Jily one shots

The letter

Disclaimer: written by @toonstar

He wrote letters the way he lived life James Potter did. A strange realization, but nevertheless true... and in realizing it, Lily Evans realized something else, something infinitely more shocking than she was perhaps ready for.

There was nothing particularly special about the day, or the letter that precipitated her epiphany. Heaven only knew she had received so many letters from him at that point that his illegible gibberish had become unsettlingly legible to her, and yet still she had not admitted, not even to herself, that she enjoyed receiving them.

It had been a Thursday evening, mid-October of their seventh year, when it arrived and they had finally managed to establish a relatively professional and peaceful working relationship. This was mostly due to a recent compromise involving him promising not to hit on her and ask her out in front of the prefects, and her promising not to hex him every time he got on her nerves. There had of course been momentary lapses (which often resulted in James doing time in the hospital wing) but they were so far exceeding the expectations of the majority of the school, who were enthusiastically placing bets in the betting pool Sirius had created.

Lily was sitting at the Gryffindor table, picking at a piece of toast, 'composing a To-Do list' and accidentally-on-purpose listening in on Ellen McNamara and Maggie Samuels' conversation, the content of which could have been inspiration for a Celestina Warbeck song. Right in the middle of some particularly juicy gossip, Lily's owl Gary flew directly into the table in front of her, knocking over her coffee, and to her great disgust, shaking himself off in a manner that could only be called doggy, which action dotted her immaculately clean white blouse with black coffee. The letter was scribbled on the back of a letter Lily had sent him, clumsily tied to Gary's leg, and now a rather fetching coffee brown colour.

Lily's letter read:

James,

We need to finish the timetable for prefect rounds before the meeting tomorrow. If possible meet me in the library at eight.

Lily.

Reading his reply, she could imagine him, covered in mud, rummaging in the corners of his bag and fishing out a bent quill to write his hasty reply, which read:

Evans- at quidditch finishes 8ish Ill be in the common room bring coffee

She looked at this masterpiece of the English language, now completely ignoring Ellen and Maggie three seats down, and thought that James wrote just as he lived.

He never punctuated, his words all rushed together into one long sentence without so much as a pause to draw breath. His writing was blunt and unpretentious. He crammed as much meaning as he possibly could into as few words as possible. He didn't quite care if he was misunderstood, he was confident of what he'd meant and that was all that mattered. The words were messy and casual and rushed and unconsidered and strangely enthusiastic. And, in the strangest oxymoron she had ever yet come across, the letters contents was both undemanding and gently commanding.

Every unpunctuated, thoughtless word sang James in Lily's face...

And that was the moment she realized, how ever little she liked it, that one day she'd say yes to him. Because he wrote like he lived... and so did she.