumbledore's eyes give away his true feelings in goblet of fire - when the "gleam of something like triumph" comes into them after he learns that voldemort used harry's blood to resurrect himself - before serving as a metaphor for the way the information about the prophecy is being withheld from harry in order of the phoenix when he refuses to make eye contact with him.

[dumbledore's eyes also stop "twinkling" after voldemort returns, in a sign of how serious the situation - which the ministry never appreciates the full gravity of - is becoming.]

occlumency and legilimency - the obscuring and seeking of truth - depend on eye contact. the teenage tom riddle's eyes - with their gleam of red - give away his true depravity, even when he's still outwardly charming and beautiful. the teen snape sees the reason for his obsession with the marauders "wrenched from him against his will" at the force of lily's glare [and the adult snape frequently averts his own gaze from harry when he clearly doesn't want to risk seeing anger or pain in lily's eyes]. ginny's love for harry - her "never giving up" on him, her willingness to wait and endure while he goes off on the horcrux hunt - is communicated by a "blazing look". the basilisk kills by looking - but doesn't kill anyone in chamber of secrets, since the truth about the culprit isn't known. and so on...

which is to say - the series regards the eyes as the windows to the soul [an idea which is connected to a verse in chapter six of the gospel of matthew - the verse immediately preceding which, "for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also", is inscribed upon kendra and ariana dumbledore's graves] and to the true, inner nature of a person.

in mentioning again and again that harry looks like james except for his eyes, what the narrative is doing is hinting to the reader that harry's big, obvious, showy similarities with his father mustn't let them miss that the more subtle traits of his personality - his steadfastness, his quiet courage in the face of hopelessness, his ability to love so much it changes the entire course of history - come from his mother, and that what he inherits from lily will be much more important to the resolution of the story than the things he inherits from james.

this is a clue it plays with really nicely - particularly because harry doesn't really care at any point prior to the last third of deathly hallows about what he inherits from lily more than he cares about what he inherits from james.

we - as readers - go through his experience of learning that his mother is the key to the whole mystery in real time - when we join harry in snape's memories - and we walk into the forest with a harry who now knows the whole truth: that he's more like his mother than he's previously realised, and that he'll therefore be able to do the same thing that she did, and die so that others might live.

“You won’t be killing anyone else tonight,” said Harry as they circled, and stared into each other’s eyes, green into red. “You won’t be able to kill any of them ever again.”

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whyaremyfandomssocruel · 3 months ago

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whyaremyfandomssocruel · 3 months ago

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Percabeth | canon-verse (ish) | 4.7k

read now on AO3

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whyaremyfandomssocruel · 4 months ago

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in losing grip

by keep_driving

Summary:

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I’ll see you again?” She’d asked. “Someday, when we’re older.”

“Obviously,” he told her. A promise without any boundaries, without any concrete truth.

“Obviously,” she whispered back. Like it was that simple.

For her, summer did not exist before him. Now that it's been gone for so long, she wonders if it ever truly existed at all.

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whyaremyfandomssocruel · 4 months ago

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Kristen Bell

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whyaremyfandomssocruel · 5 months ago

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Hello clare!! For the AU mashup thing: jily for 100 + 6

congratulations, this became a whole one-shot LOL. it’s a silly little thing and not worthy of posting on AO3, but…

tropes: bookstore AU and unexpectedly saving the day

A woman enters the bookshop through the old, glass-paneled front door, which is a very normal thing for a woman to do.

What is not as normal is the way through which she enters it; nor the series of actions she performs shortly thereafter.

James is ringing a customer up for their murder mystery—a Michael Chabon novel, with a violently blue cover and the classic Chabon dilemma of not enough paper to hold the bombardment of Nabokovian descriptions he tries to fit in every other sentence—when a woman throws open the door to the bookshop and rushes inside. The movement of her entrance is so quick and violent that it nearly appears as an action movie flash-cut. One moment, the shop is quiet, complete serenity save for the slotting of paper bills into the register and the shuffling of books into paper bags; the next, there she is, and the only evidence that she hasn’t simply sprung from thin air is the startled jingling of the overhead bell and the way her red hair swishes over her shoulder, settling belatedly across her skin like a handprint of splintered sunset.

Huh. Maybe Chabon isn’t so unreasonable, after all.

“That’ll be four pounds in cha—” James’s sale cuts off at the cacophony, and he pauses, gaze snapping to the door before he raises his volume to address the Tasmanian devil standing on his welcome mat.

“Er.” He clears his throat. Chabon Buyer holds his hand out, eyes on the four quid James is apparently withholding. James ignores him. “Can I…help you?”

The woman looks over at him so suddenly he worries she might have cricked her neck. He then wonders if she’s yet had time to breathe in between her various rushings.

“Oh, thank god!” She gasps, and James has to force himself not to ask what could have spurred such enthusiasm on her part—was she expecting to enter an unmanned store? Or was she, perhaps, just in the market for a handsome bookstore clerk to sweep her off her feet, and has been accosting every local bookseller until she could find one to her liking?

That second one seems unlikely, but a bloke can certainly dream.

She rushes over to the register, where Chabon Buyer has made the executive decision to grab the money out of James’s hand and make a heel-turn toward the door. Normally, James would worry that he might have just lost a customer, but the man’s been coming in every other day to ask about his order of the newest Michael Lewis release, so James is relatively certain he’ll be back until it comes.

Which it will, right after James decides to order it.

Anyway.

The pretty red-haired woman—for now that she’s within close range, it’s quite obvious that she really is very pretty, which is annoying and disarming and also doubly thrilling—stops in front of the register, a fact that inspires some measure of relief in James, because she’s been working at such a velocity up until now that it’s possible that she could just walk straight through the mahogany desk without even blinking.

“Hi,” she breathes, placing her hands on the desk, “sorry for the rushed entrance.”

“I didn’t even notice,” replies James—in the way that liars often do—with a grin. “How can I help you?”

“Well, the thing is…” she leans forward, and he does the same, partially out of interest in whatever it must be she’s looking for, and partially out of a more general, certainly-not-physical interest that begs for proximity. “I really, really need your help.”

“With…a book?”

“Yes. No. Well, kind of.”

“If you’re looking for kind of books, I can direct you to celebrity autobiographies in aisle four.” James sits back a bit on his heels to point diagonally across the store. “I’m reluctant to call them books at all, but it’s been explained to me that I’m not actually the arbiter of those things.”

The woman’s lips quirk, but she shakes her head, and her red hair swings to-and-fro, a soft swirling wave of crimson.

“It’s a bit of an odd case, I’ve got to admit.”

This piques James’s interest. “What do you mean?”

“Well…” She trails off and turns around to to examine the store for a brief moment, as though trying to suss out nearby eavesdroppers. “So, this guy I know wrote a book, and he, er—well. He, um…dedicated it to me?”

“Oh.” James clears his throat and straightens slightly. Having a book dedicated to you is quite a big deal—she’s probably here to buy up every copy he has in print, lug them back to this guy in thanks, and then otherwise shower him in affection. Not that James should care, of course, having only met her mere minutes ago. And really, past a passing acknowledgement of how objectively appealing she is and an interest in whatever might have brought her so blusteringly into his shop, there’s really nothing that notable—

“…So I need to find every copy you have and tear out the dedication page.”

Wait. What?

The woman laughs, which leads James to believe that he’s just said that thought out loud. But it really isn’t an irrational response to what she’s said, because…what?

“I know, I know. Weird.”

One of James’s hands—possibly of its own volition and completely independent of any messaging from his brain—shoots up into his hair and gives it a futile ruffle. He realizes that he’s standing stock-straight and, therefore, slightly towering over this woman, so he leans back down to rest both arms on the desk.

“No,” he says, attempting to be casual with an approximately equal level of futility as the earlier hair-ruffling, “not at all. Er. May I ask—”

“Why?” She cuts him off blithely, and then she takes a deep breath; as though in preparation to launch into a winding Shakespearean monologue. It occurs that she’s probably run through this explanation multiple times. In fact, he’s a bit tempted to phone up the other book shops in this part of London and ask, any chance you were ambushed by a redheaded woman with a very strange request?

“I was going to ask your name, actually,” he hears himself saying. “But I’ll take a backstory as well.”

The woman pauses, brows drawing together.

“My name?”

Might as well double-down.

“Just to make sure it isn’t something like The Great London Book Vandal.”

She laughs loudly at this—mission accomplished—before recovering quickly to shoot him a mock-skeptical look. “Would be a bit self-importing to call myself The Great at anything, don’t you think?”

“Depending on how good you are at vandalizing books, I don’t think so.”

“Also—would I really want to announce myself like that? Especially to a proprietor of books, the thing which I’m being accused of vandalizing?”

“I hardly think it’s an accusation when you literally just said you wanted to do exactly that.”

“Yes, but to a specific book. Not just willy-nilly; I’m not a monster!”

“Alright. So, The Particular London Book Vandal, then.”

“The Vendetta-Based London Book Vandal.”

“Seeker of Literary Justice and Destroyer of Dedications.”

“Lily for short, though. For brevity’s sake.”

Grinning, James sticks his hand out. She’s funny—and now, odd request notwithstanding, she’s already his favorite customer of the day. She sticks hers out and they shake, though she abandons it early to tilt her head and peer at his name-tag.

“James, then?”

“The one and only.”

“The one and only…James? Like, at all?”

“In the immediate vicinity.” He pauses. “As far as you know.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

The two settle into a comfortable silence. It’s still early, and the shop is largely empty, save for a few regulars reading in the various cushioned nooks scattered throughout the store. James is content just to observe his new acquaintance for a moment, before she clears her throat and straightens.

“So—I do want to explain why I’m here, actually…”

“Oh—” he’d nearly forgotten, “—right, right. So, you want to tear out a dedication…for you?”

Lily places her hands flat on the desk, shoulders rolling back. Ostensibly bracing for whatever it is she’s about to say. “Right. So, I know this bloke—we used to be friends for ages, actually, until he became a dickhead—”

“That will usually put a damper on a friendship. Or so I hear.”

“—Right, yeah. So we haven’t spoken in ages, and then the other day I get this package in the post, and it’s a fucking book he’s written! The dickhead! He wrote a book!”

“How dare he. Dickheads can’t write books.”

“Oh, just you wait!” Lily throws her hands up, eyes blazing. “So I figure ‘what the fuck, might as well,’ and I open it—and then I see that it’s, like, this weird pseudo-memoir about the two of us, but then the two characters in it end up reconciling because the woman realizes she’s been wrong about the protagonist and has been misjudging him, and, ugh, god, it just makes me so angry—I barely got through half, had to look up the synopsis on Wikipedia! And then I look at the front and the fucking bellend has dedicated it to me! ‘To Lily Evans, My Lost Connection!’ Right fucking there in black and white!”

The further she gets in her speech, the further James’s jaw lowers in shock. By the end, he can only stare as she gesticulates with her hands, his mouth hung open and his eyes so wide they begin to water.

“You’re…having me on,” he says, weakly.

“But I’m not, James!” She rebuts, and the way she says his name sounds so familiar, like they’re old friends rehashing a well-worn argument. He likes it—even in consternation. “I’m really not!”

“I’m so horrified I don’t know what to do with myself.” James takes off his glasses and rubs them on his shirt. Finally, he blinks. “I think my horror is horrified.”

Apparently pleased with his shared dismay, Lily folds her arms over her chest and nods: I told you so.

“I told you so.”

Well, it seems like he’s already good at reading her body language.

He’s arrested in his reply as a thought hits him: “Have you been…going around to all the local bookstores to do this?”

“Er…” she hums sheepishly, “is it that obvious?”

“Only to us veteran booksellers.”

“I just—ugh!” Lily fumes. “It’s just so infuriating! No one will let me take out the page; it’s not like it’ll decrease in value, anyway! The book’s already shite!”

James has to laugh at this. “What’s it called? So I can leave a scathing review, that is.”

“The Triumph of the Half-Blood Prince by Severus Snape.”

“The…Triumph…of the—”

“Don’t ask.”

“Noted.”

“So…” Lily pauses, “will you let me take out that heinous and unjust dedication in this book which never should have made it to print?”

It’s adorable that she thinks there was a chance he was going to say ‘no.’

But, in order to keep up some level of appearance, he taps a finger to his chin in thought, doing his absolute best to look pensive. He imagines that the glasses help by significant measure.

“Well, when you put it like that—”

James doesn’t even have time to finish his thought before she’s jumping up-and-down in victory, hair bouncing across her shoulders. She pumps a jubilated fist in the air: “YES!”

“Alright, Rocky. You’ll want to head to aisle seventeen; the shite section.” He walks around the desk to point toward the back of the store, before turning to look back at her and damn near freezing in place. This close, her eyes are downright startling—a shade of emerald that gleams in the morning sun.

He doesn’t have a lot of time to look, though, because she turns her attention toward her small tote, from which she procures (after a small bit of shuffling) a violently red magic marker. Upon its appearance, she straightens, the previously-charming gleam in her eye now somewhat…terrifying.

“Thank you!” Lily yelps before speeding off toward the chosen aisle—apparently, her earlier zooming tendencies have awoken once more for the prospect of defacing this Snape guy’s book. Her figure retreats quickly, swallowed up by towering shelves and muted tones of hardcover books.

“Wait!” He calls, and then, once she turns, realizes he has nothing else to say.

So he thinks quickly: “Do you want any help?”

She smiles widely, like she was waiting for him to ask, and the power of it inspires a mirrored grin on James’s own face, something he’s helpless but to let form. He wishes he had a better talent for descriptors, like Nabakov or even James Joyce. But all he can think is: it’s brilliant. Her smile is brilliant.

“Well,” she shrugs, though her face is alight with humor, “I suppose The Great London Book Vandal could take on an apprentice.”

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