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The lights in the club were a rainbow of beams rotating around the dance floor, lighting up the mash of gyrating bodies at regular intervals. Unfortunately, the pattern of the lights was starting to make Lily feel a bit woozy. It might’ve also been the amount of alcohol she’d consumed over the last couple of hours, but either way she bumped and jostled herself to the outer edge of the dance floor and away from the piercing lights.
With a little more room to breathe, Lily decided that the best way to clear her head would be another drink. She worked her way around the dance floor to the club bar and stopped behind a couple of men blocking the way. There was a bit of a crowd around the bar and Lily wasn’t quite rude enough to just push between them.
(Lily congratulated herself on not being that drunk if she could still consider the polite course of action.)
“Excuse me,” she said - maybe slurred. “‘m trying to get a drink.”
Both men turned to look at her. Lily realized to her surprise that she recognized both of them. The one she knew immediately as James from his shaggy, dark hair and glasses and the charm-- irritating expression on his face from when he followed her around with his ridiculous crush at school. It took her a moment to place the other, but after a second she recognized him as Regulus. Sirius’ younger brother, whom James was now dating. He had the same dark, piercing eyes as the photo where James had announced them as a couple, Regulus pressed up against him like a reserved, pale contrast to James’ darker exuberance.
Not that Lily was stalking him or anything. Lily had never liked James back. She was just . . aware.
“Should you be having another drink?” Regulus asked with - as far as Lily knew - characteristic bluntness.
“She’s an adult, love, she can have a drink if she wants to,” James told him.
Lily nodded emphatically and only regretted it a little bit. “I’m fine. And I do what I want. I’m an indem-- independent woman.”
James held out an arm in a little See? gesture.
Regulus did not look convinced, nor impressed at her successful pronunciation of such a large word. “I think you should go home, Lily. You’re very drunk. Did you come here with friends or do you want me to call you an Uber?”
Lily looked around on autopilot. She’d come with Mary and they’d met up with Marlene and her girlfriend, but somehow in the rush of music and dancing Lily had lost all of them. And she didn’t want to go home yet, she was still having fun. How dare Regulus try to boot her out the door!
She turned back to Regulus with a frown. “I’m staying!”
Regulus let out an aggrieved sigh that drew her attention to his lips. “Lily--”
“C’mon, Reg,” James interrupted him with a pleading expression. “We can look out for her and let her have some more fun.” He caught Lily’s eye. “Maybe just the one more drink, though, yeah?”
Regulus said something about alcohol poisoning in return, but Lily was no longer paying attention to their exchange. Her gaze had caught on James’ face and refused to let go. Even the pounding of the music seemed a bit distant as she studied him, the way his glasses caught the light and reflected it, the way the neon colors coming from the dance floor made regular motions across his dark skin and lit up the way his shirt clung to his frame. He looked just like he had during their school years. Lily was having trouble remembering why she shouldn’t find him unfairly attractive.
“--at right, Lily?” James asked, drawing Lily back suddenly to the conversation.
Lily blinked a couple of times, though it did nothing to clear her head. She had no idea what his question had been, nor did she particularly care. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was kiss him and see if she really had been depriving herself of a good thing for so many years.
Lily stepped forward into his space and kissed him before he could react. It was quick, only a couple of seconds, and then Lily rocked backwards again. The motion destabilized her, though, and she had to reach out a quick hand for James’ shoulder to keep her balance.
She vaguely registered his slack-jawed silence as she decided that it had been too short a kiss to really tell if it had been good. A sound caught Lily’s attention before she could try again, though, and she swung her head around to find Regulus staring at her with both his eyebrows disappeared into his hairline.
Oh. Shit. Right. James had a boyfriend now. That wasn’t good. Regulus seemed like the kind of person who could really make her life hell, too.
The part of Lily’s spinning brain that was increasingly taking control - drunk-Lily, as it were - lit up with a brilliant plan. Regulus couldn’t be that mad about it if she kissed him, too. It wouldn’t be a hardship either; he looked pretty good himself.
Lily wasn’t entirely sure when she moved, but the next thing she knew, she’d crossed the distance between them and was leaning in to kiss Regulus. It was easier than trying to kiss James, at least, because they were about the same height and she could reach his face easily even when he wasn’t actively helping her.
When she drew back from Regulus, she couldn’t help but laugh at his expression. “You’re both so pretty-- handsome! Do you prefer handsome?”
Regulus closed his eyes and chuckled softly. Lily was struck by how beautiful a sight it was. She reached out her hand--
---
Lily woke up with a pounding in her skull and a pit of nausea in her stomach. She groaned, throwing her arm over her face to shield her eyes from the thin lines of sunlight coming through her blinds. She stayed that way for some time, but eventually she admitted to herself that lying in bed attempting to hide from her problems was not actually making them go away.
With Herculean effort, she rolled onto her side - away from the sunlight, but the movement threatened to upset her tenuous grasp on the contents of her stomach - until she could reach her nightstand enough to fish around on it for her phone. She found it - not plugged in, of course - and with relief saw that it still hadn’t given up the ghost overnight.
When she tapped the screen, it lit up with a wave of luminescence that speared her eyeballs. She groaned again, tapping half-blindly until the brightness turned down enough that she could look at it. The first thing she saw was the time (well past noon) and below that were a series of notifications. She dismissed most of them automatically, not prepared to deal with the latest social media nonsense on top of a hangover, but figured she should let her friends know that she was still alive. She had no idea how she’d gotten home last night, apparently blacked-out as she’d been, but someone had probably dropped her off.
She responded to Mary’s u alive? with quick alive. feeling like shite tho and a string of laughing emojis from Marlene with some angry faces of her own.
The third notification threw her for a loop, though. It was a groupchat with two other people, “James [eye roll emoji]” and a keysmash of letters that started with R. Clearly drunk-Lily hadn’t been the most coordinated last night. It was a miracle that she’d entered the new number correctly at all. The fact that Lily was somehow in a groupchat with James, of all people, paled in comparison to the contents of the string of texts.
The first was from James at almost three in the morning and read: did u make it home safe baby? with a heart emoji at the end.
The second had been sent about twenty minutes later, from the keysmash name, and was jarringly formal: Text us when you wake up.
The third was from James again and said only: please!
Lily dropped the phone to the bed and muffled a scream into her hands. She was in a groupchat with James and Regulus - it had to be Regulus - where they called her ‘baby’ and asked if she’d made it home safely? Just what in the hell had she done last night?! Suddenly Marlene’s text made a lot more sense in a very embarrassing way.
Lily wracked her brain for clues. She remembered taking shots, vaguely recalled dancing, and then . .
A sudden burst of clarity came to her. Lily, kissing James. Lily, turning to Regulus and kissing him, too. Giggling, “You can’t get mad if I kiss you both!”
Lily whined high in her throat. The mortification over drunk-Lily’s actions was almost enough to swear off alcohol forever. Except . . it had turned out kind of alright, hadn’t it? Or at least, they wanted to talk to her more. Though that could also be to explain that everyone involved had been three sheets to the wind and the kisses hadn’t actually meant anything and to reiterate that James and Regulus were dating each other.
Lily tried to recall what had happened after she’d kissed them, what their reactions had been, but try as she might she couldn’t pull up anything past that point. She groaned again and banged a fist against the mattress weakly.
Drunk-Lily was never allowed to make any decisions again, ever. She could not even be trusted to order for herself.
Curling up in the foetal position only reminded Lily of her physical ailments and the fact that lying here was not making them any better. The good news was that she hadn’t received any further messages from the groupchat since the ones from late last night, so either James and Regulus were equally hungover or were giving her space to contact them in her own time. Lily appreciated that immensely. She was going to take full advantage of it. There was no way she could handle whatever conversation was going to happen with her head aching, stomach roiling, and the way she was becoming aware of her dire need to pee.
Lily sighed and slowly leveraged herself into a sitting position, waiting for her head to stop swimming before she stood up. She was going to drink a shit-tonne of water, take some pain killers, and get something to eat. And then maybe she’d respond to Regulus-bloody-Black’s message and see where it led. But first, she was going to take a piss.