Work Text:
Lily Evans shivered where she was sitting on a patch of grass in the hills behind Hogwarts’ courtyard. One of the drawbacks of doing homework outdoors was the chill, only warded off by sitting on a charmed-warm blanket. Both she and Severus had taken to going outdoors if the day was dry enough in spite of the temperature, enjoying the fresh air on their skin after spending the day in. Being indoors made not much difference, after all, when you lived in a stone castle with poor insulation.
Today, they had chosen a spot in a distant hill, far enough that the voices of those in the courtyard drifted away without reaching them. Lily sat cross-legged, balancing her Potion homework on her thigh, and Severus lay on his stomach, working steadily on a Charms essay. His hair was tucked behind his ears, out of the way.
Severus’s hair, Lily noticed, was getting longer. Had been getting longer, really, for all of last term and all of summer. It suited him, she dared say. Well, she dared think. She hadn’t dared to say it out loud, worried it might make it odd. Lily was perfectly aware that looks were a sensitive matter for Severus, and she didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by making any comments. So she just looked.
His hair, black sheets of slick, pin-straight ebony, always shone at the roots with grease. Lily had known the texture of it since third year, when she had tied Severus’s hair out of the way. They had been brewing and his hands had been filthy at the time with flobberworm guts. The hair itself had been surprisingly silky, unlike Lily’s own frizzy mane. She had combed his hair carefully with her fingers to gather it at Severus’s nape and had revelled in the way her fingers had glided through the strands, unobstructed. Lily had used her own ribbon to hold it in place and had blushed, pleased, at the timid smile she had got in return.
In the following two years she had developed a fixation of sorts with Severus’s hair. She had monitored his washing routine like a hawk, tracking how long it took for the hair to get oily (under twenty-four hours) and how long it was before it started to bother Severus (two days). At that point, his scalp would start to itch and he would wash it.
Lily wasn’t the only one obsessed with Severus’s hair, as she had been quick to notice. People seemed to pay attention to it, although nobody shared her peculiar type of interest. They usually made fun of it, and quite consistently, leaving Lily to feel like the only person that liked Severus’s hair. She had, consequently, kept it to herself.
Severus didn’t seem to be overly self-conscious about his greasy hair… but Lily realised she was. Nobody else seemed to appreciate the way light reflected off the oiled, black length with the same rapture she did. She often found herself drawn to it, a borderline obscene sight that made her skin tingle. A sense of shame, of wrongness, had plagued her for a few months before she had made the conscious decision of simply never voicing her pleasure.
She allowed herself to observe Severus when they were by themselves. Being nearby but separated from bystanders allowed Lily to watch as much as she pleased without feeling like a creep. Now, for example, doing homework together in a patch of grass, she felt loose with the warming charms on her skin and lulled into a weightless state by their comfortable silence. As she watched, a slick strand of black slipped over Severus’s tilted-down face. It got in his eyes and she waited eagerly for a moment. Right on cue, Severus tucked the offending nuisance behind his ear. Then, under Lily’s watchful eye, the same strand of hair slid right back to hang over Severus’s face. He huffed an annoyed breath, still trying to keep it out of his eyes without bothering to remove his hand from where it held down the parchment of his Charms essay.
It was futile, Lily knew. It was second-day hair, entirely too slick at this point to allow tucking behind the ear. He would have to tie it back and would probably wash it in the morning.
Lily waited some more with bated breath. She hoped he would want to tie it back. Lily had got into the habit of carrying multiple ribbons in her bag for this particular eventuality. Sometimes, if they were alone like in this moment, he would ask her to lend him a ribbon — curiously enough, Severus never seemed to carry one of his own, and she wondered if he owned any. Lily secretly hoped that he, too, clandestinely enjoyed their little game and didn’t bring ribbons on purpose. She was almost certain there was awareness on his part, but cherished the little moments too much to risk bringing it up and discovering that it had been one-sided.
Lily doodled in the margins of her Potions essay, pretending halfheartedly to do homework. Severus had finished his own paper earlier, and Lily raked her brain for something to ask him about that would start up a conversation.
“Sev,” Lily called softly. Once he had lifted his head, she continued, “In what order did you write your brewing process? ‘Add the porcupine quills’ before or after turning off the flame?”
Severus sent her a look half-way between confusion and alarm.
“If you want your remedy for boils to turn into corrosive acid, you might as well add them before.”
Lily snapped her fingers in a feigned enlightenment.
“Right! I couldn’t remember if the last ingredient was the cotton or the quills. I reckoned the cotton, but it did sound off.”
“Hazardous, you mean,” he muttered, already going back to his essay.
By a stroke of luck, that lovely strand of hair fell back over Severus’s eyes just as he looked down. He cursed under his breath in annoyance. Lily pretended to rummage around in her bag.
“Hold on — I have an extra ribbon here somewhere.”
Severus glanced up gratefully as Lily pulled out an emerald green ribbon. He looked surprised at her colour choice and smirked a little like he was about to tease Lily about it.
“What? Red blends in with my hair,” she mumbled defensively.
Severus extended a hand to take the ribbon, but Lily made no move to hand it over. “Can I try something on you?”
He cocked his head slightly. It wasn’t a yes. “Depends. Does it involve potentially lethal potion-brewing?”
“Ha har. No.” She smiled impishly. “I just… think it will look good on you.”
Severus’s dark eyes bore into Lily’s intently. She blushed but didn’t back down in the ensuing pause.
After a long moment, Severus shrugged and nodded.
As he sat up, Lily got on her knees and scooted over behind him. He began to pinch the grass, methodically uprooting the stalks from the soil. His fingertips were turning brown, and she could almost smell the dampness in the earth just by looking. At first, Lily flattered herself thinking he might be feeling nervous at her proximity, but then she figured he must be impatient to go back to his essay. Probably.
Severus had become a rather composed person. The boy who had dropped a tree branch on Petunia for being cruel with him was blending into this new version made of unimpressed stares and monotone assessments. Only occassionally did he forget himself and lost his temper, now resorting to snarkiness as a weapon of choice.
The butterflies in Lily’s stomach tittered and fawned over this new Severus. He’s so mature, they sighed dreamily.
Lily mentally shushed the overexcited insects, a remaining bout of shame from when she had supressed her growing fascination with Severus, before reminding herself that she did like him and there was nothing shameful in that. She started to finger-comb Severus’s hair.
“I think you might like it,” Lily told him.
“Will I like it or will I look good?” Severus inquired.
Lily tugged on his hair playfully.
“Can’t it be both?”
He grunted noncommittally. She wondered if he was, after all, a bit self-conscious about his looks.
“I like your hair.” It came out sounding oddly defensive, as if they were discussing Lily’s own qualities rather than Severus’s.
Her pulse started to thunder in her throat, reproachful at the slip. She hadn’t planned on saying anything, but having accepted her own interest made Lily want to share it in a way she hadn’t before.
Severus outright scoffed.
“What?” she demanded, stilling her hands’ movements.
Severus’s shoulders went up and inwards in a shrug. “What’s there to like?” he said simply. He didn’t sound particularly forlorn about it, but Lily made it a personal challenge.
“I’ll show you,” is all she said.
Her hands full of hair, Lily realised braiding was much easier to do on somebody else’s hair than one’s own, since she could use her sight as well as her touch. She decided to take advantage of that. With a flick of her wand, she transfigured some blades of grass into matching emerald green ribbons of a smaller length and girth. Then she proceeded to section the uppermost part of Severus’s hair and secured it with one of the magical ribbons. Once secured, Lily flipped the section of hair inside itself and tugged it through the other side, creating two intersecting twists of hair coiling all the way from his temples to the back of his head in a V shape.
As she was in the middle of teasing some strands of hair in the twists, Severus leaned back slightly. Lily wordlessly sat back on her bum from her kneeling position and pulled up her knees so that Severus could rest his back on her legs. Her core muscles burned from the tension in her posture, but she didn’t pull away.
Lily continued to make V-shaped twists below the first one until she had tied up all the hair and was left with a low ponytail to work with. This big portion of hair she divided into two sections and fishtail-braided it until she reached the ends of Severus’s hair. To tie it off she used the ribbon she had pulled from her bag. After a brief second of hesitation, she finished the knot with a bow.
“Done!” she told him, setting a hand on his shoulder. Instinctively, Severus tried to peek over his shoulder to look before realising he couldn’t see the back of his head. Lily conjured a mirror and Severus promptly copied her, and both of them spent a few seconds angling the mismatched mirrors so Severus could have a view of the finished braid.
He made a soft humming sound, face unreadable. Lily thought he must have not liked the bow.
“What? Boys can wear bows too,” she snapped.
A single black eyebrow quirked up sceptically.
“It’s not at all girlish,” she insisted, brows furrowing. Then, inspiration struck, and she smirked wolfishly. “Lucius Malfoy tied his hair ribbons into bows.”
Severus’s normally pallid face flushed a bright pink.
“Knock it off,” he warned her, but there wasn’t any heat in his voice.
“Would you say Malfoy looked girlish in a bow?” Lily continued, undeterred by her friend’s obvious embarrassment. “Because I distinctly remember you saying he was sort of fetching and quite manly —”
“I’m neither fetching nor manly,” Severus protested, like the mere idea of either of those things offended him greatly.
Lily only frowned. “Why on earth not?”
Pointedly, Severus looked at the mirror he was holding in front of his face.
“You know why. I look sort of… ill.”
“Lots of folks’ve got pasty skin.”
“And my nose is massive,” he added, like that was going to convince Lily.
The thing is, it was true. Severus housed a colossal piece of nose in his — remarkably pale — face. People were constantly pointing it out to him, too, like he could have possibly missed it. They did the same thing with Lily’s hair, back in Cokeworth. Exclaimed over her bright red hair like she was not aware of its colour. They didn’t even know that she was a real witch, but the comments about her hair often included hints at witchery. It was exhausting, having strangers make such comments about your looks all the time.
Lily plopped her chin down on Severus’s shoulder and scrutinised the mirror as well.
“Well,” she declared. Severus’s eyes were glaring at his nose’s reflection. “You know what they say about boys with big noses.”
Severus’s eyes snapped up to hers in the mirror, wide with uncertainty.
Lily bit her lip, feeling her cheeks already ablaze even before she leaned into Severus’s ear to whisper about proportions. She murmured about nose size translating into… knob size… directly equivalent, she assured him.
“So, you know,” she finished, “your nose being massive is rather manly, I reckon.”
As Severus gasped in equal parts delight and mortification, Lily’s face was properly on fire, but she was also grinning widely. She leaned back and patted Severus’s shoulder insistently.
“Do you like your braid, then, or not?!”
“Goodness, Lils, yes, it’s grand. Now leave well enough alone, you wicked woman!” But he was also smiling. His hand was feeling the back of his head to brush his fingers against the pattern in his hair. The plait shone in the sunlight, but not even half as brightly as his smiling eyes.