Jily one shots

The Early Morning Toast Brigade

Disclaimer: written by @GhostOfBambi

"Four," Lily Evans mumbled, squinting in the darkness. "Piss off."

The watch slipped from her fingers and smacked her in the face, and she snarled, and shook it off. She didn't care to learn where it landed, but turned on her side to settle back down in her squishy four poster. A loud noise - an almighty bang - had woken her abruptly, but she had found her dormitory silent. Evidently, she must have dreamed it, as the girls who surrounded her were undisturbed. She had been sleeping very peacefully and was unreasonably annoyed.

She closed her eyes in an attempt to drift off and tried to remember the dream she had been having, but that one thought led to another, and then another, until she found herself thinking about the time her sister lost her flip flop in the sea at Cleethorpes, an entirely unconnected thing. She caught herself drooling when a small puddle formed in the corner of her mouth, and wiped it away impatiently, embarrassed, as if hidden eyes were watching her do it. Worse still, she was decidedly awake, and restless. She shut her mouth tightly and made another half-hearted attempt to sleep once more, but admitted defeat. She decided to get out of bed.

She suppressed an impulse to make a lot of noise and wake one of the other girls, which would have been a product of her envy and irritation. She attempted to locate her knobbly old socks, which had been kicked off in the night, by scrambling about beneath her duvet and blindly snatching at nothing. She found one - it smelled slightly - and yanked them on, and slipped out of bed. She pulled her dressing gown over her shoulders, and crossed to the door, and padded downstairs, reached the bottom step and saw James Potter sitting in an armchair next to the fire, closely examining a newspaper that was spread across his lap. Naturally, she spun around and fled.

Once safely upstairs, she grabbed some essential supplies and barricaded herself in the bathroom she shared with the other girls in her dormitory. Infused with newfound vigour, she set about transforming herself, from a girl who had just fallen out of bed to a girl who merely appeared to have done so, and had done so looking effortlessly fresh and beautiful, as if she had been kissed awake by the night itself. She applied cosmetics in a cleverly deceptive fashion. She brushed, tossed, and fluffed her hair. She discarded her comfortable flannels in favour of a vest and tiny shorts, in which she would surely freeze, but no matter, comfort must be sacrificed for beauty. She contemplated her bra for a number of minutes, and put it on, and took it off, and decided, ultimately, not to put it back on again. Deeply ashamed of this decision, she reminded herself that going braless was not an odious crime against morality, especially when going braless served towards a higher purpose.

James Potter had fancied Lily Evans once, when he was young and stupid, and had possessed no qualms in sharing that information with her at the time. Two years on, Lily Evans was searching for a sign, a visible, promising sign, that his feelings for her hadn't gone away. Her desire to find such a sign stemmed, not from vanity, but for her own feelings for James Potter, which were frightfully distracting. She was infatuated, some might have said. Cavorting into the common room in her smallest shorts probably wasn't a hallmark of a scrupulous young woman - her Dad wouldn't have approved - but she was leaving school forever in eight months. For all she knew, she might never see James Potter again when it all ended. Time was of the essence, now that their final year was in full swing.

If all was fair in love and war, this was a little of both, and brutal strategies were vital.

She hurried downstairs, once she had satisfied herself that she looked pretty good, fearful that he had gone to bed. Her luck held, for he hadn't stirred. She stepped into the common room on tiptoe and pretended to yawn, as if she regularly got out of bed and stumbled downstairs looking perfect. Potter would never know that she had been drooling on her own face not twenty minutes ago.