Jily Oneshots (pt2)

Percentages

James lifts his wand again, eyes cast down at the spellbook. He carefully retraces the described pattern. Round, lift, flick, left sweep, through.

"I'm not a despot." He overemphasizes his through. "I'm admirably passionate."

"Yes, of course."

Her mockingly placating platitude does not go unnoticed.

(Neither, see, is the little grin she accompanies it with—quirked up at the corner, pressed thin with amusement. At him. Naturally. Or…for him? Shared, maybe, with him? Thump thump thump.)

He mindlessly, diligently, traces the pattern again.

"Who's your dragon in this race, anyway?" He leans down, flips the spellbook page back. "And why is it my dictatorship that has to bend? Why aren't you toppling Moore's brutal regime?"

"Consider me a concerned citizen," is Lily's airy reply. She absently swipes at a bit of hair that's blown across her face. "And because Vivna Moore is terrifying. And you're not."

Is he…offended to be less terrifying than Vivna Moore?

James considers it. Can't quite decide.

"If I admit to being a despot," he asks, "can I keep my Seeker?"

"No."

"I'm feeling distinctly more figurehead than tyrant right now."

"Perhaps I am just a very brilliant diplomat."

"I have thought you many things, Evans," James drolls laconically, lifting his wand, "but 'diplomatic' is not one of them. Tutela praesidium."

Round, lift, flick, left sweep—

Fuck. Fuck. Waning cerulean. He can already feel the spell sputtering as it leaves his wand.

"I'm plenty…" The words die in Lily's throat. She whips around. "Was that a Hextate Shield?"

James glares openly—tyrannically—at the glimmering, useless blue cage.

"Doesn't even have the dignity to lay claim to the label of an attempt at one, does it?" he bitterly bites off, wanting to hex something. The flies. The spellbook. Himself. He ducks his head down and is whipping through pages again. "Don't know why it won't bloody hold—"

Lily drops her legs.

"James. That's a combat-grade shielding charm. Hardly Standard Book of Spells, Grade 6." She reaches out, lifting one end of the spellbook's cover off the ground. "What is this? Where did you get it?"

"Around." The Restricted Section, actually, specifically. He gives into his impulse, swats at the old tome with his toes. "Ought to have left it. I'm missing something—"

"You can't twist your wrist. And you need to arch upward."

James's foot stops mid-second kick. "What?"

"You're turning your wrist in the lift." She mimes it, raising her own arm to demonstrate. "You need to keep it straight. And at the end—you don't dip to the left. You need to arc upward. Like—here—"

James doesn't know what he expects. Even as he watches her, stunned into silence, and sees her lift off the ground and shuffle his way, he doesn't know what he expects. So when she comes up behind him, covering her hand over his, and says, "Like this," warm and low against his ear, and begins to guide his hand through the revised pattern, all he can do is…sit there. Sit there, and let her move him like a mannequin. Putty in her hands. Pure jelly mush. He is her marionette, a puppet to be pulled any which way she desires. All strings, all over.