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Lily had convinced Madame Pomfrey to let her leave the hospital wing early, and even she's surprised at that fact.
It’s a victory, she reckons, that Pomfrey had taken her wheedling seriously. She’d been confined to the infirmary for nearly a week, recovering from nasty jumping Lily’s taken great pains to not think about since, the spell damage she’d taken far more extensive than a casual tripping hex in the corridors, much to her chagrin.
Five days in the quiet limbo of the infirmary was almost as infuriating as being caught unawares, though, Lily had decided somewhere around Tuesday afternoon. Being left to so many of her own thoughts, as the only patient in the row of beds all day and all night, is enough to drive anyone barmy and she'd testify to it.
Pomfrey had been reluctant but let Lily go, fretting over the state of her bruised ribs and rattled brain tissue, but eventually agreed on the promise she’d stay in bed in her dorm for at least another day.
Secretly, Lily was pretty sure the medi-witch was simply finished with tsk-ing all her visitors every day for being too loud (Sirius), too crass (McKinnon), too stubborn about respecting visiting hours (James). Pomfrey had to kick him out earlier, despite his adamant protestations — “Miss Evans needs to rest, Mister Potter;” “Certainly it's a bit early for a nap, Poppy–;” “I said out, Potter!” — and Lily’s stifled laughter. They’d gone through the same motions every evening this week, her fellow Gryffindor always eventually making a reluctant exit.
Friends had been on a constant rotation, Lily does give them that. Someone had perched at her bedside anytime they could between lessons and meals, Quidditch training and Runes Club and all the homework she's fallen behind on. They’d brought her textbooks that made her concussed head spin, the latest gossip from the Great Hall, whatever league stats for the Holyhead Harpies they could, but five days bedridden had been far and enough for Lily.
The quiet in-between all those visits had still led to too much thinking, about too many things. Lily springing her own jailbreak tonight had become purely a matter of self-preservation.
After four nights tossing and turning on the stiff infirmary mattresses, the thought of cuddling into her own plush bed in her dorm also sounds like heaven. Not starting her morning with a foul-tasting anti-inflammatory elixir sounds even better, and so here she is, walking back to Gryffindor Tower alone, relishing the comical taste of freedom.
The corridors were quiet when Pomfrey finally sent her off after dinner, and unsurprising chilly given March's propensity for rain. It doesn’t help that Lily's dressed only in her pajamas because it's all Mary had brought her a few days earlier, a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt that are doing little to ward away goosebumps. Several portraits shout about her state of dress as she passes, but quite a few are wearing those accordion-shaped collars so she ignores their heckling.
Even though its only half-nine, the common room has emptied out by the time she slips through the portrait hole, save for a few harried fourth years in the corner huddled over stacks of books and feet of parchment.
Pausing halfway up the staircase to the sixth year girls’ dormitory, Lily exhales. Her ribs do still ache a bit and there’s a throbbing echo at her temples, despite how fine she’d insisted she was to Pomfrey. The thought of the reaction waiting for her in her own dorm — all the chatter and questions and doting from her mates, who she does appreciate, she does — makes her shoulders sag.
Her friends are lovely and she had been dreaming of her own bed when she’d made her bid to leave, but it’s late and she is tired.
There’ll be a record playing — probably one of hers, if she knows the girls she's lived with the last six years at all — and Mary fretting about what to wear to her date with Reginald Cattermole on Saturday, Eloise with a million opinions on this week’s edition of Witch Weekly, McKinnon indignant they’re spending a night talking about boys and feelings and other “objectively shallow arsewipe, honestly you twats.” The lights will be bright and their excitement to have her back in the mix will be overwhelming.
It all sounds a bit too much yet for Lily’s poor pounding head.
It only takes a moment to change her mind, and then she’s backtracked down the girls’ staircase and up the boys’ instead. The familiar door to the sixth-year’s dorm is cracked open, and it’s already a much calmer scene than what Lily had been prophesying in the girls’ hallway, though not entirely without life.
Remus’ voice is a murmur but Sirius’s barking laughter is impossible to miss, even before she reaches the gets close to the doorway.
“C’mon mate, you’ll give yourself an ulcer,” he’s goading, punctuated with an odd thwack. “She’s fine.”
“Maybe that’s his brilliant plan,” muses Remus, sounding amused. “Bishop to A7. Stoke something nasty enough to snag a hospital bed himself.”
“It would save all the sneaking about,” Sirius says.
“And all those stairs. Rook to D8,” Peter chimes in.
“Maybe he’s hoping Pomfrey will give him a sponge bath, while he moons over —“ Sirius' words are cut off with another thwack, of something like leather hitting something fleshy.
“Oh bugger off, the lot of you.” It’s James’ voice that interjects then, grumbling and tetchy.
When Lily nudges the boys’ door fully open, they all turn at the sound and gawk at her for a moment. There’s a wireless radio playing somewhere, but far more quietly than Lily’s friends would ever allow, and the lights are dimmed low and warm. It’s not her first time up here, so the teenage boy messiness isn’t a shock, but seeing Peter tucked into a pair of striped blue pajamas is a bit. She’s never seen his pajamas.
He and Remus sit on the floor rug, a game of wizard’s chess and a scattering of sweets between them. By the looks of the carnage, both Peter and his chocolate stash are being trounced thoroughly. Sirius is lounging across his four-poster, spinning a quaffle in his hands, while James leans back against the headboard on his own bed, their ridiculous map strewn across the duvet in front of him.
Both are still dressed, as is Remus in one of his sweater vests. Lily recognizes James’ jumper as the one he’d been wearing earlier, soft and a warm earthy brown practically made for his shoulders and hazel eyes.
He’s pushed the sleeves up now, arms still up like he’d just thrown something across the room at Sirius, and he looks a bit shocked to see her, though she’d figured he would be. Pomfrey had been quite clear when she’d shooed him away before dinner that Lily would be staying until at least the next morning, if not forever.
“Speak of the devil,” Sirius says, tilting his head with a coy smirk.
“Pomfrey let me out early,” she answers and Sirius quirks an eyebrow, muttering something that sounds like “peas in a pod” under his breath.
“How’re you feeling?” Remus asks, ever diplomatic but he also still looks amused at her appearance. Lily fidgets in the doorway, tugging on the leg of her shorts and tucking her hair behind an ear.
“I'm alright,” she looks at James as she says it, and his eyes narrow at the admission. “Still a bit off, but staring at the walls was doing my head in. D’you boys mind if I hang out for a mo’? The girls are all still up and a bit too loud just yet.”
Remus snorts. “And you thought it’d be quieter here, with Sirius still conscious?”
Lily laughs as she pads across the room without waiting for an answer. No one bats an eye when she crawls onto the end of James’ mattress, flopping down next to him.
It’s a well-known truth that she and James are in a spot right now; just a bit past friends, on the cusp of something more, after months of unexpected bridge mending. It's an almost laughably different place than they’d started the term, but they’d been here now so long — weeks, at this point — that all their mates have given up on taking the piss about it. The hilarity has faded, because both James and Lily just shrug and admit to their goofy, moony eyes with little shame.
It’s not even a will they, won't they kind of dance anymore, more like a yeah, they will, soon as the moment’s just right kind of stasis.
She thought he’d been about to spark their moment last week, and then a trio of blood purists had ruined it by nearly hexing her face off and any build-up they'd achieved fizzled in the face of anxious concern.
Pricks.
“I know, he's a megaphone, but he’s still less shrill than Mac,” Lily mumbles from her faceplant into James’ comforter. He nudges one of his pillows towards her and she takes it, with a grateful smile.
“Oi,” Sirius grunts indignantly at them both, flipping them off. He swings around to lay on his back and resumes a one-man game of catch, as James laughs and sits up.
His huffing makes Lily smile, cheek pressed into James’ linen pillowcase, and she tucks her socked feet under the blanket crumpled at the food of his bed. It looks like one from the common room sofa, an afghan of deep reds and golds with tassels all along the edge.
It’s soft on her skin, and there’s a comforting smell clinging to James himself, like the cinnamon twist pastries she loves that the house elves only occasionally make. For a moment she laments having missed them tonight, wonders if he had smuggled some up from dinner, tucked them away in his desk drawer for later with a preservation charm to keep them fresh.
“Ha!” Peter crows as his rook takes one of Remus’ bishops, drawing his attention back to their game. Sirius laughs as Remus swears vividly, but Peter’s victorious expression lasts only a second before he shoots Lily a guilty side-eye. “Bollocks, sorry Lily.”
“Oh no,“ she says quickly, tucking her arm under her pillow as she curls on her side. “Don’t let me interrupt. I’m alright.”
Both boys look like they don’t believe her, even as Lily tries to smile convincingly. Truthfully, Peter’s cry did put a spike to her temple, but she’d never tell them that. James looks like maybe he might suspect, the way he’s eying her, so she curls her smile in the way she knows stuns him a bit, and it works.
“Were you spying on me,” she asks, as she peers over his arm to watch him tuck the folds of the map together.
“Pomfrey, actually, waiting for her to go to sleep,” he glances over at her, eyes soft. The to sneak down and check up on you goes unspoken, but not unrecognized.
“Sorry to have foiled your plans to spring me yourself,” she teases, enjoying how he huffs an annoyed laugh at her.
“S’pose I’ll forgive,” James hums, before leaning forward to toss the map onto the top of his trunk, at the foot of his bed. The mattress shifts when he does, sliding Lily even closer to his side, her bent knees bumping his thigh.
“It was hardly a plan so much as a moody sulk, anyway,” Sirius pipes up, dodging with a laugh when James swipes a sock from the floor and lobs it at his head.
James slouches further against his headboard when he settles back again, tucking one hand over his ribs and the other behind his neck to get comfortable. His feet brush hers under their shared afghan.
A new widget in Lily’s chest pinches, happily, as it's been wont to do whenever James acts as though it’s perfectly natural for her to be so near to him this way, not a stitch of embarrassment at being openly fond of her around his mates.
James doesn’t put his arm around her. It's a line they’ve yet to cross, still waiting for that right moment first, but he lets her cuddle as close as she pleases, so she does. She shuffles closer to press her temple to his bicep, curling her fingers around the hem of his jumper to rub the fabric with her thumb, a subtle connection she craves but one the other boys won’t notice.
Across the room, Peter groans as Remus’s remaining knight violently smushes his bishop, and Sirius laughs again. He and James fall into a half-hearted ribbing about the Sunday's coming Quidditch League match (the Catapults, James' team, is playing Sirius' beloved Falmouth Falcons), and all in all, it's a quiet Thursday night; exactly what Lily had been looking for.
It takes hardly any time for her to doze off, lulled by James’ warmth and voice and his soft pillow, the hum of the boys in the background.
She wakes to sunlight in her eyes and a strange whirring in her ears, stirring the wisps of hair that had gone squirrely from her braid in the night.
No one had pulled the curtains above the bed, and so a shaft of morning brightness is slashing right across her face, but that's not what woke her up. Cracking one eye open, she mumbles a quiet swear and blinks when the pillow under her vibrates again, chirping in her ear insistently.
It’s a shock but what really jolts her awake is James, who jumps beside her at the sound.
“Shit, sorry Evans,” he’s mumbling, swearing under his breath as he sits up, the movement jostling Lily due to how close they are.
Because she had been tucked rather close to him, They’d curled together throughout the night, like planets in a tight orbit in a galaxy the size of one full-sized four-poster bed. They’re not quite sharing a pillow, but they had been nearly nose-to-nose, Lily pressed along James’ arm, now clutching at his hand instead of the jumper he’d shed sometime while she’d been out, feet tangled with his.
Looking up at him now, James is wildly sleep rumpled, in a white t-shirt and missing his glasses. There’s a crease pressed into his cheek from his sheets, and Lily has about two seconds to admire how boyish it makes him look before he’s leaning to grab his wand from his bedside table, on her side of the bed.
The motion has him stretching overtop her in a way that puts chest, throat, jawline — with, Merlin’s pants, is that morning stubble? who is this boy — right into her space, her nose nearly pressing into the hollow of his throat.
It’s like there’s a buzzing in the few centimeters of air separating them. He’s still warm — James is always warm — and impossibly close, enough to make her think about pressing her lips to the soft spot above his clavicle that’s right there in front of her face, just to see what happens.
Maybe this can be the moment, she contemplates. It doesn’t have to be grand and romantic. It could be soft and just like this, just them.
He pulls back before she decides, though, swishing his wand at her pillow, which stills and quiets immediately.
“It's an alarm charm. I modified it so it doesn’t wake the lads when I get up for practice, just me,” James tells her, and she makes a great effort to tune back in. “Sorry, forgot to disarm it last night.”
“It’s alright. That’s clever,” she says, because it is and her mind’s still a bit foggy, on account of the early hour and how the collar of James’ shirt gapes a bit. She can see a stretch of chest she's never seen before.
They both instinctively keep their voices low, the rest of boys still asleep around them. Sirius’ snores are unmistakably loud, enough to shake the rafters if Gryffindor Tower had any, Peter’s a quiet titter in between.
“Do you have practice this morning?” she asks, tilting her head to eye the light still assaulting them both, as James settles back to a respectable distance. It’s early, clearly, and he does usually spend most mornings on the Quidditch pitch, either at an early practice he’d scheduled for the team or simply out for a fly himself. (She knows because he always smells a bit like fresh grass and cold air at breakfast, when he crowds into the seat next to her.)
“Nah, not today,” James answers, scrubbing a hand over his face. His hair is a riot, shirt crumpled beyond saving, and his eyelashes are somehow longer when she’s not seeing them filtered by his glasses. The sunlight makes them glow amber at the ends, they’re so lush, and Lily's a bit chuffed at his good genetics.
But then again, he's looking at her the same way she’s looking at him, like it's unfair how a person can be so pretty in the first, fluttery wee hours of the morning, and it warms her chest.
“Might enjoy a lie-in,” his lips quirk softly, as he lowers himself back down beside her, twisting to look at her over the few inches between them. Her warmth grows when he nudges her arm with his knuckles, fingers tapping a staccato on her skin seemingly without thought.
“Until breakfast, you mean,” she answers with a yawn, tucking her nose back into her now-still pillow, and he shrugs, non-committal.
“Are you back to lessons today, then?” he says, raising his eyebrows.
“I’ve permission to skip, for one more day’s bed rest,” she admits. “Pomfrey’s orders.”
“I’ll skive too,” he says immediately, as if it's obvious. We can stay here, he doesn’t say. She wants to, quite a bit, but it seems like stretching their luck. Not the moment.
“You can’t,” she flicks his shoulder, smiling at the look of affront that skips across his face, like she’d insulted his ability to be unbothered about missing schoolwork. “I need you to go to Transfig and bring me back some decent notes. I love her to bits, but Mary’s are shit. Yours have got to be better."
She presses closer to him then and if she bats her eyelashes, that’s between her and the universe and the slightly dazed expression on James' face.
James recovers after a moment and just laughs, fingers wrapping around her wrist and squeezing affectionately. The buzz between them snaps and crackles at the contact. Lily press her answering smile into James’ pillow, wishing she’d taken the moment earlier to lavish his dumb neck so she could do it again right now, without it being a whole new lines-crossed type of thing.
“Fuck, Lil, that’s low down. You can’t appeal to a bloke’s ego and his anxiousness to please a pretty girl,” James smiles down at her and she decides ah, fuck it anyways and noses into the nook under his chin, crushing their hands between their chests. “Who could turn that down?”
“Not you, if you’re as clever as you think you are,” she mumbles, pursing her lips when James hums. She feels it against her cheek as much as she hears it.
They lay like that for a while longer, until the other boys start stirring at their own alarms — Remus first, then Peter with a jaw-cracking yawn and lastly Sirius, who rolls out of bed looking as irritatingly unruffled as he always does.
Lily sits cross-legged on James’ bed while the boys get ready, munching on a cinnamon twist James had indeed nicked last night. (He’d handed it to her incredibly nonchalantly, given how obnoxiously Sirius and Peter coo at them from across the room when he does.)
She sends them all off to breakfast an hour later. James rubs her back as he deposits her at the bottom of the girls’ stairs, a last comfort before she treks up to her own bed to sleep off one last morning before returning to the real world where there’s classwork to catch up on and unwelcome invitations to Hogsmeade to dodge.
Exactly as predicted, the girls do shriek and chatter at her return, clamouring to know how she’s feeling.
“I’m alright,” Lily answers, with a smile.