James Finally Makes an Impression
Throwback Thursday first posted 08-04-2011
Disclaimer: JK Rowling owns the Harry Potter books and characters, of course, unless I end up coming up with any original ones. And I'm not making any money on this.
This was written after “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince” came out, but before the “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” I figured out that Snape and Lily were friends, but I figured they were BFF, not romantically involved, and that they never stopped being friends, so that was one of the many things I got wrong.
This was originally posted at a Harry Potter fanfic site, and now resides at fanfiction.net as “The Highest Value: Chapter 42: Breaks - Spring 1977.
Breaks — Mauraders Generation — Sixth Year
It was the Hogsmeade weekend just after Valentine's Day. Sirius and Remus and Peter were all in Hogsmeade with girlfriends. James wandered the corridors of Hogwarts, alone.
Music was coming from somewhere — a Muggle band Lily favored. Following the sound, he found Snape in a deserted classroom with a Muggle contraption. The Slytherin must've heard James approach, because his wand was out and ready.
They stared at each other — the Slytherin forbidden to speak to his best friend, the Gryffindor rejected by his crush. Just now, there didn't seem to be much difference. They were both Lily-less.
Snape lowered his wand. James stayed until the tape ended, then left for Hogsmeade, after all.
Severus turned the tape over.
Lily felt at loose ends. She had originally come to Hogsmeade with Nan and Ophelia to have a "girls only" Valentine's Day. Nan was being true to her fiance, who was already a working wizard and couldn't visit very often. Ophelia had had a huge row with her current boyfriend and declared that she was "done with boys for the rest of her life." And Lily just couldn't be bothered with any complications just now. There was a Muggle-hating Dark Wizard to be brought down.
But then Nan's fiance had been able to make it after all, and after sufficient grovelling, Ophelia had accepted her boyfriend's apology. So Lily was alone in Hogsmeade, walking along the train tracks and trying to figure out what to do with herself.
Suddenly she heard a voice singing off to the right.
"Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?"
It was a voice she recognized quite well, although its owner was no where to be seen.
"James Potter!" she called out in the direction of the voice, taking her wand out. No one would blame her for defending herself. And besides, she was almost seventeen anyway. And not a Muggle in sight.
"Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality." The voice was circling behind her.
She turned to keep it in front of her. "Potter," she warned.
"Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see." James dramatically threw off the Invisibility Cloak and dropped to his knees.
"I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy —" he continued singing, now looking up at Lily, hands clasped together and raised to her like a supplicant.
The whole thing was so ludicrous — "poor boy" was so outrageously inappropriate in connection with the name "Potter" — that Lily broke out laughing. She fell to the grass and sat, legs straight out in front of her, arms propping her up from behind, as tears of hilarity ran down her cheeks and she gasped for breath.
"You've been listening to me singing," the red-head stated, wiping her eyes, when she had regained some control over herself.
"Of course. How could I resist such dulcet tones?"
"My tones are not exactly dulcet," she returned. "Although trying to match Freddie Mercury's range in Bohemiam Rhapsody would be hard enough for anybody. Aren't you going to sing some more?"
"Ummm." He paused. "Because I'm easy come, easy go, little high, little low, something something something doesn't really matter to me, to me."
James stopped singing and moved from his knees to sit on the grass a bit closer to Lily. "Er, that's all I know. And I only remembered that much because Snape was playing that song on some Muggle-looking contraption just before I left for here."
"You saw Severus?" James had thought he was making progress, but the eagerness in Lily's voice touched a wild, hard jealousy. She never sounded like that when she talked about him.
Seeing the sudden hardness in James' face, Lily narrowed her eyes. "Okay. What did you do to him this time?"
James fought for control. They're just friends, he told himself, trying to believe it.
"Nothing, Evans. I thought you'd noticed my track record was a bit better this year. No more attacking people for 'existing.' Not even Dark Arts loving hit wizards." Hmmm. He hadn't meant it to come out quite that harshly. Still, he had stopped himself from saying much worse. And he really hadn't done anything.
"Really? Still think you're the center of everyone's attention, including mine?" But the rejoinder was half-hearted, more out of habit than anything else.
"You're the center of mine," James said, in a rare moment of unstaged sincerity.
"So Severus actually got that Muggle tape-player to work in the Castle?" she said, half to James and half to herself.
This was not what James wanted to talk about, but there was such a loneliness in her voice that he couldn't help blurting out, "You miss him, don't you?"
She looked up at him and nodded wordlessly. Then she sighed. "They won't let him hang around me anymore."
James bit back a scathing remark about what Snape was doing hanging around with "them" in the first place and just said, "I'm sorry, Evans."
"Lily," she corrected. It felt so good to talk to someone about Severus, even if it was James Potter.
"He and Florence must have worked it out over the summer hols. How to get a Muggle electrical device to work in a magical environment."
"Florence?" James tried to place the name. Some nondescript Ravenclaw, wasn't she?
"Yes, Florence. Severus' girlfriend. Don't you know anything about your enemies?" She shook her head. Severus would never tolerate such gaps in his knowledge.
"She's not at Hogwarts anymore, is she?" Then, remembering the attacks over the summer, "She wasn't hurt, was she? Or her family?"
"No. But the Death Eater attack really freaked them out. They've moved to America — the States."
James was quiet. He still thought they were talking way too much about the greasy Slytherin, but it occurred to him that maybe Snape and Lily really were just friends. "That must be really hard on Snape — having his girlfriend so far away."
"I'm sure it is, although he's not likely to show it."
She took James' hand between her two hands and looked solemnly into his eyes. "I'm so glad you and Severus aren't enemies any more."
He meant to leave it at that, but something about the earnest look in her eyes compelled him to tell the truth. "I wouldn't go that far, Ev- , Lily. Let's just say we've called a truce."
"That'll do," she answered. "Want to go to the Three Broomsticks?"
It's good! This does take me back.