Jahan Poddar ⚽ James Potter (jahan) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2017-09-30 16:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, * emily, * jamie, r: calla puri, r: jahan puri |
WHO: Calla Adams & Jahan Puri → Lily Evans & James Potter
WHEN: Fall 2009 → Fall 1977
WHERE: Dunhaven University → Hogwarts
SUMMARY: Just two enemies starting to fall in love.
WARNINGS: None! Still in progress with the Jily stuff.
Calla Adams wasn't entirely sure how she had gotten here. Well, she knew how she'd gotten physically to where she was at that moment, sitting at one of the tables in the student union, her messenger bag on the chair to the left of her and her laptop sitting open on the table, papers surrounding them. It was the fact that Jahan Puri was sitting in the chair to her right, actually engaging with her in the planning process of the roundtable event that the two of them had been given as members of the College Democrats group on campus that was baffling her -- especially given that she wasn't scorning his very existence and hadn't insisted on being paired with someone else. In fact, she'd almost been relieved when it was Jahan. Only a couple of years ago, there wouldn't have been a sum that she could have been paid to willingly spend time with Jahan. Calla would have been prepared with a list of things that she disliked about the boy and would have offered to make a powerpoint to drive the issue home. Now, though? Now she was having a hard time remembering all of those things. Neither of them had changed so drastically that they were different people, but something had changed and Calla knew that it wasn't just in him. At first she'd come to tolerate him, then start to like him, and now she would not only call him a friend, but liked to find reasons to spend more time with him. In all, it was vexing, confusing, and she didn't like it. So, Calla had sunk into a special brand of denial for herself. That just seemed easier. "I think that about does it," she decided with a sigh, scrolling through the document they'd built for an outline of discussion points for the roundtable. Calla glanced once toward him with a smile. "All we need to do is make copies and make sure the pizza is ordered." In a time not so long ago, Jahan would have considered spending the night with Calla akin to meeting Beyonce, or something like that--he would have bent over backwards to impress and endear himself to her. None of this was to say that Jahan didn’t still enjoy Calla’s company; in fact, he found he was enjoying it more than ever the less he said something stupid and the less they wound up fighting. Jahan had essentially given up on trying to impress people in general and caring so much about what other people thought. Strangely enough, it seemed to be working out for him, and particularly for him and Calla, who he felt he could call a real friend now. Jahan rubbed his eyes--it had been a long night, and he’d applied more or less his full athlete’s drive to stay focused and get it all done. “The pizza is most definitely the most important part,” he pointed out. “We really need to make sure we don’t mess it up--let me set an alarm in my phone for tomorrow,” he said, taking out his cellphone and doing just that. “Half plain, half pepperoni, you think?” "I think that just about covers all the bases," Calla agreed, saving the document one last time for good measure and quickly emailing it to him, so he had a copy himself. You could never be too safe -- she'd lost one too many assignments in the past and had learned from that particular mistake. "And I was going to Wilkerson's tomorrow to pick up some snacks for my dorm, so I can get some soda, too." Speaking of soda, her hands abandoned her keyboard and reached for her nearly depleted bottle of Mountain Dew. It was pretty much the only thing that was keeping her going at that point. Well, that and her overwhelming need to give 110% to absolutely everything she did. A blessing and a curse, it would probably be the end of her eventually, but for now she had caffeine to keep her going. "Thanks for sticking this out with me. I know I can be a pain to work with sometimes." “Nah,” Jahan said with a shake of his head. “You’re one of the few people I can think of who also happens to be on my level of insanity. We made a good team," he said. It was true that Jahan could be a bit much, approaching everything in life that he really cared about like it was a championship soccer match. Vega had told him more than once that he exhausted her sometimes, but Calla seemed to share that same sort of drive for the things she was passionate about. It was one of the things he liked best about her. "Yeah," Calla replied, almost thoughtfully as she set her soda down and looked over to Jahan. "I guess we do." It was a realization that she'd made not long ago, something she'd been forced to consider and accept. For so long, she had placed Jahan under the category of people that she had nothing in common with and never would, but she'd had to reevaluate that completely. Poor Annie had gone from having to listen to Calla's rants about him to her ramblings of how she apparently didn't know him as well as she'd thought. She smiled, reaching up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "Who knew? Guess we'll have to keep working together." Jahan smiled--a genuine smile, neither cocky nor self-assured, because he didn’t feel either of those things at the moment. Instead, Jahan felt suddenly vulnerable--the truth was, he liked Calla a lot, and he wanted her to like him in return, even if it was only on terms of friendship, because Jahan thought there would be nothing “only” about being real, true friends with Calla. He thought that’d be a pretty incredible experience, in fact. The problem was, Jahan usually turned into an idiot when he tried to get people to like him. All of his real friendships had formed when he wasn’t trying, like with Vee and Remi. But with his and Calla’s rocky past (namely Jahan annoying her to the umpteenth degree), he knew he’d have to put some effort in if he wanted to spend time with Calla outside of College Democrats. “I guess so,” Jahan said, a bit distractedly. “It doesn’t have to only be work, though,” he said quickly. “We could, like...hangout, I mean. Like see a movie, or something.” Calla worked very hard to not react at what he said, mostly because she wasn't sure how her face would react and she didn't want to give the wrong impression. For a number of years now, she had been doing all she could to try to create distance from Jahan and convince herself that she didn't like him and that he was irritating. It might have been true at first, but he'd become progressively less irritating as time went on -- not because she got used to him, she thought, but because they'd both changed. There would have been a time where the thought of having to work with him would have made her roll her eyes, while the thought of willingly spending free time with him to just spend time with him would have made her laugh. Now, though, she was doing neither. In fact, when she turned, she smiled at him. "Yeah? We could do that." “Yeah?” Jahan echoed, perking up considerably. It wasn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but on the other hand...it kind of absolutely was. “Maybe Friday?” he suggested. Quite without her permission, Calla felt herself not only be charmed by the obvious excitement he was feeling over her agreement, but also smiled. "Friday would be good," she agreed. "Do you want to get food after? A burger or something?" The suggestion came out of nowhere and she could hardly believe she'd made it after she realized the words came out of her mouth. Jahan could hardly believe it either, and his grin only widened. “I’d like that, definitely,” he nodded. Jahan wasn’t entirely sure what the nature of this outing was, but he didn’t especially care right now--the thought of spending more time with Calla in whatever context left him feeling happy enough. Calla's thoughts followed Jahan's. She didn't know what this dinner and a movie could actually be categorized, but she wasn't going to overanalyze it -- not yet, at least. She could do that later in her dorm room, laying in her bed and going over each and every detail with Annie. It was a situation that had played out before, in another time, place, and world entirely as Lily Evans worked with James Potter to decorate the Great Hall of Hogwarts for the upcoming Halloween festivities. She remembered back when she was only a first year, when her eleven-year-old self that was still fairly unused to magic as a whole was in awe of the sudden decorations festooning the hall when she came down for breakfast and silently wondered if they had just appeared there. Magic could do so much, she'd realized; was this really much of a stretch? She had realized long before her fifth year, when she was a prefect and first started to help with these duties, that they didn't just appear there. In fact, Lily was old hat by the time her seventh year had rolled along and she'd actually helped make decisions as one of the Heads of the students. As she carefully strung the last of the fairylights with the use of her wand, she glanced toward James and didn't repress the smile she gave him. He'd become much more tolerable this year in a way she hadn't expected. In fact, she had bemoaned for hours to Mary during the summer after she found out he had been made Head Boy alongside her Head Girl and had been rather surprised just how much she'd come to enjoy working with him. James scanned the fairylights up and down to make sure they were straight, his wand still held aloft, occasionally flicking an askew light back into an upright position. Honestly, he’d been as baffled as anyone when he’d been chosen for Head Boy, and he’d kind of anticipated hating it, even in spite of it being a good excuse to spend time with Lily. James still kind of thought it was all some Jedi mind trick Dumbledore was playing to keep his friends in line, but he was surprised to find there were a lot of things about being Head Boy he didn’t exactly loathe. James liked organizing school events and using his wealth of knowledge about magical mischief to make them a little more exciting--he also didn’t really mind mentoring the younger students and looking out for them. Even having to tell Sirius off came more or less naturally to James. He’d never been one to mince words with Sirius, the question was always more whether or not Sirius would actually listen to him; sometimes, Sirius did actually listen to James, which was more than pretty much anyone else could say. As he surveyed their work one last time, James caught Lily’s eye and returned her smile. “I think it looks wicked,” he said. “What do you say about animating some skeletons to dance?” asked James, lifting a brow. Completely without her permission, Lily's face lit up at the thought. "Yes," she agreed, her lips splitting into a grin as she imagined it. "Yes, we absolutely have to do that. They'll go nicely with the pumpkins with the moving faces." That had been her suggestion -- first carving the jack-o-lanterns, then charming them so they would look around, laugh, or look as though they were speaking. They didn't actually make any sound, at least not yet, but she was rather happy with them. James grinned as he imagined it all--eager to give it a try, James turned his wand on the weirdly extensive collection of full, life-size skeleton decorations Hogwarts owned (or, at least James was assuming they were just decorations). He murmured a few charms under his breath, and three of the skeletons jumped suddenly to life. James made two of them tap dance in a rather elaborate style, but then with a smirk, he cast a different spell on the third; it promptly walked over to Lily, bowed extravagantly, then offered its bony hand. Lily continued to grin as she watched James animate the skeletons. It was rather impressive magic, though she'd always known, even when she desperately didn't want to admit it, that James was incredibly talented when it came to magic itself. While she knew that she was good herself, it was easy to appreciate just what he could do when she got to witness it. When the skeleton offered her hand, Lily laughed, but took it nonetheless. Never in her life would she have imagined dancing with a skeleton, but that was exactly what she was doing -- and the skeleton was leading, even. By the time it had led her through a series of steps with no music to guide them, she was laughing again. This was utterly ridiculous, but absolutely wonderful. When the dance ended and the skeleton bowed to her once again, Lily managed a curtsy back in her school uniform and then turned to James. "That was amazing." James smiled and laughed in turn with Lily; honestly, he was a little impressed himself, as the charm had turned the skeleton into a better dancer than James was himself. Most of all, though...James liked to hear Lily’s laughter and know that he was the reason for it. He gave a small round of applause, a grin still alighting his face, “You both are very skilled dancers.” |