whyaremyfandomssocruel - Tumblr blog

whyaremyfandomssocruel · 2 months ago

Note

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.”

231 notes · View notes