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“And now we wait,” James declares, beaming at the camera pointed at his face. He sits down at the table, opposite Peter and between Remus and Sirius, and they all wave obligingly at the camera. “Marauders strike again!” Sirius crows.
“Okay, that’s all the footage I need,” Frank tells them, putting the camera down. “Enjoy your lunch. I’m going to finish setting up the hidden cameras.”
“Thanks, Frank,” the four of them chorus. Frank waves and heads up the stairs.
“The boss lady wants to know what our next episode is,” Sirius tells them, digging in his pockets for his phone. “Did you see her email?” He extricates his phone from his back pocket and slides it across the table for the rest of them to see.
James nods, pushing the phone closer to Remus and Peter, having already seen the email. It had been McGonagall, setting deadlines and scheduling a meeting next week for the next episode. He did have a few ideas. “You know, there’s a wildlife sanctuary half an hour away. I’m pretty sure they have snakes, if you catch my drift.”
“Why would you need a snake?” Remus asks. His face remains perfectly expressionless when he continues, “We’ve already got Severus, don’t we?”
Sirius barks out a loud laugh before composing himself. “We’re professionals,” he says, sounding more like he’s trying to convince himself. “Professionals. He is our coworker . Right. Professional. I’m a professional.”
James snorts. “Sure, Padfoot. Anyways. A snake. We could put it on someone’s desk or something.”
“I like that idea!” Peter chimes in. James flashes a grin at him. Peter’s agreement was something he could always count on. Privately, he thought that Peter was a little too easily convinced, and he’d always felt some sort of need to protect him. Anyways, he didn’t mind, a four-way argument is much harder than a three-way one. Luckily, the others seemed to agree too, for once. He tunes them out a bit when Remus and Sirius start discussing the logistics and focuses on the bowl of soup in front of him.
“I was thinking we could prank Lily this episode?” Remus says, and James sits up so violently that his chair almost falls over. He grabs the table to steady himself and ignores the alarmed looks he’s getting. Because Remus is insane. Absolutely insane. Remus was there in college. Remus knows. Remus is an idiot.
“Evans?” he hisses, staring at Remus with wide eyes. “Moony—”
Any argument he might have had dies upon his lips when the lights flicker off. The four of them perk up and trip over their feet as they scramble up the stairs to where Frank had disappeared off to. They found Frank waiting at the top of the stairs, where he had a view of the whole office. Everyone’s monitors were flashing with the word error.
“Nice,” James breathes, turning to Peter. “That major in computer science paid off, yeah?”
Peter beams proudly. “Thank you. And Pads over here thought I was wasting my degree by going to work at BuzzFeed and filming a series on pranking people.” He draws himself up and puffs out his chest and James grins a stupidly fond grin at his best friends. Sirius rolls his eyes and tells him to save the heart eyes for someone else. James shakes his head and slings an arm around Sirius’s shoulders. “It’s part of my charm.”
Amongst the chaos on the floor below them as people tried to save their computers from the virus they were sure was about to hack the entire company (“It’s a screensaver,” Peter informs Frank and the camera), Remus points out a certain redhead to James.
“Prongs, c’mon, please. The comments have been begging for an episode of Marauders pranking her. Look. She knows this was us. She’ll be fun to prank.”
Said redhead is staring directly at them, middle finger raised but a faint smile playing at her lips. James looks away quickly. He can feel the heat rising from the back of his neck as Remus waves at her. “Let’s go,” James says roughly, tugging Remus over to where Peter and Sirius are standing. Frank has gone downstairs to film people’s reactions. Specifically—oh, shit.
He’s talking to her. Frank is talking to Lily. He’s pointing up at the Marauders. You’d think executive producer would give James some vetoing power when it came to who they’d include in their videos, but apparently not. Lily is waving at them—
“Yeah, Moons, I’m not sure if this is a good idea,” Sirius is saying. His hand is on James’s arm. Oh. He’s shaking James. James isn’t sure when that started. “Prongs, you good there?”
“James, I’m sorry. Are you really not okay with this?” Remus asks him, that look on his face that Sirius had once called a motherly concern. He does that quite a lot. He hasn’t done it much lately, actually. When had James seen that look a lot? Right. College. After he’d—no, she’d—they’d—no. He was not thinking about it. He had not thought about it in approximately two years, actually. If you didn’t count the hour when he’s lying down in bed trying to fall asleep. Yes, not counting that, he has succeeded in not thinking about it for two years, thank you very much. He is not breaking that streak. Nope. Not at all.
“James?”
Ah. Remus is talking. “I’m fine,” James finds himself saying. Wow, he thinks, I am not fine.
“So we can prank Lily?” Peter says, perking up. He claps his hands together when James nods almost robotically. “Fantastic! I love Lily. She’s very nice. James, remember when—oh. I’m sorry,” Peter’s hands move to cover his mouth and he shrinks a little at the glares from Sirius and Remus. “Forgot. Sorry. Um, we can call this prank revenge?”
“No!” James cries. “Absolutely not. Wormtail, you can stop apologizing, I’m fine. I’m over it. I’m okay if you mention her, we do not need to revenge prank her, we are only pranking her because all the YouTube comments want us to. We are keeping all personal feelings out of this. ”
“Right,” Remus says dryly. “You’re doing a great job of that.”
“Thank you,” James says. He ignores the possibility that Remus was being sarcastic. He also ignores the very low probability of that, seeing as Remus is always sarcastic. This might have been an exception. He also chooses to ignore the raised eyebrows from all three of his best friends. Oh god, even Peter looked unconvinced. That was when you know you’re doing a terrible job at convincing.
Frank arrives back upstairs at the same time the lights turn back on. “Got some good footage,” he says brightly. “McGonagall wants it all edited and posted by Friday. So, two days.”
“That should be good,” Sirius says. “See you’ve talked to Lily. Isn’t the point to
not
tell the prankee that they’re getting pranked?”
“I didn’t tell her she was getting pranked,” Frank says. “I didn’t know she was getting pranked. She was asking if it was for a Marauders episode, or if it was just the four of you being assholes.”
“We made this a series because it gave us an excuse to be assholes,” Sirius says, and they all laugh at that.
They decide on the snake in the end. Peter refuses to go near it, and Remus is the Marauders’ representative at the meeting currently taking place with McGonagall and all the other executive producers, so it’s up to Sirius and James to help the handler carry it over to Lily’s desk. The singular handler that had come with the snake, mind you. And it was one huge-ass snake, in James’s opinion. He was a bit worried that there was only one person who knew what they were doing if they needed to wrangle an angry twelve-foot boa constrictor, but they needed to film this episode now and this was the only option that fit their budget.
“Do we have cameras?” Sirius asks, a section of the snake draped over his arms and held as far away from him as possible.
“Frank said he set them up,” James says. “He’ll film her reaction when she finds out, but I know there are some hidden ones somewhere on her desk.”
He gingerly drapes the section of python he’d been holding over a chair and starts poking at Lily’s desk. He finds the cameras pretty easily, and while rearranging them to remain hidden while he made space for the snake, he lets his eyes wander to the pictures Lily had set up on her desk. There’s one of her family, of course, one with her and Marlene and Mary and Alice all grinning at the camera, and one that makes his breath catch in his throat.
Because it’s him, and her, taken in their college years, a candid picture of them laughing at a long-forgotten joke. It’s framed but it’s not standing, it’s lying face-up flat on the desk, but it’s there all the same. Sirius clears his throat and tells James he needs to move so they can put the snake down and James backs away slowly. Breathe, he reminds himself. “You alright?” Sirius checks in. James pretends it’s the snake that’s the problem.
Someone taps at his shoulder and he turns to find Peter standing there, his hands twisting together nervously at the sight of the python. “Meeting’s over. We gotta go.”
They park the snake’s handler at some unoccupied desk nearby and go over to the copier, where they busy themselves with printing out way too many copies of whatever was in there last. James picks one up to ignore the fact that it’s Lily, Lily Evans, walking over to her desk right now. Apparently the parking lot was getting repaved over the weekend. Well, with the amount of copies the printer was spitting out, they could hand out announcements to every single person in that office. And their families.
He risks a glance over at her desk. She’s standing in front of the snake, arms crossed, looking slightly concerned but mostly pissed. There is, however, absolutely no hint of surprise in her expression. She looks directly at him, then, a challenge written in the arch of her brow. “James fucking Potter. This was your idea, wasn’t it.”
James gapes at her like a fish out of water. This was not exactly his plan for the first thing he’d say to her since they—she— nope. Absolutely not going to think about it. Two years, he reminds himself. Sirius seems to take pity on him, thankfully.
“Hey, I helped!” Sirius says, nudging James to the side. James thinks Sirius could maybe try to hide that concerned tilt of his eyebrows a bit better. “So did Remus. And Peter.”
“Doesn’t change what I’m about to say,” Lily says, a playful grin tugging at the corner of her lips. And it’s been two years, but there are still certain things that pull at a string in his chest, buried so deep in the effort of forgetting (the time she’d smirked at him and stood on her tiptoes and kissed him so fiercely he’d had to take a step back, only to have her jab him in the side and dissolve into laughter; the time he’d woken up to her lying next to him, fingers trailing across his cheeks and tracing lines between the faint freckles that had appeared on his face from the hours they’d spent at the beach the day before, the fondest smile he’d ever seen on her lips; the time she’d snuck him into her dorm, a wine bottle in a brown paper bag in her hands, grinning mischievously up at him before chugging half the bottle when he’d bet that she couldn’t).
“Fuck you,” Lily tells them cheerfully, her eyes bright and reminding James painfully of when she used to look at him like that.
“What the
fuck?”
James demands, emerging from the bathroom completely drenched. “Who the fuck—”
“We’re being attacked!” Peter cries, rounding the corner and almost running into James. The front of his shirt is soaked. “I went to get coffee and the coffee machine tried to kill me!”
James’s eyes narrow. He has a suspicion that he’s afraid to put to words. “Where’s Moons and Pads?”
He finds them both at their desks. Sirius is picking silly string out of his hair meticulously. Apparently he’d sat down on his chair and it had triggered the can of silly string now sitting innocently on his desk. The same thing had happened to Remus, although it looked like Remus had given up entirely and was now continuing to edit a video, silly string still in his hair but pushed out of his face at least. Frank walks up to them, camera in hand and a barely-suppressed smile on his face. “So, the tables have turned.”
“Did the whole office know about this?” James asks, rounding on Frank. “Why didn’t anyone else go in the bathroom before I did?”
“We may have gotten a heads-up, yeah,” Frank admits sheepishly. “Don’t kill the messenger.”
“Lily Evans!” Sirius exclaims suddenly, and James turns to find her approaching them. God. She’s laughing. The breathless laugh, the one that used to be James’s favorite sound in the whole world. It would take her a few minutes to calm down.
“Now we’re even,” she says. James thinks he might be hallucinating, but she might have just winked. He stands there staring after her for a few minutes before the sound of heels clicking on hardwood floors snaps him out of it.
“Excellent,” McGonagall says. “This’ll be a good video. You don’t mind if it’s added to the Marauders series, do you?”
Jessica Smith 2 days ago
Let Lily join the Marauders!!
feedbuzz 4 days ago
petition for the girl who pranked them to join the marauders
pandagirlxx 37 minutes ago
LILY EVANS MY QUEEN I WOULD DIE IF SHE BECAME PART OF THE MARAUDERS
“So, this was not exactly the outcome I had expected,” James says, slowly. The other Marauders are sitting around the table, all leaning in with varying expressions on their faces. Remus keeps his face carefully schooled into a neutral expression, as always. Part of the reason YouTube loved him. Peter is grinning ridiculously wide. Peter is always grinning ridiculously wide at everything, though, so James supposes he shouldn’t be too alarmed. He should probably be concerned about Sirius, though, who looks like he’s stuck somewhere between a smile and a frown, which James thought would cancel out and give him a blank expression, but whatever contorted mess is currently happening on Sirius’s face is definitely not blank.
“James,” Sirius starts, sounding as if he has hand-picked each syllable, “I just, I want you to think about what this means.”
“The way I see it,” Remus jumps in, glancing sideways at Sirius before looking straight into James’s eyes, or his soul, possibly, “You’ve got two choices. Either we don’t take her, and all 457 commenters and even more viewers are disappointed, or we do, and we get more publicity because we’ll get fans from [Self] Less is More, and all you have to do is suck it up.”
James recognizes the name of the series she does with Marlene, if only because he had avoided it at all costs whenever it appeared in his recommended videos on YouTube. She did always like puns, he thinks, like the time she’d— no, he tells himself forcefully, and drops the subject. Or tries to. His consciousness is very stubborn sometimes.
“So we have to take her. You’re telling me I have no choice,” James says flatly.
“You do have a choice,” Peter chimes in happily. “There’s just a better choice. Also, it’s been two years. You might as well start getting over her.”
With that surprising tidbit of wisdom from Peter, James mumbles out some half-assed excuse of how he’s already gotten over her, thanks very much, and she can join if she wants to. And then he disappears into the bathroom because that’s the only place with any semblance of privacy in here. Unless there was another bucket of water waiting for him when he walked in, courtesy of Lily Evans herself. There wasn’t, thankfully, and he locks himself in a stall and leans against the door to think.
It’s just—okay, maybe he isn’t over her, and maybe he never will be, because he was (is?) absolutely, positively, head over heels in love with her. And he’d thought that she was it, hell, still thinks she’s it, and he’s tried but other girls might be pretty and nice and seemingly perfect for him except for the fact that they’re not her. He’s dated other people and all those dates had never ended well because in the end he was just looking for another Lily Evans, which is obviously never going to happen unless he actually gets the real Lily Evans. And he had his chance with her, an impossibly long and impossibly short two years, and now it was over. Has been over. For two years.
He’s accepted the fact that he’ll probably have to settle for someone not quite Lily Evans, but he figured he’d find someone eventually. The problem is that now he’d be forced to actually talk to Lily, and then he’d realize just how head over heels in love with her he still was, and then everything would all go to shit. Again. She made it quite clear she did not want to date him anymore.
So, in conclusion, he thinks, he’s completely, utterly fucked. Forever. At least until this series ends.
Oh god, what if it gets renewed for another season? No. Nope. Not happening. He won’t think about it. He won’t think about how back when they’d all been in college, him and Lily had gotten an internship here at BuzzFeed; how they’d helped out with this cooking show, which had also gotten renewed for another season. Stop, he thinks, because he knows where this is going.
Except he chooses to ignore his smarter self, and instead continues thinking about how while they were cleaning up Lily had somehow managed to climb up on the countertop behind him and dump the remnants of a mostly-empty bag of flour on his head; how he’d pelted her with various plastic measuring cups, all of which she’d somehow miraculously caught—okay, no, he needs to stop. Right now, preferably.
He walks out of the bathroom and sits down at his desk and tries out a positivity thing he’d read somewhere. “You know what, Pete?”
“Yeah, Prongs?”
“None of this matters, because whether or not I talk to her I’ll still be wallowing in despair, so I might as well be sad and go be friends with her again than be sad and lonely too.” That sounds good. Wow. He does have his moments of genius.
“Cool!” Peter says, completely oblivious to James’s current internal struggle. “We’ve got a meeting with Lily after lunch, discussing the next episode and such. Room two.”
“Oh,” James says, like the breath is knocked out of him. “Okay.”
Peter smiles at him and turns back to his computer. “You ever miss college, Prongs?”
He stares at Peter for a bit before responding. “Um.”
(Because what is he supposed to say? Of course he misses it. He misses late nights and red plastic Solo cups filled with apple juice because they all thought it was hilarious that they were drinking apple juice from the literal manifestation of illegal teenage drinking. He misses the four of them sitting in a circle on the floor with textbooks and notes strewn around the room. He misses Lily and Marlene bursting into the Marauders’—though they hadn’t been named that yet—shared apartment to announce that they’d gotten jobs at BuzzFeed too. He misses Lily —)
“A little,” he finally says. Without it he never would’ve been heartbroken. Never would’ve been as happy, either, but that’s besides the point. You don’t know how much happiness you’re missing out on if it doesn’t happen, anyway. He clears his throat. “Where’s Padfoot and Moony?”
Peter looks at James and raises an eyebrow. “Getting lunch,” he says, with a wry grin on his face. “Without us. Or anyone else.”
“Interesting,” James says. “Alright. Did you eat?”
Peter nods. “Yeah. Go get food. Don’t wanna be late for the meeting.”
The fucking meeting. God. He still hasn’t actually spoken to her, not since everything. He sighs and heads down to the cafeteria for a sandwich and inhales it at his desk, finishing up the post he was supposed to be making about millenials. He doesn’t look up from his computer until there’s a heavy thump and Sirius appears in the corner of his eye, perched on his desk. “Oh, Prongsie. Cutting a bit too close to a deadline there, aren’t you?”
“Fuck off,” James mutters, standing up and punching Sirius in the shoulder. “Time for the meeting, isn’t it?”
Sirius smirks, nudging James in the side. “Excited?” James tries to laugh it off, but of course Sirius knows him too well. “James, hey, really. It was bad, after. If you can’t do this that’s okay.”
“I’m fine,” James says too quickly. “How was your date with Moony?”
“It was not a date,” Sirius and Remus answer just as quickly. Remus’s cheeks are bright red, and Sirius is taking the stairs two at a time. James laughs at that, big and booming, and he’s on the verge of tears when he slips into the meeting room. Lily is already inside, watching the four of them with an unreadable expression on her face, and James swallows down the laugh immediately.
“Hey, Evans!” Sirius says cheerfully. Thank god for Sirius. He holds his hand up for a high-five, which she returns enthusiastically. “So, you wanna be a Marauder?”
“I’m a bit more civilized than that,” Lily retorts.
“Are not,” James says a bit softly. He tries to ignore the way his chest feels tight when he looks straight into her green eyes.
“Am too,” Lily answers, her voice lacking the teasing edge one might have expected from an exchange like this. It’s gentle and quiet and she sounds just like she did that night, hesitant and tired and sad all in the same breath.
James realizes that he should probably reply. He smiles weakly at her and she returns it as they sit down around the table, and he ignores the looks the three others are sharing. He sits across from her and lets himself actually look at her for the first time in two years, red hair and green eyes vibrant as ever, freckles still splattered across her cheeks, the smile that never quite left her lips still ever-present.
He’s absolutely, completely, and utterly over her. She broke his heart. That’s undeniable. But they can move past that, he thinks. Quite the genius, James Potter is.
“Prongs and Evans, you two do all the wrapping,” Remus says. “Pads and I will get the free donuts set up outside and Wormtail’s getting everyone out.”
“Okay!” Lily chirps, seemingly unfazed by this whole plan. She heads off to grab a roll of plastic wrap and James stares at the door Remus had just disappeared to. “Potter, you planning on helping anytime soon?”
“Oh. Um, right,” James mumbles, taking the plastic wrap that she’d been struggling with and finding the end of it. He sticks it to someone’s chair and passes the roll to Lily, who begins wrapping it around the long row of desks. He grabs his own roll and busies himself with the next row, making it almost halfway down before he thinks that maybe he should say something.
“Hey, Lily?”
“Yeah, James?”
He looks up at her, and for the past few weeks he’s only ever seen her with a confident grin, but right now she looks almost fragile, no wit or charm about her, just Lily Evans staring at him with green eyes blown wide and her eyebrows just slightly scrunched up in the way they do when she gets nervous and the perpetual smile on her face nowhere to be seen. “I just—“
Footsteps. He closes his mouth and turns away from her. “Bet I can finish this row faster than you can finish yours,” he says, without any real challenge. Frank comes around the corner and props up the camera on a stack of chairs.
“Camera’s rolling,” Frank informs them, grabbing a spare roll of plastic wrap and getting to work on the third row of desks. They work mostly in silence, pausing every now and then to point out a particularly interesting thing at someone’s desk. When they’ve finished packaging every desk in the office and it still looks like nobody is coming back in, James offers up the brilliant idea of covering every doorway in plastic wrap. Frank slips out to get footage of the free donuts being passed out by Sirius and Remus and Peter, and James is left alone with Lily. Again.
“What were you going to say?” Her voice is impossibly soft.
“Nothing.”
“James—”
“Nothing, Lily, I—” He stops. Takes a breath. Forces a smile onto his face. “I just missed you, is all. Like. As friends. Are we—are we friends?”
“Of course we are,” Lily says. “You know I don’t hate you, right?”
“I don’t hate you either,” James says quickly. “Did I—did I come across as that?”
“You didn’t really want to talk to me.”
“Of course I didn’t—fuck that came out wrong.”
“James, look, I’m sorry. About everything. I loved you, you know.”
James smiles bitterly at her. “Past tense.”
“We were—we were just out of college. We still are,” Lily says, sounding almost pained. “I can’t— we can’t—we have so much time, James. I didn’t want to be tied down.”
“Did you really believe I’d ever hold you back?”
And. Oh. She’s staring at him with wide eyes and. She. She’s not saying anything. He kind of hates that he can hear the (bad) punctuation in his thoughts. That’s when he knows. He is very broken.
“Okay,” he says, voice cracking a little. “Okay. Then. I won’t. Not as a friend. Which is why we’ll stay friends.”
“Right.” Lily smiles at him. James smiles back.
“James Potter!”
Marlene, he’s pretty sure. He knows that loud voice anywhere. “Hey, Mar.”
“You’re part of my next video,” she informs him.
“Did you get approval?”
“Course I did,” she says, tossing her hair as she hops up onto his desk. His desk , which, granted, is a mess, but Marlene isn’t particularly helping the matter either. She doesn’t seem to take the hint when he gestures at her to get off, please and thank you. He flips her off then, which she also ignores. “McGonagall read the script and everything. She also specifically suggested asking you.”
“For what?” James asks, not waiting for a response before snatching the script out of Marlene’s hands. “5 Ways To Tell If Your Crush Likes You,” he reads from the title. And ignores the sneaking suspicions he has about why exactly McGonagall wanted him to star in it. “Oh, this is gonna be good. The internet loves this shit.”
“Exactly,” Marlene grins. She lets him read over it before taking it back from him. “So, any guesses as to who your crush is going to be?”
James stares at her for a second before he gets it. And oh. No. Absolutely not. The half-smile, half-grimace she’s giving him is not helping at all. He’s seen the YouTube comments on the latest Marauders videos. All the chemistry they kept pointing out. Of course this would happen. A hazy memory of a pickup line, sometime in the middle of college, chooses this moment to bring itself to the forefront of his mind. Hey, you look familiar. I think we have chemistry. Green eyes crinkling with a breathless laugh. That’s what sets him off. He starts laughing and Marlene stares at him like he’s gone insane. Which he might have, actually.
“This is a terrible idea, but I’m going to say yes,” James tells her. Marlene pats him on the shoulder in a way that somehow says both I’m so sorry and you’re an idiot. He considers her uncanny ability to communicate multiple feelings a talent. Generally these feelings include an insult, so maybe he’s just used to being insulted a lot.
He manages to put all this out of his mind for a while. A while meaning about two hours, because two hours later there’s another person who hops up to sit on his desk. “Get off,” he snaps without looking up. Seriously, what is with people and sitting on his desk? It’s not like there’s much empty space on it. He has a speech pulled out from the Files of James Potter’s Brain, and by a speech he means a formal request to move your ass with a few choice words stuck in there. He looks over at whoever is sitting on his desk, because speeches are best delivered while making direct eye contact (thank you, film school, you were useful for something), and then he immediately shoves the speech back into the Files of James Potter’s Brain.
“Oh. Lily.”
“That is my name, yes,” Lily says. He makes eye contact for a second before he decides that’s too much. He isn’t sure what to look at now, so he returns to hunting for Tumblr posts for his shitty article. “Did Marlene ask you about the video she’s making?”
“Um. Yes. If you’re okay with it?”
“Of course I am!” she answers, a little too quickly and a little too high-pitched to sound like her. “I came by to tell you we’re filming tomorrow morning. Like, at nine. So. Don’t be late.”
He’d given in and turned to look at her as she was talking, but that. That was. He had to look back at his computer at that. That sounded too much like the time she’d asked him on a sorta-kinda-maybe date, when she’d sidled up to him after class and told him that she’d be at that coffee place later, at six. So. Don’t be late.
Yeah, that little trip down memory lane was going to need to be shut down. Immediately. James nods quickly and waits for her to leave so he can bury his head in his hands, contemplate all his life choices, and then go talk to Peter, who’s been watching this exchange from his desk with barely-concealed interest, because that’s Peter for you. And then he would go find Sirius and Remus, who were off getting lunch. Together. Again. See, he was very good at distracting himself from wallowing in self-pity about a girl he’d dated in college who then broke up with him and was now working at the same place he worked at and—yes. Distracting. By wondering about what Sirius and Remus are up to! He is really very good at this.
Someone clears their throat. “James?”
“What?” he asks. Squeaks, really. He forces himself to make eye contact with Lily and pretend like his voice didn’t just go up five octaves.
“I—you know what? Never mind. You’ll find out tomorrow.” Lily smiles at him and, oh, that’s definitely a wink James ignore that ignore that ignore that do not over-analyze that, and then she slides off his desk and pats him on the shoulder like Marlene did and heads back over to her desk. This time he doesn’t know the emotions that come packaged along in that shoulder pat.
“Fuck,” he mumbles. Peter grins at him from around his computer.
“Evans?” he calls, walking over to her desk. He sits on it because James Potter is nothing but petty. “It is eight in the morning. Look who’s early.”
Lily turns to look at him with a bright smile that makes James feel like he’s been run over by a truck, his breath catching in his throat a little. There’s an odd feeling in his chest that he quickly squishes down, a mercy squishing, really. It deserves a much more painful squishing down, in his opinion. “Well, you get your surprise earlier,” she says, standing up and grabbing her purse. “Come on. I took the liberty of writing this into your schedule.”
“You wrote it into my schedule?” James asks, because only, like, ten people have the authority to do that.
“I’m an executive producer too, James, I do have authority to do that. Hurry up.”
“Right,” James mutters. “Where are we going?”
They’re at the doors now. He’s just noticed that Lily’s been spinning her car keys around her finger for the past few minutes. That signals confidence, and wow, James can almost hear his professor saying that, which is bad, because when he starts categorizing real life occurrences as film tropes that means he is trying his absolute hardest to distract himself from A Problem. She smiles cryptically at him— that’s his problem—and walks outside, leaving him no choice but to follow. “Are you kidnapping me?”
“Yes,” Lily says dryly, opening the passenger door for James. He slides into the seat and tries his best to ignore the fact that this is the same car Lily had when they were dating, the same car where. Well. Things had happened. He shakes his head (like that’s going to help) and reminds himself that he is not going to think about it. They’re two coworkers, filming a video together, except James actually has no idea what they’re doing right now. In another life, James might have made a joke about this being a date, but for now he doesn’t let himself say anything. Instead he pulls his phone out and sends a text to a group chat consisting of Marlene, Sirius, Remus, and Peter, otherwise titled (Mar)auders. Also unofficially known as James’s therapy group post-breakup. Which he’s proud to say has been mostly inactive recently. Until now, for obvious reasons.
Today 8:17 AM
Marlene you better know what’s going on
Mar
whatever is the matter james dearest
Where is Lily dragging me off to what the fuck
It feels like a date
Obviously I know it’s not a date
Pads
Stop overthinking
Just
Talk to her
Moony
where are you
In the car
Lily’s driving
Pads
Use protection
Ok I’m kidding I’m sorry
Uncalled for
“James?”
“Yeah, sorry,” he says, dropping his phone on his lap. Face down, because he does not need Lily looking over and happening to catch a glimpse of whatever Sirius decides to send next. “What’s up?”
“Okay, so, we’re going out to breakfast. All you can eat pancakes,” and then she glances sideways at James like she’s waiting for a reaction. They pull into the parking lot at the same moment, and for a second he’s nineteen again and they’re getting out of the car—the same car they’re in right now—holding hands and laughing and he drapes an arm over her shoulders and thinks that this is up there in the happiest moments he’s ever had in his life.
He blinks and he’s twenty-four and they’re sitting silently in the parking lot, looking at each other with unspoken apologies and explanations hanging in the air. “I just, I thought that before we filmed this video we would—I don’t know, sort out our shit,” Lily explains in one breath, never looking away from James. He laughs. It doesn’t really come out right, but.
“Lily, I don’t think half an hour at the restaurant we had our first date at is going to fix all our problems, but we can try,” James tells her sincerely.
She laughs and gets out of the car and James follows her in, his hand lightly brushing against hers as they walk side by side. He shakes off any thoughts about taking her hand in his like in some stupid chick flick, which, being a film school student, he regarded as a disgrace to cinematography; and then he lets his mouth run by rote because the silence between them is growing and it’s one of maybe five things he picked up from film school and he’s not one to let his four years of ultimately useless college education go to waste. He was always good at improv. “You know, I couldn’t go back here after we broke up,” he says lightly. And then immediately regrets it, and thinks that maybe he isn’t that good at improv.
But then Lily says, “Neither could I,” and James doesn’t know how to react. Luckily, he’s saved by the waitress pointing them to a table. He tells Lily he’ll stay at the table and watch her stuff while she disappears off to the bathroom, and he decides he might as well capitalize on this opportunity to check his texts.
8:23
Wednesday, May 14
MESSAGES 1m ago
Wormtail
(Mar)auders
what did i miss
MESSAGES 1m ago
Mar
(Mar)auders
sirius shut up and let the man enjoy his sorta kinda not really date
MESSAGES 2m ago
Pads
(Mar)auders
Everything
MESSAGES 2m ago
Pads
(Mar)auders
You hear me
MESSAGES 2m ago
Pads
(Mar)auders
Prongs you have to tell us everything
MESSAGES 3m ago
Moony
(Mar)auders
good luck
MESSAGES 3m ago
Moony
(Mar)auders
be careful
MESSAGES 4m ago
Moony
(Mar)auders
sirius’s joke aside
MESSAGES 4m ago
Moony
(Mar)auders
ok i hate to do this i know we’re all happy right now but james please remember how bad it was afterwards
MESSAGES 5m ago
Mar
(Mar)auders
i knOW
MESSAGES 5m ago
Pads
(Mar)auders
yEs
MESSAGES 5m ago
Mar
(Mar)auders
so now they’re going to get breakfast
MESSAGES 6m ago
Mar
(Mar)auders
lily thought it would be a good idea for them to actually be able to talk to each other without avoiding eye contact before they filmed the video
MESSAGES 6m ago
Mar
(Mar)auders
ok so background info
Wow. So, um. That was a lot. He barely has time to tap out a reply before Lily comes back over and he shoves the phone into his pocket. They’re saved from having to make any conversation as the waitress asks them what they’ll be having to drink (black coffee for James and a chai latte for Lily, and there’s a brief moment where they stare at each other because James had just blurted out Lily’s order at the same time she had, and he thinks exactly three things at the same time: 1. Her usual drink is still the same thing, 2. Maybe speaking by rote should not be on his list of useful skills from film school, and 3. He’s a fucking idiot.), and then the waitress tells them that their first plate of pancakes would be out soon, and leaves them alone.
“So,” Lily says. They’re doing terribly at the whole talking to each other without avoiding eye contact thing. He tells her as much, and that wins him a laugh and a hesitant glance up at him. “Okay,” Lily tells him, sounding like she does before she dispenses some life-changing advice like she does on every episode of [Self] Less is More. Which, speaking of, he’s given up on avoiding and had watched both seasons last night. He told himself that it was to get to know her better before they had to film a video in which they both would have to pretend they still liked each other. Well, “pretend.” Wait. No. He is pretending. Because he does not like her. Go James.
“Okay,” Lily repeats. “So, when we’re done with this we’re going to have to go back to work and let Marlene direct us on how to act like we have a crush on each other.”
“Won’t be hard,” James says without thinking, and then immediately goes to explain himself into a deeper grave. “I mean, um, not that I do, but I just. Know what it’s like. And so do you. I think. I’d hope. From, from before, not now, obviously, and—”
“James?”
“Yes?”
“Shut up,” she advises.
“Right,” he mumbles, and takes a bite of the pancakes that had been delivered to their table while he was rambling. “So. Sorting out our shit.”
“Yes,” she says. “We’re friends, yes?”
James thinks that this might have not been the best time to eat his pancakes, because now he can’t exactly respond properly. What he wants to say is actually, I’m not entirely sure, because I’m pretty sure friends can talk for longer than five minutes, but we’re also not not-friends because not-friends don’t know each other's’ biggest secrets, but friends would be able to talk about it, so in short, no, Lily, I don’t know if we’re friends or not. But she’s staring expectantly at him and James just decides fuck it and nods.
“Right!” Lily claps her hands together in that way she does when she’s either excited or relieved. “We’re just friends acting in what happens to be a romance. We should also, um, probably be able to talk about how we dated. And stop avoiding it.”
“Yes,” James says. This he can agree with. “So, we’re friends now, we used to date, and nothing’s going to be awkward! Because we are both equally over each other, despite the fact that I was heartbroken after you dumped me.” Lily looks like she’s about to interrupt, but James barrels on before he can regret anything. Actually, that’s a lie. He’s already regretting everything. “No, no, shh. We’re over it and we can talk about it. Besides, I’m fine, you’re fine, everything’s good, and we’re going to eat pancakes!”
He’s decidedly not fine, but that’s fine. They eat their pancakes and pretend nothing is wrong and even talk about their college days a little, and Lily brings up their inside jokes and James is grateful that they can still laugh themselves to tears, reminiscing on the pranks that had given each of the Marauders their nicknames: the time they’d stuck pads covered in red paint on Sirius’s feet while he was sleeping and he’d screamed when he’d woken up; the time they’d dropped a worm down the back of Peter’s shirt; the time they’d dared Remus to howl at the moon on Halloween and pissed off their upstairs neighbors. By the time they’ve decided they’re about to explode from pancakes, James is actually kind of happy. They head back to the car still laughing about something when James’s hand grazes hers like it had when they were walking in, except this time he hooks their pinkies together without thinking and Lily drops her hand like she’s touched a fire.
Shit, he thinks, and reminds himself that he’s going to need to pull himself together, because Lily still Did Things to his brain that apparently made him forget everything, and that they’ve just sort of fixed everything and now he’s gone and ruined it again and—well, Lily’s rambling about something now, and he pretends he’s just as invested in complaining about the temperature in the BuzzFeed offices because if he doesn’t he’s going to launch into another round of apologies that are definitely not going to fix anything between them.
“Number one: you catch them staring at you. Like, a lot,” Marlene narrates. “It would be creepy if you didn’t also like them.”
This one is easy. He’s had a lot of practice looking over at her desk inconspicuously. Well, he hopes it’s inconspicuous. Except this time Lily flashes a small smile at him, and now he also has to pretend that he isn’t a little bit broken from that. Apparently he wasn’t very good at pretending, because when they review the footage, he’s horrified to see that his jaw drops a little.
“Nice acting,” Marlene tells him. He isn’t quite sure if she means that sincerely or sarcastically. For the sake of his pride, he chooses to pretend that it was just acting. Film school, right?
“Number two: their voice sounds different. Maybe it’s quieter, or maybe it’s louder, or it goes up five octaves.” James feels personally attacked. Marlene doesn’t notice, which is good, and keeps talking. “Whatever it is, they just sound different when they talk to you or when they’re talking to someone near you.”
James sidles up to Lily and taps her on the shoulder like he’s done so many times before. “Hey, Lils,” he says, the nickname falling easily from his lips. “What’s up?”
She spins around in her chair and clicks furiously at her computer behind her back, minimizing several tabs featuring James’s social media and other videos before finally landing on a blank Word document. “Nothing!” she yelps, and he bites back a laugh. Is this what he sounds like whenever she comes to talk to him? That’s embarrassing. This video really just feels like Marlene’s personal mission to bring up every humiliating memory that James has. She’s, unfortunately, very successful thus far.
“Number three: their friends go quiet whenever you come over to talk to them. That probably means they’re talking about you,” Marlene says. James elbows Sirius on cue and the mindless chattering amongst the Marauders cuts out. The four of them lean back in their chairs and wave at Lily, who’s maybe about ten feet away.
“Hi, Lily!” they chorus, James not having to reach too deep into his stockpile of embarrassing memories to look pained.
“Looking for James?” Remus asks innocently.
“Shut up,” James hisses, in a way that’s a bit too familiar to him that it takes him a minute to remember that they’re currently acting.
“You two are doing really well,” Marlene tells them after they finish this scene. “The new one-take wonders of BuzzFeed?”
James snorts and crosses his arms. “Film school, am I right?” Lily grins and pulls at her shirt, which happens to be their college shirt. He fist bumps her and is completely unprepared for what comes out of her mouth when she taps her fist to his.
“Remember what the professors always said? The best actors act from the heart.”
And then she leaves him staring after her as she heads over to Frank to watch the footage. “Marlene,” he whispers, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
She shrugs and smiles cryptically at him, picking up her script. “Figure it out, Jamesy.” She claps her hands together and points towards the kitchen. She really could not be less helpful, James thinks. “Alright, next scene!”
“Number four: two words. Physical. Contact.”
Okay, if this wasn’t a personal attack before, it definitely was now. Putting an arm around Lily’s shoulders when they were standing next to each other was fine, despite being painfully domestic. But a piggyback ride? Holding hands? Lily clinging to his arm?
“Stop overthinking,” Lily whispers into his ear when she jumps onto his back, which has the complete opposite effect, because then he almost drops her.
“You’re having too much fun with this,” he accuses Marlene when they finish with this scene. She gives him the same unreadable smile. “We’re rolling in two minutes, James dear.”
He is going to kill her.
“And number five,” Marlene announces. “Just straight up ask!”
“What are we doing,” James says flatly, looking around. They’re in a park, the park, the park where he’d (completely involuntarily) asked Lily out years ago. He remembers walking with her, Marlene and Sirius and Remus and Peter having disappeared what could be centuries ago. He remembers her face, all bright green eyes and grinning and gesturing animatedly about something, and then he just absolutely could not stop himself from saying something along the lines of “so, I may or may not be completely and utterly in love with you?”
Completely involuntarily, of course.
“Just, like, channel whatever was going on when we were here last time,” Marlene says, and James doesn’t have the words to express just how much he cannot do that. “Act from the heart,” she adds, and wow, he is really going to kill her.
So he does it, in the end. She walks next to him and laughs and he blurts out that he might be in love with her, or maybe just in like, and she takes his hand and he can pretend for five seconds that everything is okay again.
James sits down at his desk, looking much too smug to have just come from his lunch break. Peter says as much, and James grins even wider, if that’s possible.
“I,” he begins, jabbing a thumb at his chest, “have just returned from a walk around the block with Lily. To talk about the video, Marlene’s having us reshoot a couple scenes because of a problem with the camera. So. Serious reasons. But. I walked around the block. With Lily. Wormtail, you know who else goes for walks around the block at lunch?”
“Those two,” Peter says dryly, nodding over at Sirius and Remus.
“Indeed they do,” James says, grinning at them. “So, it’s proven. Couples go for walks together.”
“Prongs! Prongs, c’mere,” Sirius yells, pointedly ignoring James’s comment. James doesn’t bother getting up from his desk, instead pushing his chair around to Sirius’s desk, because why else would he have a chair on wheels?
“You’re five years old,” Remus says, not looking away from his computer. James punches him lightly in the arm before leaning over Sirius’s shoulder.
sharkboiii 1 day ago
ok firstly who gave them the right to both be so beautiful ahhhhHHHHH,,, secondly petition for more videos with james and lily
spaghet 8 hours ago
#jily???
“That, that’s, that’s a ship name,” James realizes, staring at the hashtag. “Aw, fuck .”
“Can I write an article about you?” Sirius asks him, grinning. James doesn’t respond. “Prongs, hey, James, don’t tell me…”
“I
can’t
,” James almost wails, deciding to ignore how pathetic he must sound. He is a man in the middle of a
crisis,
okay. “You remember how it was!”
“You’re different now,” Sirius says, “and it’s not like she’s found someone new, has she? I talked to Marlene, and—”
“Nope!” James almost yells, ignoring the stares he’s getting. “Sirius Black, do not get my hopes up.”
“James you need to hear this—”
“No, I absolutely do not!” James snaps. Sirius is loud, and he’s never minded that, but he’s starting to think he might. “I don’t care what Marlene said, because nothing’s happening again, and I am not putting myself through that again.”
Sirius stares at him for a long time. He doesn’t like when Sirius does that, probably because Sirius generally knows better than him when it comes to things like this, but eventually Sirius sighs. “Fine. Okay. New subject?”
“Yes!” James agrees enthusiastically. Anything different from what they’re currently talking about. Sirius clicks at his computer and pulls up a quiz.
“Take my quiz?” Sirius asks, with the puppy-dog eyes James likes to make fun of him for. He agrees without looking at the title and picks his answers mindlessly. He doesn’t really care about the outcome, truthfully, he takes so many BuzzFeed quizzes just to look at the food questions rather than for the results. This one makes him stop, though.
You got: Your crush likes you!
Maybe you’ve been pining after them for a while, or they’ve just caught your eye. Either way, they’re just as in love with you as you are! Go ask them out!
“Sirius. Orion. Black,” James hisses. “You asshole.”
Well, looks like Sirius will have to be added to his list of people to murder, along with Marlene. He rolls his chair back over to his desk, looking rather undignified as he scoots along. Sirius is still laughing at him, and he puts on his headphones and sticks his tongue out at his best friend. Less than a minute later, his phone buzzes in his pocket.
11:43
Thursday, May 15
MESSAGES now
Pads
(Mar)auders
Lol James also got yes
MESSAGES now
Mar
(Mar)auders
i made lily take your quiz sirius she got yes
God. This is fucking awful. Dead puppies, he thinks. Dead Sirius. Anything to stop himself from smiling.
Actually, right now he’d be okay with a dead Sirius. He tells Sirius as much and gets only a bark of laughter in return.
“Jaaaaames!” Lily singsongs, hopping onto his desk like she always does and grinning at him. He rolls his eyes at her and wants to tell her to move, because he’s pretty sure she’s sitting on some script that he probably needs, but she’s smiling so widely at him and her face is covered with more freckles than usual that are probably the result of the warm weather they’ve been having because it’s finally June, and the sun is hitting her just right so he can see all the shades of green in her eyes, and he’s going to start thinking about something else now.
“Hi,” he says. He’s very proud of himself for not letting his voice crack.
“Brunch time?” Lily asks hopefully.
He nods and grabs his keys, laughing at the eyebrow she raises at him. “I’m driving.”
“You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“I know. I’m picking.”
Today 8:03 AM
Mar
fucking married
Yeah fuck you too McKinnon
It’s not even a date
You know we get brunch before every video
It’s literally our fifth jily vid
Wormtail
see youve started using the ship name
Bye
He can’t not smile, though. And it’s probably really bad that he uses times like these to pretend like they’re still, like, twenty, and they haven’t broken up yet. He should probably stop denying the fact that he hadn’t ever really gotten over her in the first place, but maybe residual feelings are a thing? Maybe it’s like Annie from high school, where he’d thought that he was over her but when he’d gone back home for Christmas he’d run into her and felt literally every single emotion possible, like he’d fallen in love and gotten dumped all in one minute. Maybe this whole thing with Lily was a prolonged version of that, the Chronicles of James Potter’s Heartbreak, like all those ancient epics that he’d read in film school (which seemed very pretentious, looking back on it) that dragged on and on and never really amounted to anything.
He has this whole minor life crisis while waffles are being presented to them and Lily is staring at him, a fork and knife already in her hands. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m fine,” and he wonders if he’ll ever be able to say that he isn’t. It’s ridiculous, really, but it’s some sort of stupid moral code he’s internalized. It consists of exactly three rules:
- Do literally whatever is necessary when your friends are sad.
- Do not fall in love with Lily Evans again.
- You’re always okay if people ask.
Rule one, at least, he follows very strictly. Rules two and three? Those are more flexible. They were currently being stretched very far. He sighs and pretends like he can bury his feelings under the gallons of syrup he’s in the process of pouring onto his waffles.
“That was a sigh,” Lily notes. “Are. You. Okay?”
“One hundred percent fine,” James reassures her, unconvincingly, because he still hasn’t looked up from his waffles. “Just thinking. When did this become a thing?”
“What?”
“Brunch. You and me.” James gestures between the two of them with his fork and finally puts down the bottle of syrup. “Us.”
Lily’s voice is painfully soft. “James, there—there isn’t an us.”
“Not us!” James yelps, and wow has he fucked up. “Not—not us, I mean, like, I was talking about us, platonically, not us, romantically, and—I’m sorry, I just, I—Jesus Christ.”
“Oh! Right,” Lily says, and how is she just so—unaffected? She smiles at him before going back to her waffles. “Sorry for assuming. This isn’t going to be painfully awkward now, is it? Because I actually kind of like getting brunch with you.”
“Of course not,” he says too happily. God. He’s just. He’s just going to go die now.
“Look, this wasn’t my idea,” Marlene whispers, her hand gripping James’s arm tightly. It probably hurts, but he couldn’t care less right now. “It was one of the editors, Florence, I think. She brought it up in a meeting and I had to.”
“Marlene, I can’t kiss her.”
“You’re not kissing her,” Marlene corrects him. “You’re just…going to be very close to kissing her.”
Very close was much too close for comfort. “This okay?” Lily whispers, her breath on his lips and her hand on his chest. It’s not fair, he thinks. She looks completely sane and not at like she’s struggling to breathe, which is more than he can say for himself, because she’s right there and it’s so unfair because she’s, she’s like, she’s like art. Terribly frustrating, much too opinionated, absolutely infuriating art, but art nonetheless. “James?”
“Um. Yes?” He isn’t sure what he’s agreeing to, but he does know that it gets her to laugh, which is a win in his book.
“Okay, cut!” Marlene yells, and Lily steps away from him so quickly it feels like a slap to the face. “That was—wow. That was really good.”
“Okay,” Lily says, with this flat tone that James kind of hates because he can’t tell if she’s actually sincerely accepting that compliment. “So, um, why exactly did you need this scene?
There are several pieces of very exciting news that are then delivered to him.
The first is from Marlene, who informs them that this scene was supposed to be them imagining what they wanted to happen, and that the next scene was going to be what was actually happening, which is them staring at each other from across the hall. This also feels like a personal attack.
The second piece of news is from Lily, who tells him that he isn’t making enough eye contact. He doesn’t really want to, because that just leads to—well. Then he wouldn’t need to do much acting at all. She’s still using her directing voice, the one she might use for, say, an intern running an errand, or for an actor who’s asking for feedback, and they’re technically at work so this shouldn’t bother him as much as it does.
The third is from himself, to himself. And it’s that this—this whole Lily thing—bothers him because he is almost one hundred percent sure that he’s not actually over her.
Which brings up a whole list of problems that he’s going to choose to ignore.
Realistically, this shouldn’t be news. He’s obviously not blind; she’s pretty and he’s always thought she is. Breaking up doesn’t change that. Breaking up also doesn’t change who she is; she’s still Lily Evans and she had broken up with him so of course it wasn’t that he’d fallen out of love with who she was. And it’s not like that was the reason she broke up with him, but the state of her feelings and the possibilities they have is something James is going to ignore because he hates getting his hopes up. So, he tries to rationalize to himself, you’ve still got a thing for Lily. Big deal. Residual feelings, right?
And it’s not—it’s not like he’s going to act on them. They are coworkers now and dating in the workplace is strictly frowned upon. He can get over this. Maybe he’s just never going to get over her, but that’s okay, right? He can just…settle. She’s, like, the one that got away, or whatever that stupid song said.
“James? Earth to James. You good?”
He forces himself to look up at Lily and smile. “Yeah,” he says, hating himself more with every word he speaks, “I was just improving my self-worth.”
“Fantastic,” Lily says dryly. “Has your new self gotten into character yet?”
“Absolutely,” James says. His new self is going to have a lot of acting to do.
It always comes back to the damn pancakes. They’d had their first date at the pancake place. They’d had their first brunch at the pancake place. “Oh, god,” James groans, burying his head in his hands. Sirius pats his shoulder. This is tragic, he thinks. He’s just mentally recognized brunch as a Thing. A Thing as in something they do. Together. Constantly.
“Prongs, hey, just. Just tell us what’s wrong,” Remus says, and James wonders, not for the first or last time, how he always manages to stay so calm. It’s not fair, really. A lot of things are not fair, James has noticed.
“So she goes, ‘we’re filming a video tomorrow, right?’” James narrates miserably. “And I’m like ‘yeah, so, any brunch ideas or what,’ and she goes, she, Lily fucking Evans, she’s like, ‘okay, I have a meeting in the morning, so maybe instead of pancakes we go out for a drink tomorrow night?’”
“Shit,” Sirius says after a short pause, and whistles admiringly. James thinks he’s summed it up rather well.
“So, is that a date?” Peter asks.
“I don’t know!” James wails. There are so many problems with this. “I even made a Remus List!”
“That’s when you know it’s serious,” Remus says, and then he looks at Sirius and bursts out laughing. It’s probably funny, but right now James could not care less.
See, Remus Lists are the ultimate crisis plan. They’re pros and cons, or ideal outcomes and, well, not ideal outcomes. And James is not a therapist and neither are the rest of the Marauders but he’s damn proud of the four of them for coming up with Remus Lists to help Remus whenever he was having a panic attack, which they could bet on happening at least once a month, and also to help with his depression. Which got especially bad after the whole HIV thing. They still have the first Remus Lists from that particular panic attack up on the whiteboard in their old shared apartment, now Remus’s apartment. And James is definitely ignoring his own Remus List of problems right now so he should probably go back to that.
“Look at this!” James exclaims, plucking a sticky note from the five million sticky notes stuck to his monitor. Okay, that’s a lie. Several sticky notes. On them is a chart that James is quite proud of.
This is a date :
- LILY. EVANS. LIKES ME.
- What if we break up again
- I can pretend I’m not a mess with all my feelings and decide to do this because I’m single and have no one to mingle with
This is not a date:
- Lily Evans is friendzoning me for. Like. Life and also the afterlife and also reincarnation
- At least we’re friends again
- Now I have to face every single emotion that has come up along with the hope that this is a date
“There’s really no good outcome here,” Remus muses. James could scream. Because that’s very helpful advice, isn’t it.
“Yeah, good luck,” Peter says, making what James thinks is an attempt at a sympathetic noise but comes out more like a snicker before rolling back to his desk. Remus and Sirius murmur something to the same idea before going back to their desks too. Assholes, really, all of them.
Here’s the thing.
James is not, by any means, great at drinking. In fact, he has the alcohol tolerance of maybe a twelve year old. This is common knowledge. So by that logic, they both should’ve known that this would go bad.
In his defense, though, it started out great. He got a beer and she got a cocktail and they were talking, like, actually talking how regular work friends do when they hang out. He finishes his beer before she’s halfway through her cocktail, which should maybe have been the first warning, but really they were fine. Absolutely fine. And if he ignores the sideways look Lily casts at the bottle clutched in his hand, then that’s nobody’s business.
He’s almost done with his second beer when Lily pushes her cocktail at him. It’s about here that everything starts going downhill. Actually, that’s an understatement. It’s a full landslide.
“Lily, this is a girl drink,” James complains, but he accepts the alarmingly blue cocktail from her as she swipes his beer and takes a long sip. “I know, I know, no such thing as a girl drink, but people think it is and I have a reputation to keep up.”
“What, trying to impress a girl, Potter?” Lily teases.
“Only ever you,” he answers with a lazy grin. It’s not the right thing to say, he knows, but he’s been wanting to say this for so long and god if the wide-eyed look she gives him before her lips draw into a thin line makes his chest constrict with this wanting that he’s buried for so long, then they don’t need to say anything about it.
“You’re drunk, James,” Lily says softly. He stares at the cocktail glass in his hand. It’s really violently blue; why had she given it to him again? It’s only going to make him more drunk.
“You used to steal my cocktails, trust me, I know you secretly want some,” Lily says. Oh. Did he say that out loud? Lily laughs and nods, and oh shit, he said that out loud too, didn’t he. Well. He really didn’t mean to get this drunk with a coworker, but. Drinking away his sorrows was too tempting, you know?
(Even if that meant drinking, like, two beers.)
“James,” Lily says, this sort of pained note in her voice, the one she only ever gets when he brings up—everything.
“No, you don’t—you don’t get to do that, Lils,” he says, and they really should not be having this conversation here, or even have gone here in the first place, this was not somewhere two work friends go, but hey, at least he’s aware that he’s talking now. “You don’t, you can’t, you can’t just—keep avoiding this forever. You can’t just keep saying my name like that—”
“Like what, James,” and this is exactly what he’s talking about.
“Like you still care.” Even to him it sounds pathetic.
“I do! You’re my friend—”
“Friends, especially friends who used to date and broke up, don’t invite their friends out for drinks like it’s a date!”
Lily is silent for a long time. “Lils, say something.”
“You’re drunk,” she finally says again, avoiding his gaze. “We’re not having this conversation now. I’m taking you home.”
“How romantic,” he says, and if his joke comes out sounding bitter, he’s already gone this far, this can’t hurt, can it? Anyways, he’s hurt, so if she is then that’s her problem to deal with.
To Lily’s credit, she doesn’t say anything. She’s almost deathly silent, actually. She pays for both of them and practically drags him out of the bar, one of her arms wrapped around his. That’s what he focuses on, standing on the sidewalk waiting for the Über that she called, acutely aware of the warmth of her arm next to him. When she lets go of him to get in the car, he stands there for a second, staring at her, before he gets in. He’s going to pretend that wasn’t a moment of shock from the sudden loss of contact.
She still knows where he hides his spare key, he notes, when she shoves the plant next to his door aside and unlocks the door with the key that had been concealed under the pot. It’s all so painfully domestic James isn’t sure if he’s still awake or if this is an alcohol-induced dream.
“Goodnight, James,” she murmurs, standing just inside his bedroom. He’s sitting on the bed and staring up at her and he can’t bring himself to move after she leaves, the front door clicking shut softly behind her.
It occurs to him, when he’s finally found the motivation to change into a tank top and boxers and gotten into bed, examining the ceiling in the darkness, that he isn’t sure if she’d said goodbye or goodnight.
9:48
Saturday, June 21
MESSAGES 56m ago
Mar
(Mar)auders
what the fuck did you do
MESSAGES 57m ago
Mar
(Mar)auders
i got a few more details from lily than they did but
MESSAGES 1h ago
Pads
(Mar)auders
I’d be worried if I were you
MESSAGES 1h ago
Wormtail
(Mar)auders
she said you got pretty drunk
MESSAGES 1h ago
Moony
(Mar)auders
lily texted us
MESSAGES 1h ago
Moony
how was your not date
Oh god, James thinks, unlocking his phone and just—stares at his texts for a while. A benefit of having an alcohol tolerance of approximately zero is that he doesn’t forget what happened while he was drunk. He’s not exactly sure how to explain what occurred last night, so he settles with a short sentence that he thinks sums it up pretty well.
Today 9:50 AM
Ok so I fucked up
James pulls into the BuzzFeed parking lot with a growing sense of dread. He knew this was going to be a problem, especially because they were filming a Marauders episode, but he’s been ignoring that. His weekend was great, actually, thank you very much. It’s fine, really. He’ll just—avoid her. Yeah, that works. Sirius is great at conversation, he can do all the talking.
He steps into the office and is immediately met by none other than Lily.
Shit, he thinks, and barely has time to arrange his expression into one that is not fear before she starts speaking. “James, there you are, filming starts in five. They’re in the cafeteria. Frank is with them but we need more cameramen and they’re not showing up and—”
Well. She doesn’t seem like she has any intention of bringing up Friday. Which is fantastic, because neither does James. “Lily. Hey. Your control freak is showing. Filming can be delayed for like five more minutes, just let me help.”
“Filming cannot be delayed!” she insists, but doesn’t protest when James follows her upstairs.
“Yes it can,” James reassures her, laughing when she shoves him lightly to the side. “Marauders gets BuzzFeed a million views a video, they can’t fire me.”
And this is—nice. It’s nice. They’re arguing without any weight like they always do and Lily hasn’t moved away from James’s side since she elbowed him and James is honestly half-convinced that Friday never happened.
He’s fully convinced that that Friday never happened after a full two weeks passes and neither of them acts any differently. They film another crush video—“Guys, I got official clearance from McGonagall to make this a series called Jily, like, we get our own playlist and everything,” Marlene announces—and have a few more meetings for Marauders and one time while James is getting lunch with Sirius and Remus and Peter, Lily stops by for a few minutes. It’s all just mind-numbingly, painfully normal and James hates it.
“I don’t know what to do ,” James complains after Lily’s gotten out of hearing range. “Did I hallucinate everything?”
“You said you had two beers,” Peter says mildly, taking a sip of his Pepsi. James resists the urge to comment on his choice of drink, because Coke is clearly superior. But he’s in the middle of an ongoing life crisis here and Coke vs. Pepsi is not a priority. He makes a mental note to himself that that might make a good video. And then he realizes that he should probably be paying attention to Peter. “You might try to argue that you hallucinated that and you had more than two beers, but you pass out after three beers, so you don’t exactly have time to hallucinate.”
“At least we’ve got one smart person around here,” Sirius says.
“Two,” Remus says, while Peter is practically glowing at the compliment.
“Right, how could I forget myself?”
James doesn’t miss that fondly frustrated look Remus throws at Sirius. He shares a glance with Peter, but doesn’t bring it up, because he really needs their help right now and he doesn’t need two of the three people he’s asking for help to have his murder on their to-do list.
“What do I do, ” James repeats, because he’s not a very patient person.
“You’ll figure it out,” Sirius reassures him. He’s annoying like that. “C’mon, Moony. We have to finish our article.”
“Wormtail, please, ” James says, while Peter is standing up. “Help.”
“I’m not supposed to say this,” Peter says, glancing around them shiftily like he’s the second coming of James Bond or something, “but Marlene says Lily has talked to her about Friday. And it wasn’t, like, bad.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” James demands. That doesn’t…that makes things worse. “Peter, what?”
“Can’t tell you more,” Peter smiles apologetically. James thinks his friends have some sort of secret pact to slowly kill him.
This is further confirmed when he’s returned to his desk and actually started being productive. He’s gotten through editing almost a full video and is taking a break by seeing how many crumpled sticky notes from his Remus List about the Lily Problem he can shoot into the recycling bin, contributing to the general welfare of BuzzFeed like a good employee, when someone taps him lightly on the shoulder. “Finally, people aren’t sitting on my desk,” he says, spinning lazily in his chair.
“Oh. Hey Lily,” he says, quickly crumpling the last sticky note from the Remus List a bit too violently. “What’s up?” Is that normal? Does that sound like he’s trying too hard?
“Did you hear about what Marlene said?” she asks, her laptop in her arms. She’s gripping onto it tightly enough to make her knuckles go white, James notes. “She sent me a thing with, like, episode ideas and stuff. Did you see it?”
She flips open her laptop and starts scrolling through her emails. “Chill,” James says. In what he thinks is a normal tone. He’s thought the word normal so many times these past few weeks it doesn’t feel like a word anymore. “Marlene announced it, like, twenty seconds ago.”
“Twenty minutes, ” Lily says, sounding genuinely aggravated when she turns her laptop screen towards him. “Do you see this? McGonagall wants an episode every other week. We need to sit down and figure our shit out.”
There it is. This is where she tells him that he needs to move on and she’s never going to speak to him again and he’s ruined all chances of them being friends again much less—“So, any thoughts for the next episode?”
Oh. Oh. She wasn’t going to talk about— oh. “Uh, yeah, actually,” he says. “I had a couple.”
It appears his acting abilities extend only to Lily, which means that his acting abilities are actually nonexistent, because he doesn’t have to do much acting at all when Marlene tells him to stare at Lily longingly.
Which is good, when they’re filming normal videos. But right now he’s sitting across a table from Mary MacDonald and they’re both trying to flirt with each other and failing terribly (Mary, at least, has the excuse of actually having a boyfriend), and Lily is a few tables away watching them with this look that is very distracting, so excuse him if he can’t quite convincingly act enamored by Mary right now.
“James, you’re the one who suggested this,” Lily calls from her seat, a grin playing at her lips, and it’s so unfair how unaffected she always is. Marlene is staring at James with an expression he’d affectionately nicknamed her death glare once, but it’s currently living up to its name.
“Sorry,” Mary offers, and James immediately panics, because he’s clearly the problem here.
“It’s not you, it’s me,” he finds himself saying, and then they both dissolve into laughter. Marlene makes a frustrated sound and he looks up at her.
“Of course you all manage to do exactly what I needed you all to do when the cameras aren’t rolling,” she whines, except he isn’t paying much attention to her because she’s standing behind Lily and Lily is. She’s. She’s staring at them and her eyes are so green and James finds that his mouth has gone dry. He swallows and forces himself to look back at Mary when Marlene yells action a few minutes later.
And she just—keeps doing it. First of all, this is his thing, the whole staring longingly thing, so this isn’t fair, and he can almost hear Remus telling him life isn’t fair, Prongs. Well, life is clearly never fair in his favor, so. And secondly, she can’t just keep looking at him like—like that, not when she’s the one who ended things and she’s the one who was witness to his incredibly cliche drunken confession and what was he thinking suggesting this as a video because obviously she would have to do this—the whole point is that she sees him and she’s trying to figure out if he’s on a date or not and the entire video is her being just a tiny bit jealous but he was not prepared for it to be so real.
(Here is a collection of memories: the time his cousin had managed to win a bet and made him dance with her friend, two years younger than him, painfully shy and in the process of nursing a crush on him, and he’d smiled kindly at her and tried to hide his grin whenever Lily shot a glare at them from her seat; when they’d finally left the party, Lily had his wrist in a death grip and she never kissed him in public but she did then, fierce and desperate, and then she’d winked at him with an innocent smile when she stepped away to call a taxi and burst into giggles at the stunned look on his face. This and a handful of other nights, he remembers.)
“Hey,” Lily says softly, and James pulls off his headphones, pausing the video and spinning in his chair to face her. Her eyes flicker to his screen, where, in full HD quality, Mary and James are sitting at a restaurant table smiling brightly at each other. “Can we walk?”
James stands up so quickly he slams his knee into his desk. And then he immediately falls back into his chair, because he went to film school and if that isn’t a sign he loves being overdramatic he doesn’t know what is. “Help me,” he wails, and Lily laughs, sounding so free and happy as she grabs his hand and pulls him up. His chest feels warm. He’s always loved making her laugh.
“You just wanna go around the block?” he asks when they reach the door. They always go around the block. He doesn’t know why he’s asking.
“Yeah,” Lily says, sounding like she isn’t entirely sure what she’s agreed to, and also like she doesn’t care very much. She looks a bit preoccupied. James has exactly one guess as to what she’s going to bring up. “So, we need to talk.”
God, he hates those words. “I hate those words,” he informs her. Lily laughs a little breathlessly.
(“We need to talk,” Lily says abruptly, sitting down at the table in front of him. He didn’t know the word heartbreak was physically accurate until that moment.)
“James, I really miss you,” she finally says, sounding really—hollow.
“Hey,” he says gently, like you would approach a startled deer. “I’m here, you know? As—as a friend. I was—I was drunk, I shouldn’t have—”
“No,” she says emphatically, stopping on the sidewalk and determinedly keeping her gaze fixed on her feet. “No, that’s the thing.”
And his chest suddenly feels tight and he can feel his heartbeat in his throat when he speaks. “What are you saying.”
“I miss you,” she repeats. “As a friend, as—everything.” She finally looks up at him then, eyes the same bright green he has loved since before he knew he was in love with her, and he is not entirely sure this is actually happening right now.
“I thought you said—”
“I was wrong,” she says resolutely, and he laughs just a little hysterically.
“Must’ve taken you a lot to say that,” he says.
“Shut up, won’t you?” she whispers, and it occurs to him that they’re standing awfully close to each other.
Her hand curls gently around his, her other hand resting on his chest, and she kisses him just as fiercely and just as desperately as she had so many times before, and they’re in public and she would’ve hated this, before, at least, but right now he absolutely could not care less.
“Just to clarify,” he manages to say, after. “We’re, like—this is—this a thing, yeah? Us? Being an us? You’re okay with—”
Lily lets out another breathless laugh, tipping his forehead against hers. “Yeah,” she says, “I think I was pretty okay with that.”
“You’re sure about this, James?” Marlene asks worriedly. “I know you—”
“No, it’ll be good, don’t worry,” he says, grinning. “Two birds with one stone. We get Is This A Date for Jily and we get a video for Marauders. It’ll be great.”
Today 1:23 PM
I am
So fucking excited
I’m fully aware
You’re going to give it away
Stop smiling so much
I don’t see you not smiling
Fuck you Potter
That’s your job
JAMES
Sorry sorry
Lily’s not wrong, though. He can’t keep himself from smiling ridiculously wide at her. Honestly, she’s not much better. He almost breaks when Sirius shows up at the restaurant and his face goes through several expressions, ranging from disbelief to shock to excitement to suspicion. Remus and Peter are less expressive, but he knows them well enough to know that they’re thinking essentially the same thing.
He recites his lines to Lily with a practiced ease and she answers just as smoothly, and Frank, behind the camera in a corner where the other Marauders can’t see him, gives them a thumbs up. He can also see Marlene watching them with a worried look that slowly morphs into confusion and then the biggest grin he’s ever seen on anyone’s face when Lily gives her the tiniest of nods to the question she mouths at them.
“Well, one person’s already got it figured out,” he murmurs to her when Frank comes over with the camera, Marlene behind him. Sirius and Remus and Peter jump up from their table and glare at James with identical accusing looks.
“Do you really think we’re that stupid? I knew it! This is a prank!” Sirius crows. Thankfully the restaurant has emptied out, so there’s no one around to hear Sirius ranting, and James pretends to let him have his moment. Peter sighs in disappointment and Remus shakes his head but gives James that motherly look and he almost breaks again.
“Yeah, well. We tried,” Lily says, looking crestfallen. “You’d think we’d be more convincing, James.” She glances sideways at him and tilts her head. Go ahead.
Thank god, because he wasn’t going to be able to hide it any longer, with Marlene practically vibrating with excitement behind the Marauders. “Yeah,” he says, keeping his voice as level as possible, “you’d think we’d convince them we’re on a date, ‘cause we’re, you know, dating.”
It takes a full two seconds for them to realize.
“What the fuck,” Remus says flatly, and James bursts into laughter then. Peter is staring at them with his hands over his chest looking like he’s about to explode, and Sirius’s jaw is actually hanging open.
“You’re kidding,” Sirius insists. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope!” Lily chirps, scooting around the table so she’s next to James. “One hundred percent dating.”
She kisses him then, and here in this empty restaurant, with his best friends around him and Lily Evans right here in front of him, James Potter thinks that this might be the happiest he has ever been.
(At the very least, he’s figured out that his crush likes him, so all those videos were good for something after all.)