FIC: Pictures of Lily
So I decided to post my fic from fandomcommerce, an HP gift exchange which is amazing and for which you should all sign up!
Title: Pictures of Lily
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Lily/James
Word Count: 1,457
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: Written for pirrofina
One of the things that James loves about Lily (and there are, oh god, so many things) is her love of taking photographs. She can spend hours with her huge, ancient Muggle monstrosity snapping anything and everything that comes in front of the lens. There are pictures of newspapers, James tripping over his shoelaces, rain on a window, their rusty old stove, and he loves them all.
The process is a huge mystery to James; the odors of acrid chemicals float out from the miniscule closet Lily uses for a dark room and make his eyes water, and then a couple hours later there are beautiful pictures lining the peeling walls of their flat, hung from clothespins on string. It’s something that makes the flat their own, apart from the huge piles of their belongings strewn about the place. He tried to get Lily to teach him once how she did it, but the shots turned out blurry and messy, even with her pale, freckled hands reaching on top of his to adjust his grip in her own slightly bossy way.
“It’s useless,” says James sullenly one day as he thumbs through the recently developed stack. “You should give up on me now, before I sully the rest of your work.”
Lily laughs. “Honestly, James, there are a lot more things I could have abandoned you for that aren’t photography. Not everything can come so easily for the magnificent James Potter.”
“It’s just one button!” He runs a hand through his hair in frustration. “It can’t be that hard to use one button! The pictures don’t even move!”
“Practice does go into the process,” Lily sighs. “Doesn’t help that you’re using Mum’s camera from ten years ago, either.”
“The machine is working against me.” James dramatically casts the photos onto the coffee table. “I am doomed forever.”
“You dolt.” Lily picks up a particularly horrible picture of-his toenail, perhaps, and pins it up carefully next to the bathroom door. She crosses the room and places a sound kiss on his mouth. “We’ll make you a photographer yet.” And in her eyes James sees that frightening, exhilarating gleam that means whatever Lily Evans is preparing to do, she’s going to make sure it’s done right.
***
“I’ve got just the thing!” Lily cries from the front door on a Saturday morning. James glances up blearily from his coffee. “It’s a Polaroid camera!”
“Corduroy camera?”
“Polaroid.” She slings herself in the seat beside James and holds out the box. He takes it with dull-feeling fingers and fumbles the box open. “It automatically develops. I thought since it was more like the wizarding sort of camera you could get the feel of it easier. It literally takes thirty seconds to develop. Go on, take a picture!”
The camera is black and boxy and does not look that much different from the expensive knobs and twists on Lily’s, but James presses the button and the camera spits out a grey, foggy square. “This just looks worse than the other ones,” James moans, but Lily shushes him. As the seconds tick by, he sees the image emerge like an optical illusion and there in front of him is a not half bad picture of their kitchen.
Bewildered, James looks up at the kitchen, then down at the photo, then up at the kitchen again and finally turns to Lily and grins wickedly, and Lily suddenly questions whether the idea of giving James his own camera was such a good idea after all.
***
“You don’t even like photography,” scoffs Remus when James shoves the camera in his face, making him lose hold of his book. “When you tried just holding my camera you nearly dropped it and took seven pictures of your thumb.”
“That is why I’m practicing!” says James gleefully. He waltzes across to Sirius who is sprawled on the ancient couch and snaps another photo, making Sirius wince. “Be a sport, would you Padfoot?”
“Why did I help you seduce Evans,” Sirius sighs, throwing an arm across his face. “If only I had known she would make you a terror to those who don’t want documentaries of their lives.”
“It is a Couple’s Thing,” James says, fanning himself with the square of paper. “We are Having Similar Interests. I don’t expect you to understand. Look! Look at your slothful self!”
“Oh, it’s that kind of photography, is it?” Sirius waggles his eyebrows delightedly. “I am intimately familiar with that sort of thing, Mr. Potter, and my own highly handsome self could be very helpful in giving you some tips.” This makes Remus blush for some reason, probably his far too high sense of propriety, but James is too busy defending Lily’s honor with his fists to consider it.
In the end, he leaves with four eye rolls from Remus, eleven lewd remarks from Sirius, twenty three polaroids, two bruises on his right arm, and quite enough practice for one day.
***
The truth is that Sirius’s remarks get him to thinking. Lily never takes pictures of herself-not in a having-sex way, understandably, but in an everyday way. James doesn’t even think that he’s seen her in her photos by accident; a strand of hair, fingers peeking over the lens.
“Why aren’t you in any of your photographs?” he asks one sweltering day when they have all the windows open but are still cuddled close.
Lily laughs into his chest, her hair flowing over the cotton t-shirt. “That’d be dreadfully narcissistic of me, wouldn’t it?” How can she use words like narci-bloody-ssistic and still make it sexy? James thinks.
“It would be nice,” he insists. “You have a million pictures of me in various embarrassing poses around the house, so why aren’t there any of you? S’only fair.”
Lily pauses before she replies. “It seems shallow,” she murmurs. “It’s not like the pictures would be anything interesting with me in them.” She sighs. “The photographer doesn’t make the best subject matter, anyway,” she jokes. “It’s much more interesting to see you falling down stairs, where I can get a better angle of your downtrodden pride.”
“Of course,” James smiles but secretly makes a note to get Lily on film as much as possible. After all, she does want him to practice.
***
Taking photos of Lily is harder than he thought. She’s not fast and she’s not hiding from him, but she knows when something is going on, making it harder for him to catch her unawares. He gets crooked shots of her brushing her teeth, wincing in the sunlight, reading the paper, sleeping just before dawn. It occurs to James that if he had done this in sixth year, he probably would have been killed by Lily for stalker-ish behavior and he thanks his lucky stars he never had this idea as a sixteen-year-old boy.
The idea that she doesn’t want to see herself in photos because she’s not interesting enough is mind-boggling to James. It might be because he’s head over heels in love with Lily, but every picture raises new questions about what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, and some of the photos are just so inherently Lily-like that James is amazed. Indistinct pictures of her hair catching the sunlight or her eyes shining bright in the mirror’s reflection though the lighting is dim; it makes him wonder how he was every so lucky to get her. Even with his at best mediocre talent, the photographs show something about Lily that James isn’t able to get to, that he can only brush the edges of with a click of his finger.
Lily finds out eventually, one day when they decide to venture into the great outside with their cameras and see what happens. Lily, exhausted after her long night Healing at St. Mungo’s, casts herself on the grass, arms spread wide, a small, contented smile on her face. Her camera is still clutched in one hand, and this is exactly the moment James has been waiting for.
He props himself up on one elbow on the grass and the camera lets out a soft click, ejecting the film. Lily startles, her sleep-blurred eyes half open in surprise. She sees the photo in James’s hand, and he stops midway in a frantic wave to develop it faster. Plucking it from his hands, she examines it closely, and James’s heart skips a little. He knows Lily won’t kill him, exactly, but she can berate him for the rest of his life if she wants to. His fears are alleviated when her semi-serious face breaks into a gorgeous smile, and James knows that this very moment is the one that he wants on film, Lily’s green grass eyes, radiating love.
Title: Pictures of Lily
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Lily/James
Word Count: 1,457
Warnings: None
Author's Notes: Written for pirrofina
One of the things that James loves about Lily (and there are, oh god, so many things) is her love of taking photographs. She can spend hours with her huge, ancient Muggle monstrosity snapping anything and everything that comes in front of the lens. There are pictures of newspapers, James tripping over his shoelaces, rain on a window, their rusty old stove, and he loves them all.
The process is a huge mystery to James; the odors of acrid chemicals float out from the miniscule closet Lily uses for a dark room and make his eyes water, and then a couple hours later there are beautiful pictures lining the peeling walls of their flat, hung from clothespins on string. It’s something that makes the flat their own, apart from the huge piles of their belongings strewn about the place. He tried to get Lily to teach him once how she did it, but the shots turned out blurry and messy, even with her pale, freckled hands reaching on top of his to adjust his grip in her own slightly bossy way.
“It’s useless,” says James sullenly one day as he thumbs through the recently developed stack. “You should give up on me now, before I sully the rest of your work.”
Lily laughs. “Honestly, James, there are a lot more things I could have abandoned you for that aren’t photography. Not everything can come so easily for the magnificent James Potter.”
“It’s just one button!” He runs a hand through his hair in frustration. “It can’t be that hard to use one button! The pictures don’t even move!”
“Practice does go into the process,” Lily sighs. “Doesn’t help that you’re using Mum’s camera from ten years ago, either.”
“The machine is working against me.” James dramatically casts the photos onto the coffee table. “I am doomed forever.”
“You dolt.” Lily picks up a particularly horrible picture of-his toenail, perhaps, and pins it up carefully next to the bathroom door. She crosses the room and places a sound kiss on his mouth. “We’ll make you a photographer yet.” And in her eyes James sees that frightening, exhilarating gleam that means whatever Lily Evans is preparing to do, she’s going to make sure it’s done right.
***
“I’ve got just the thing!” Lily cries from the front door on a Saturday morning. James glances up blearily from his coffee. “It’s a Polaroid camera!”
“Corduroy camera?”
“Polaroid.” She slings herself in the seat beside James and holds out the box. He takes it with dull-feeling fingers and fumbles the box open. “It automatically develops. I thought since it was more like the wizarding sort of camera you could get the feel of it easier. It literally takes thirty seconds to develop. Go on, take a picture!”
The camera is black and boxy and does not look that much different from the expensive knobs and twists on Lily’s, but James presses the button and the camera spits out a grey, foggy square. “This just looks worse than the other ones,” James moans, but Lily shushes him. As the seconds tick by, he sees the image emerge like an optical illusion and there in front of him is a not half bad picture of their kitchen.
Bewildered, James looks up at the kitchen, then down at the photo, then up at the kitchen again and finally turns to Lily and grins wickedly, and Lily suddenly questions whether the idea of giving James his own camera was such a good idea after all.
***
“You don’t even like photography,” scoffs Remus when James shoves the camera in his face, making him lose hold of his book. “When you tried just holding my camera you nearly dropped it and took seven pictures of your thumb.”
“That is why I’m practicing!” says James gleefully. He waltzes across to Sirius who is sprawled on the ancient couch and snaps another photo, making Sirius wince. “Be a sport, would you Padfoot?”
“Why did I help you seduce Evans,” Sirius sighs, throwing an arm across his face. “If only I had known she would make you a terror to those who don’t want documentaries of their lives.”
“It is a Couple’s Thing,” James says, fanning himself with the square of paper. “We are Having Similar Interests. I don’t expect you to understand. Look! Look at your slothful self!”
“Oh, it’s that kind of photography, is it?” Sirius waggles his eyebrows delightedly. “I am intimately familiar with that sort of thing, Mr. Potter, and my own highly handsome self could be very helpful in giving you some tips.” This makes Remus blush for some reason, probably his far too high sense of propriety, but James is too busy defending Lily’s honor with his fists to consider it.
In the end, he leaves with four eye rolls from Remus, eleven lewd remarks from Sirius, twenty three polaroids, two bruises on his right arm, and quite enough practice for one day.
***
The truth is that Sirius’s remarks get him to thinking. Lily never takes pictures of herself-not in a having-sex way, understandably, but in an everyday way. James doesn’t even think that he’s seen her in her photos by accident; a strand of hair, fingers peeking over the lens.
“Why aren’t you in any of your photographs?” he asks one sweltering day when they have all the windows open but are still cuddled close.
Lily laughs into his chest, her hair flowing over the cotton t-shirt. “That’d be dreadfully narcissistic of me, wouldn’t it?” How can she use words like narci-bloody-ssistic and still make it sexy? James thinks.
“It would be nice,” he insists. “You have a million pictures of me in various embarrassing poses around the house, so why aren’t there any of you? S’only fair.”
Lily pauses before she replies. “It seems shallow,” she murmurs. “It’s not like the pictures would be anything interesting with me in them.” She sighs. “The photographer doesn’t make the best subject matter, anyway,” she jokes. “It’s much more interesting to see you falling down stairs, where I can get a better angle of your downtrodden pride.”
“Of course,” James smiles but secretly makes a note to get Lily on film as much as possible. After all, she does want him to practice.
***
Taking photos of Lily is harder than he thought. She’s not fast and she’s not hiding from him, but she knows when something is going on, making it harder for him to catch her unawares. He gets crooked shots of her brushing her teeth, wincing in the sunlight, reading the paper, sleeping just before dawn. It occurs to James that if he had done this in sixth year, he probably would have been killed by Lily for stalker-ish behavior and he thanks his lucky stars he never had this idea as a sixteen-year-old boy.
The idea that she doesn’t want to see herself in photos because she’s not interesting enough is mind-boggling to James. It might be because he’s head over heels in love with Lily, but every picture raises new questions about what she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, and some of the photos are just so inherently Lily-like that James is amazed. Indistinct pictures of her hair catching the sunlight or her eyes shining bright in the mirror’s reflection though the lighting is dim; it makes him wonder how he was every so lucky to get her. Even with his at best mediocre talent, the photographs show something about Lily that James isn’t able to get to, that he can only brush the edges of with a click of his finger.
Lily finds out eventually, one day when they decide to venture into the great outside with their cameras and see what happens. Lily, exhausted after her long night Healing at St. Mungo’s, casts herself on the grass, arms spread wide, a small, contented smile on her face. Her camera is still clutched in one hand, and this is exactly the moment James has been waiting for.
He props himself up on one elbow on the grass and the camera lets out a soft click, ejecting the film. Lily startles, her sleep-blurred eyes half open in surprise. She sees the photo in James’s hand, and he stops midway in a frantic wave to develop it faster. Plucking it from his hands, she examines it closely, and James’s heart skips a little. He knows Lily won’t kill him, exactly, but she can berate him for the rest of his life if she wants to. His fears are alleviated when her semi-serious face breaks into a gorgeous smile, and James knows that this very moment is the one that he wants on film, Lily’s green grass eyes, radiating love.