"It Was the Winter Wild," James/Lily, R Title: It Was the Winter Wild Author:green_amber Pairing: James/Lily Rating: R Warnings: awkward teenage fumbling Word Count: ~2600 Summary:She'd be damned if she was going to let even the most insufferable prat die of exposure on her watch. Author's Notes: Written for smutty_claus 2006--a gift for r_becca. Beta by sionnain.
It didn't snow like this in Surrey.
Lily remembered watching the skies hopefully with Petunia when they were little girls, before the rift had opened between them, praying for the snow to come and cancel school the following morning. She remembered, too, how she had loved white Christmases. She wondered if they were having one now, back home.
If they were, surely it was nothing like this. Snow in Surrey was a decorous thing. It coated everything in a genteel sort of cake-frosting and made the familiar houses and streets look like something from a greeting card. It was winter, yes, but winter tamed and hemmed in and made safe for the delight of schoolgirls and the grumbling of fathers with shovels. She knew that now.
Here, there were no streets, no hedges, no polite boundaries to contain the elements. Lily wasn't sure how long she'd been out, but her fingers and toes hurt through the swaddling of gloves and boots, even after she remembered to put a Warming Charm on the shaft of her broom, and she hadn't covered half the grounds yet. The castle's domain seemed to stretch into eternity in every direction: a sea of relentless white, its stark perfection marred only by the glassy surface of the frozen lake and by the grey reaches and turrets of the school itself. Even Hogwarts, which usually seemed so welcoming with its golden warm windows, seemed a fancy carved from ice in this light, most of its lights extinguished owing to the small population here during holidays.
The sky gave back nothing but the same pitiless blankness, veiled in cloud cover, and still the snow fell. It had slowed some, but it fell and fell and fell, whirling in the gusts of wind and not at all helping Lily find this particular needle in this particular haystack.
What the hell could have possessed Potter to come out here in this mad weather? Dumbledore's orders had been crystal clear. No one was permitted outside the castle until the snowstorm had abated. The Headmaster had, for reasons still unfathomable to Lily, named Potter Head Boy--Head Git would be more like it--and therefore he was no longer technically under her jurisdiction; she couldn't do anything to him once she found him. Still, it was the principle of the thing. She'd be damned if she was going to let even the most insufferable prat die of exposure on her watch. And when she found him, she planned to give him a piece of her mind, which would be almost as satisfactory as giving him a detention. Maybe McGonagall would oblige and he'd get both.
You should have gone to McGonagall in the first place, the sensible voice at the back of Lily's mind nagged. You've always got to be the bloody hero. You'll get yourself killed someday, Lily Evans.
She had checked the Quidditch pitch first. She'd been expecting to find Potter there, doing loop-the-loops in the sky to show off. (Though she wasn't entirely sure whom he'd be showing off for. For some reason unknown to Lily, he was the only one of his little gang who'd stayed at Hogwarts over Christmas.) Oh, surely James Potter could find an adoring audience somehow...
James had been nowhere to be found, though, leaving Lily at a loss. She flew low over the lake next, wondering if he'd gone skating or ice fishing or something, worried that maybe he'd fallen in. But she'd seen nothing unusual there, only her own face, red from the cold, and here and there the sinuous shapes of merfolk as they went about their own business in the still-liquid depths beneath the ice sheet.
Larger and larger circles now, leading her away from the castle. Guessing the time was impossible under this sunless firmament and she hadn't remembered, in her haste, to bring a watch along. The Warming Charm helped a bit with her hands, but the pain in her toes was getting worse. She knew, though, that if the pain stopped that would be more ominous still, and so as she flew she flexed and pointed her toes, over and over, in her boots.
Sudden flash of vision: That's a broomstick. There, propped up against that tree. She was sure she was wrong--even Potter couldn't possibly be daft enough to go wandering about in the Forbidden Forest alone--but all the same, she dipped lower in her flight to investigate what she'd seen.
It was, without question, a broomstick.
Lily sighed and swooped in for a landing. Her broom would be of no use in the Forest; if she flew high enough to avoid snarling herself in the tangled, rimed branches, she'd be too high to see anything on the forest floor. She left her broom against the tree, leaning against James Potter's, and felt a little strange somewhere in the pit of her stomach about the idea of something of hers lying there so intimately next to something of his.
"Potter!" she called, shaping her hands into a crude megaphone. Her voice rang the icicles; some soft powder fell from the branches overhead. She rubbed her gloved hands together for warmth as she shouted again for him.
Wish I had some breadcrumbs. She didn't want to get too far into the woods. If she got lost, she'd be of no use to James or to anyone else. "James!" she called again, gingerly venturing a few more steps into the press of trees.
There was a sound of hoofbeats, then a majestic creature appeared between two great oaks ahead. It was a stag, and it paused and studied her with almost human interest. She'd never heard of a deer that ran to humans. It didn't run when it sighted her, either, just stood there with an unreadable look in its velvet-brown eyes.
Fear? Aggression? Kindness?
Then there was a rippling in the air, almost like looking through the undulating invisible lines of heat above a hot kettle, and the stag's body shrank, changed. A boy stood where the creature had stood. His tousled brown hair and angular face were as familiar to her as the back of her hand, but the expression in his eyes was something Lily had never before seen in James Potter. It almost looked like vulnerability.
Years later, she would be ashamed of her next thought, which was He could do something this spectacular--and didn't show it off?
"You're an Animagus," she said, realizing she was stating the obvious.
"You're freezing," James said. "I didn't mean for you to have to come out here looking for me--I didn't think--Come on, let's get back to the castle before you freeze your ar--er, I mean your bum off."
"It's all right," she said, laughing in spite of herself at the absurdity of James Potter watching his language in front of her as if she were some kind of blushing flower of delicate maidenhood. "You can say arse in front of me. But I'm fine, really...I came out here to see if you were all right."
"I am," he said. "You're not. Your face has gone all red."
She sputtered something about how that was just what redheads' complexion did, turned beet-red at the slightest provocation, be that heat or cold or embarrassment or any number of things, but he put his arm around her shoulder and led her back toward the broomsticks. She figured she should complain about the chauvinism of his gesture, but she really was quite cold, and she supposed James had the right idea.
She didn't plan on telling him how much it irritated her that he'd turned her rescue of him into his rescue of her. Pride, maybe, but pride was useful at times.
Lily had never been so glad to see the Gryffindor common room in all her years at Hogwarts. It was empty except for her and James; the second-year who'd told her James was out on the grounds must have gone to bed. She didn't think she'd ever seen the room so quiet.
"James?" she asked as he steered her toward a couch and started up a roaring fire in the hearth. "Your friends. Why didn't they stay for the holidays?" She hadn't meant it as an insult, but a second after the words left her mouth, she realized how they must have sounded. "I mean..."
"It's quite all right," he said. "Sirius is staying with my parents these days, but they're doing this second honeymoon thing for their anniversary this year, so he went home with Remus...Peter went home, too. Something about a Muggle girlfriend, I think..."
He poked at the mantelpiece for a moment, finding a bit of scrollwork that responded to his touch, spitting open a little hidden drawer for him. He pulled out a slightly dusty bottle filled with amber liquid. She decided not to ask where he'd gotten it. It seemed like bad form to call him out on rules violations at the moment, though she wasn't sure why she felt that way. Maybe because his concern for her seemed so strange.
He's been trying to get in your knickers for years; that's why he's being so nice, the sensible voice nagged. Lily wasn't sure that was it, though. Wanting to shag someone didn't mean giving a monkey's arse whether they were cold, and it certainly didn't account for that look he'd given her right after he'd transformed.
"Butterbeer," he said. "It's quite good, warmed up. You'd be surprised." He cast a Warming Charm on the bottle and handed it to her, then went to the drawer for another.
She closed her aching fingers around the heated bottle. Nothing had ever felt so good. It tasted good, too, as if it were a potion specially concocted for people who were freezing their arses off. No, she definitely wasn't going to turn him in for having the stuff stashed in the common room. "So. About the Animagus thing."
Lily remembered McGonagall talking about how much work it was, how many years it had taken her to master the metamorphosis, and found herself staring at James, trying to reconcile her image of him as a playboy who cared about nothing but Quidditch with this new vision of him poring over books in secret every night, practicing ever more difficult transfigurations until finally daring to attempt the most difficult one of all...
No wonder he was always half-asleep in class.
James shrugged. "I am. It amused me to learn."
Lily didn't believe this was all there was to it. No one would learn this skill on a whim. He'd have been bored years ago. Yet it was clear he didn't plan on telling her any more, at least not yet. "Why tonight? You heard Dumbledore."
"I had to get out of the building," he said, settling down on the couch beside her with his butterbeer. It was oddly pleasant sitting next to him. It occurred to her that she'd never done that before, not in all the years they'd shared a table in the Great Hall. "I needed some air. Does that make any sense?"
Lily thought of the feeling that had overtaken her when she'd first flown out into the storm to find James: the weight of a heroic mission, the freedom of flight, the exhilaration of leaving behind the castle with all its shadows and dust. "I think it does," she said slowly.
James really wasn't so bad when you got him away from his friends, Lily reflected. Smelled good, too. There was a scent wafting from him, something green and rich and dark. Had he put on cologne before his little ramble, or was this the scent of the forest clinging to him?
She found herself wondering what he would taste like, and leaned over and kissed him, right on the lips, before the sensible voice could get a word in edgewise. The answer was butterbeer, and she wondered why she found this odd. What did you expect? Wormwood and juniper berries?
James kissed her back, slipping his tongue lightly, sweetly, between her lips. The sensible voice caught up to her then, asking her What do you think you're doing, young lady?, and she answered it with a silent Bugger off.
He set down his bottle. He touched her shoulders first, then let his hands wander up and down her sides, sliding ever closer to her chest, as if he was working up nerve, and as she tangled her own fingers in that messy black hair she whispered in his ear, "Please."
He found her breasts; his hands cupped them for a moment, and she saw him close his eyes as if in prayer, and then he kissed her again and began to caress her nipples--yes, there--and she moaned against his mouth and pulled him closer.
"Lils..." he mumbled. "Are you sure? You don't even like me..."
"I'll like you better if you don't stop doing that," she said with a giggle, a moment later wondering where the giggle had come from. Lily wasn't the sort of girl who giggled, who made out with James Potter in the common room where anyone could just bloody well walk in...
He pressed her down onto the cushions and kissed her neck with a hard kiss that was almost a bite, and she decided that maybe she was that sort of girl after all. She heard the shattering of glass and realized, somewhere in a cobwebbed corner of her mind, that she must have dropped her drink.
James was lying on top of Lily now, and she could feel the hard length of him pressed against her through their thick winter robes. He kissed her harder now, on the lips, the throat again, then undid her robes and lowered his lips to her breast. She gasped at the sudden sweet shock of his lips on her naked skin.
"Lily..." he moaned; his eyes were glazed, and he abruptly jerked against her, mouth falling slack and open. He lay there, still and silent, for a long moment.
"God. I'm sorry," he said when he'd caught his breath.
"Why?" she asked, cursing herself for an idiot. She knew what had happened. She could feel the desire coiled tight and hot in her own abdomen, waiting for a release of the same kind.
"That wasn't very...gentlemanly...of me."
"James Potter," she said with a smile. "If I wanted a gentleman, what would I be doing with you?"
He laughed, and kissed her again, slipping a hand beneath the hem of her robes to touch her.
In the morning, she'd worry about whether this had been a daft idea, and whether there was any chance of the two of them learning to get along in other ways--but for now, his touch was enough. His fingers found the hot wetness between her thighs, and then the hard little knot where her tension was centered. She climbed rapidly, already hot and bothered from before, and in a few short minutes shuddered against his eager fingers.
"Right," she said when she could think straight again. "We'd better clean up before someone comes down here." She wriggled out from under James and buttoned up her robes.
"Good point," he said. "Evanesco." The glass shards and the pool of butterbeer vanished into oblivion.
"Thanks," said Lily.
"For cleaning up the butterbeer?"
"For being worried about me out there."
"Yeah, you too." James grinned. "If I'd known all I had to do was wander off in a snowstorm..."
Lily hit him with a pillow from the couch, and as the seam split and feathers flew everywhere, Lily thought they looked just like snow.