Happy Holidays!
MERRY CHRISTMAS F-LIST!!!!
I love you guys so much and thank you for making 2006 an awesome year!
And now for the stuff that you guys really care about. ;)
Way back when, I offered to write some drabbles for those who wanted one for Christmas. Some of you signed up, some didn't. Some didn't have the chance since I just recently friended you, but that's okay. I expect I'll do another thing just like it around Valentine's.
But anyway, for those of you that requested something, here you go. I hope you got what you wanted.
She'd give anything for some mistletoe right now.
To say things have been weird between her and Jack would be the world's worst understatement ever in recorded history. Awkward doesn't even begin to describe it and not even difficult comes close. The best she's got is it's complicated and that just sounds stupid whenever Claire or Sun or Charlie or Locke ask her about it.
She hurt him by sleeping with Sawyer. He hurt her back by fucking Juliet. They should be able to be adults about this and move on and stop holding grudges against each other for things they can't change but they cling to their grudges because it's all they know to do when it comes to relationships.
He's so wary of her now a days that the only way she'd get a kiss out of him would be to trick him into it, hence her dying need for some mistletoe. He's a lot of things but he'll put up with the tradition and once she gets him kissing her, she knows that she can get past their grudges and into something much more enjoyable.
She stares at him from across the fire, annoyed that it's Christmas Eve and only three months to the day since she met him and yet all she can think about is how badly she wants to ignore everyone else and leap across that fire and force him to listen to her in the only way she knows how.
"Kate, is something wrong?"
"Yeah, something is," she tells Charlie in response as she stands up and walks around the fire to stand in front of Jack, giving him a mix of a death glare and a loving smile which effectively makes her look ridiculous. He opens his mouth to say something but she's quick about what she wants to do because if he starts talking, she'll kick him in the shins and ruin any chance of the kiss she's been dying for.
She drops to her knees, grabbing his head by the neck and jerking it towards her own in one fluid motion and then she kisses him like she did in the jungle but this one isn't about curiosity. No, she knows what kissing him's like already. This is about telling him everything she wants to say but can't find the words for. She's unaware of the other survivors until after she pulls away and she hears Sawyer's crude whistling. She rolls her eyes, a part of her wondering how she ever could have slept with that, and stares Jack in the eyes. "Understand?" she whispers.
Jack licks his lips and stares back at her, nodding just the tiniest bit. Yeah, he does and he proves it to her by kissing her again.
She's always been the bridesmaid and never the bride. Sort of. She was technically at one time married but since it was under a false name and when she was on the run and because she ended up leaving him after drugging him, she doesn't really consider it to be a real marriage. More like a pitstop in Florida where she was played a housewife from the sixties until the next corner of the world called to her.
When Claire married Charlie, Kate was a bridesmaid.
When Shannon married Sayid, Kate was a bridesmaid.
When Sun remarried Jin, Kate was a bridesmaid.
Finding the perfect guy isn't the problem. She's got a guy, a pretty good one this time too. It's them as a couple that's the problem. They're messed up and that's not even the half of it. They fight so much that getting married just seems silly when they're going to be fighting with each other all the time and they don't want to be one of those couples that people whisper about and say should just divorce and get it over with.
So they stay unmarried and unengaged and settle for living together.
She knows it's only a matter of time before she runs. It always is just a matter of time. And she's starting to feel the ichings of being in one place for too long but for now all she has to do is glance at him and suddenly running isn't that important. She can push those thoughts to the back of her mind and enjoy where she is, enjoy him.
Today she'll stay. Tomorrow she'll run.
Tomorrow just hasn't come yet.
"You got another letter."
Lily glances up from her book long enough to say "I don't care."
"This is the third one this week," Emmeline says. "And it's only Monday."
"Again, I don't care."
"Don't you think you should answer just one of them?"
"Nope."
"He's not that bad, you know."
"Oh, not you too," Lily groans, dropping her head against the pages of her book. If she has to listen to one more person tell her how "he's not that bad", she's going to find him and kill him. "He is. He really is that bad."
"That was two years ago," Emmeline retorts. "He's changed."
"No one changes."
"Some people do."
"Potter isn't some people," Lily mutters darkly, snapping her book shut and jumping off her bed. "I'm going to go put a stop to this right now," she announces, and with a turn of her heel, marches down to the common room, primed to start yelling at the messy haired Chaser to pretty please, stop drowning her in love letters. She stops three steps from the bottom, stunned speechless by the sight of said boy bent over a book of all things with a first year of all things, clearly tutoring the little girl in Charms of all things. She stares for a minute, transfixed like a deer caught in headlights, before turning on her heel again and creeping back up to her dorm.
"Well?" Emmeline asks with a quirked eyebrow and smirk.
"Give me that damn quill."
"You know who sucks?" Hurley proposes over another plate of boar. "Sawyer."
Kate giggles into her food while Jack tries not to choke on his drink. "What makes you say that?" she asks once her giggles have died and she's just smiling like an idiot.
"Dude's got like eight hundred sticks of deodorant and does he share? No. Some of us actually need it, you know. We don't all have good looks and abs of steel to keep people near us."
Kate starts giggling again and she has to set her tray down or she's going to drop it in trying to hide her giggles from Hurley. It's not him--it's just a funny topic and it's about damn time they've had some humor around this place.
Jack spends a moment smiling into his drink before he can take a sip and not choke on it and then he answers Hurley. "I can talk to him if you want."
"Would you?"
Jack nods and sets his bottle down at his feet and picks up his plastic fork. "I'll do it first thing tomorrow morning."
"You're a life saver, dude," Hurley says, finished with his food now. He says a 'goodnight' to the both of them before going off to see what Libby's up to.
Kate almost has her laughter under control but then Jack looks at her with a smirk and she breaks out into another fit of giggles. He joins her and they laugh over the absurdity of the conversation and how topics like it have been common ones of conversation lately. Whoever has one of the last razors or bottles of shaving cream or deodorants is often bribed and complained about for hours.
"So... Kate. You up for a conversation with Sawyer?" Jack asks. He knows she's the only one that the conman will listen to and actually give something to and while it irks him to use her like this, he did promise Hurley.
"I'll do it if you give me something," she answers.
He quirks an eyebrow at her. "What?" She leans in and whispers something to him with a devilish smile and a small wink. He looks at her sharply when she's finished, gauging her seriousness and she looks pretty damn serious about this. Not that he's really complaining.
Jack nods and smirks back at her, "Meet me in the hatch at noon then."
"Can't wait."
She feels like Alice sometimes. Not the Alice in the story but the Alice that really lived. The one that had an old man interested in being her friend and a father figure to her when she had enough friends and the father she had was more then enough to handle. She sympathizes with the real Alice, she really does, but she wishes that sometimes she were more like the fake one. The one that fell down a rabbit hole and found a magical world.
The world she's got right now isn't magical in any way.
It's cruel and harsh and it doesn't forgive her tiniest misstep. It takes things that she wants dearly and it twists them until nothing makes sense and everything's just wrong. It did to her mother, to her best friends, to her father, to Vaughn. It took them from her and twisted every single relationship until she was an island onto herself in the midst of millions of people.
The world clearly wanted her to be alone.
He just didn't accept that and he wasn't going to let her do it either. So what if she lost two years of her life and her boyfriend married someone else and her mother was God-knows where and Sloane was off punishment free and her father was hiding something from her? None of that mattered if she didn't let it. She had him, didn't she? She wasn't totally alone.
It didn't really come as a surprise to either one of them when they had too much to drink one night and after he recounted a tale about his college days and a certain embarrassing Halloween story including a hockey stick and a cross-dressing roommate, she leaned over and kissed him. It was only natural. She'd been given the short end of the stick in life and he was the one to pick up the pieces when it all shattered.
When she's with Weiss, she feels like she's worthy of the love he has to offer her and she really likes that feeling. Vaughn never brought that into their relationship. There was too much guilt and past mistakes and rule breaking in their relationship for either one of them to ever feel like they deserved the other.
Sometimes Sydney feels like Alice but sometimes that's okay.
"Ten!"
Kate's never been a big fan of New Year's, eve or day. The first actual one she remembers is nothing but unpleasant memories (mostly of drunk Wayne and a crying mother) and not one has improved since. Wayne only got drunker and her mother only cried more and neither one of them really seemed to notice that Kate was still there by midnight and by the time she was sixteen, she really wasn't there around midnight but instead outside, away from people. She doesn't like being around people on New Year's but now she's stuck on an island and there's not many places she can go, not with the Others still out there.
"Nine!"
Being trapped in camp doesn't mean that Kate hasn't found a place to hide and she has, a secluded corner of trees, shrouded in shadows, far from the fires and conversations of everyone else and that's where she's planning on staying until it's daylight again. She's boycotted every other New Year's Eve of her life. No reason why this one should be any different.
"Eight!"
"... is there a reason why you're hiding out?"
"Seven!"
Kate looks up from the sand, tongue in cheek and gives him a breathless laugh. "Why aren't you with the others?"
"Six!"
Jack shrugs, resting his hands on his hips. "You looked lonely," he tells her, effectively taking her breath away with such a simple statement.
"Five!"
Kate smiles at him, just for a brief second. "I'm fine," she tells him.
"Four!"
"Mind if I join you anyway?" Jack asks and she nods. "I've never been a fan of New Year's," he comments as he sits next to her. He's just talking for talking's sake by now and she's okay with letting him do that. "My dad was always drunk by midnight and my mom was always crying about something."
"Three!"
It's absolutely horrible of her but Kate loves that his New Year's have been a mirror image of her own. They've both had the worst pairs of parents and that's probably a lot of the reason why they get along so well. They get each other on a level that not many people do.
"Two!"
"I haven't been either," Kate says softly, looking at him with an equally soft expression.
"One!"
Jack reaches over and places his hand over hers, and while it's not the traditional kiss, she wouldn't have the new year brought in any other way.
"Names."
"That's a very random subject change of you."
"I'm like that sometimes, Jack."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"So... names."
"No Tom."
"Or Sarah."
"Or Kevin."
"Or Juliet."
"Or James."
"So really, we can't name our baby a name we've heard before."
"No. Just names that have been associated with past relationships."
"Oh, so no Sayid then either."
"..."
"... I'm kidding."
"That wasn't funny."
"The look on your face was."
"I didn't make a look."
"Yes, you did! You looked like you were going to march out of the bedroom and hunt Sayid down and murder him in some super secret doctor way."
"No I didn't."
"You did so."
"Names, Kate. We need to think of names."
"Wouldn't you rather hunt Sayid?"
"Okay, forget it. I'm done."
"Jack! C'mon!"
"Nope. I'm no longer inspired to name our child. You do it."
"Okay, fine. I will."
"... you're going to pick something ugly aren't you?"
"Probably."
"Poor kid, it never even stood a chance with us."
"James! I swear to God if you put those damn bows in our son's hair again, I am going to kill you with my bare hands!"
The only answer Lily gets from the living room where she stupidly trusted her husband to handle getting Harry dressed and ready for when her parents and sister and brother-in-law and nephew show up for the family's traditional Christmas dinner is the sound of laughter and then some whispering that sounds highly suspicious. She should never have agreed to let Sirius come over for Christmas dinner. Then again, she should never agreed to host the damn thing either. She's too swamped at work to handle cooking an entire dinner and cleaning the house and shopping for all the presents and decorating the house and while James is a darling and she loves him with all her heart, all he's good for when it comes to domestic matters is entertaining a baby for hours on end. She's pretty sure it's because he's at the same maturity level as his five month old son.
But she'll be the first to admit that James taking care of Harry has taken a huge weight off her shoulders. Now if he would stop thinking bows are an okay thing for a male child, however funny they might be, he'd be damn near perfect.
"James! I mean it!"
"Hush, Lily. You'll upset the baby!" James retorts.
Lily stops mid scrub and turns to face the doorway leading into the living room. He did not just hush her. She's the only one that gets to do the hushing around here. "Excuse me?" she demands.
James appears in the doorway, their son in his arms, dressed and giggling and completely bow-less. "He doesn't like it when you yell."
"I don't either," Sirius chimes in purely for speaking's sake.
Lily throws him a dirty look before smiling at her boys. "Have I told you that I love you lately?" she asks James.
He laughs, bouncing Harry a little. "Yeah, but I can stand to hear it a little more. I resisted the bows after all."
"James, come on. Talk to me."
"No, you called my hair 'unfashionable'," he retorts, crossing his arms over his chest childishly. "I'm not talking to you anymore."
"You're talking to me now," she points out reasonably.
His eyes narrow immediately and he looks more angry with himself for falling into that one then at her for pointing it out. He lifts one shoulder in a shrug and pretends like he didn't hear her very reasonable logic.
She waits through a couple minutes of silence before making an annoyed noise in the back of her throat, and slapping the back of the couch with her palm. "James, damnit, stop being such a bloody baby."
"I am not being a baby!"
"You're not talking to me because I called your hair unfashionable," Lily snaps back. "It is unfashionable. It's positively horrible."
For a moment he looks like he'd punch her in the face if she wasn't a girl and his girlfriend at that.
"Well, me and my positively horrible hair don't talk to people who insult it," James retorts.
Lily rolls her eyes, throwing up her hands. "I never insulted it. I just said it was bad."
"How is that not an insult?"
"Because I love your hair the way it is," she answers with a smile. "All messy, unfashionable, horrible, and bad."
"The hair and I think we like you again."
"I feel so blessed."
I love you guys so much and thank you for making 2006 an awesome year!
And now for the stuff that you guys really care about. ;)
Way back when, I offered to write some drabbles for those who wanted one for Christmas. Some of you signed up, some didn't. Some didn't have the chance since I just recently friended you, but that's okay. I expect I'll do another thing just like it around Valentine's.
But anyway, for those of you that requested something, here you go. I hope you got what you wanted.
She'd give anything for some mistletoe right now.
To say things have been weird between her and Jack would be the world's worst understatement ever in recorded history. Awkward doesn't even begin to describe it and not even difficult comes close. The best she's got is it's complicated and that just sounds stupid whenever Claire or Sun or Charlie or Locke ask her about it.
She hurt him by sleeping with Sawyer. He hurt her back by fucking Juliet. They should be able to be adults about this and move on and stop holding grudges against each other for things they can't change but they cling to their grudges because it's all they know to do when it comes to relationships.
He's so wary of her now a days that the only way she'd get a kiss out of him would be to trick him into it, hence her dying need for some mistletoe. He's a lot of things but he'll put up with the tradition and once she gets him kissing her, she knows that she can get past their grudges and into something much more enjoyable.
She stares at him from across the fire, annoyed that it's Christmas Eve and only three months to the day since she met him and yet all she can think about is how badly she wants to ignore everyone else and leap across that fire and force him to listen to her in the only way she knows how.
"Kate, is something wrong?"
"Yeah, something is," she tells Charlie in response as she stands up and walks around the fire to stand in front of Jack, giving him a mix of a death glare and a loving smile which effectively makes her look ridiculous. He opens his mouth to say something but she's quick about what she wants to do because if he starts talking, she'll kick him in the shins and ruin any chance of the kiss she's been dying for.
She drops to her knees, grabbing his head by the neck and jerking it towards her own in one fluid motion and then she kisses him like she did in the jungle but this one isn't about curiosity. No, she knows what kissing him's like already. This is about telling him everything she wants to say but can't find the words for. She's unaware of the other survivors until after she pulls away and she hears Sawyer's crude whistling. She rolls her eyes, a part of her wondering how she ever could have slept with that, and stares Jack in the eyes. "Understand?" she whispers.
Jack licks his lips and stares back at her, nodding just the tiniest bit. Yeah, he does and he proves it to her by kissing her again.
She's always been the bridesmaid and never the bride. Sort of. She was technically at one time married but since it was under a false name and when she was on the run and because she ended up leaving him after drugging him, she doesn't really consider it to be a real marriage. More like a pitstop in Florida where she was played a housewife from the sixties until the next corner of the world called to her.
When Claire married Charlie, Kate was a bridesmaid.
When Shannon married Sayid, Kate was a bridesmaid.
When Sun remarried Jin, Kate was a bridesmaid.
Finding the perfect guy isn't the problem. She's got a guy, a pretty good one this time too. It's them as a couple that's the problem. They're messed up and that's not even the half of it. They fight so much that getting married just seems silly when they're going to be fighting with each other all the time and they don't want to be one of those couples that people whisper about and say should just divorce and get it over with.
So they stay unmarried and unengaged and settle for living together.
She knows it's only a matter of time before she runs. It always is just a matter of time. And she's starting to feel the ichings of being in one place for too long but for now all she has to do is glance at him and suddenly running isn't that important. She can push those thoughts to the back of her mind and enjoy where she is, enjoy him.
Today she'll stay. Tomorrow she'll run.
Tomorrow just hasn't come yet.
"You got another letter."
Lily glances up from her book long enough to say "I don't care."
"This is the third one this week," Emmeline says. "And it's only Monday."
"Again, I don't care."
"Don't you think you should answer just one of them?"
"Nope."
"He's not that bad, you know."
"Oh, not you too," Lily groans, dropping her head against the pages of her book. If she has to listen to one more person tell her how "he's not that bad", she's going to find him and kill him. "He is. He really is that bad."
"That was two years ago," Emmeline retorts. "He's changed."
"No one changes."
"Some people do."
"Potter isn't some people," Lily mutters darkly, snapping her book shut and jumping off her bed. "I'm going to go put a stop to this right now," she announces, and with a turn of her heel, marches down to the common room, primed to start yelling at the messy haired Chaser to pretty please, stop drowning her in love letters. She stops three steps from the bottom, stunned speechless by the sight of said boy bent over a book of all things with a first year of all things, clearly tutoring the little girl in Charms of all things. She stares for a minute, transfixed like a deer caught in headlights, before turning on her heel again and creeping back up to her dorm.
"Well?" Emmeline asks with a quirked eyebrow and smirk.
"Give me that damn quill."
"You know who sucks?" Hurley proposes over another plate of boar. "Sawyer."
Kate giggles into her food while Jack tries not to choke on his drink. "What makes you say that?" she asks once her giggles have died and she's just smiling like an idiot.
"Dude's got like eight hundred sticks of deodorant and does he share? No. Some of us actually need it, you know. We don't all have good looks and abs of steel to keep people near us."
Kate starts giggling again and she has to set her tray down or she's going to drop it in trying to hide her giggles from Hurley. It's not him--it's just a funny topic and it's about damn time they've had some humor around this place.
Jack spends a moment smiling into his drink before he can take a sip and not choke on it and then he answers Hurley. "I can talk to him if you want."
"Would you?"
Jack nods and sets his bottle down at his feet and picks up his plastic fork. "I'll do it first thing tomorrow morning."
"You're a life saver, dude," Hurley says, finished with his food now. He says a 'goodnight' to the both of them before going off to see what Libby's up to.
Kate almost has her laughter under control but then Jack looks at her with a smirk and she breaks out into another fit of giggles. He joins her and they laugh over the absurdity of the conversation and how topics like it have been common ones of conversation lately. Whoever has one of the last razors or bottles of shaving cream or deodorants is often bribed and complained about for hours.
"So... Kate. You up for a conversation with Sawyer?" Jack asks. He knows she's the only one that the conman will listen to and actually give something to and while it irks him to use her like this, he did promise Hurley.
"I'll do it if you give me something," she answers.
He quirks an eyebrow at her. "What?" She leans in and whispers something to him with a devilish smile and a small wink. He looks at her sharply when she's finished, gauging her seriousness and she looks pretty damn serious about this. Not that he's really complaining.
Jack nods and smirks back at her, "Meet me in the hatch at noon then."
"Can't wait."
She feels like Alice sometimes. Not the Alice in the story but the Alice that really lived. The one that had an old man interested in being her friend and a father figure to her when she had enough friends and the father she had was more then enough to handle. She sympathizes with the real Alice, she really does, but she wishes that sometimes she were more like the fake one. The one that fell down a rabbit hole and found a magical world.
The world she's got right now isn't magical in any way.
It's cruel and harsh and it doesn't forgive her tiniest misstep. It takes things that she wants dearly and it twists them until nothing makes sense and everything's just wrong. It did to her mother, to her best friends, to her father, to Vaughn. It took them from her and twisted every single relationship until she was an island onto herself in the midst of millions of people.
The world clearly wanted her to be alone.
He just didn't accept that and he wasn't going to let her do it either. So what if she lost two years of her life and her boyfriend married someone else and her mother was God-knows where and Sloane was off punishment free and her father was hiding something from her? None of that mattered if she didn't let it. She had him, didn't she? She wasn't totally alone.
It didn't really come as a surprise to either one of them when they had too much to drink one night and after he recounted a tale about his college days and a certain embarrassing Halloween story including a hockey stick and a cross-dressing roommate, she leaned over and kissed him. It was only natural. She'd been given the short end of the stick in life and he was the one to pick up the pieces when it all shattered.
When she's with Weiss, she feels like she's worthy of the love he has to offer her and she really likes that feeling. Vaughn never brought that into their relationship. There was too much guilt and past mistakes and rule breaking in their relationship for either one of them to ever feel like they deserved the other.
Sometimes Sydney feels like Alice but sometimes that's okay.
"Ten!"
Kate's never been a big fan of New Year's, eve or day. The first actual one she remembers is nothing but unpleasant memories (mostly of drunk Wayne and a crying mother) and not one has improved since. Wayne only got drunker and her mother only cried more and neither one of them really seemed to notice that Kate was still there by midnight and by the time she was sixteen, she really wasn't there around midnight but instead outside, away from people. She doesn't like being around people on New Year's but now she's stuck on an island and there's not many places she can go, not with the Others still out there.
"Nine!"
Being trapped in camp doesn't mean that Kate hasn't found a place to hide and she has, a secluded corner of trees, shrouded in shadows, far from the fires and conversations of everyone else and that's where she's planning on staying until it's daylight again. She's boycotted every other New Year's Eve of her life. No reason why this one should be any different.
"Eight!"
"... is there a reason why you're hiding out?"
"Seven!"
Kate looks up from the sand, tongue in cheek and gives him a breathless laugh. "Why aren't you with the others?"
"Six!"
Jack shrugs, resting his hands on his hips. "You looked lonely," he tells her, effectively taking her breath away with such a simple statement.
"Five!"
Kate smiles at him, just for a brief second. "I'm fine," she tells him.
"Four!"
"Mind if I join you anyway?" Jack asks and she nods. "I've never been a fan of New Year's," he comments as he sits next to her. He's just talking for talking's sake by now and she's okay with letting him do that. "My dad was always drunk by midnight and my mom was always crying about something."
"Three!"
It's absolutely horrible of her but Kate loves that his New Year's have been a mirror image of her own. They've both had the worst pairs of parents and that's probably a lot of the reason why they get along so well. They get each other on a level that not many people do.
"Two!"
"I haven't been either," Kate says softly, looking at him with an equally soft expression.
"One!"
Jack reaches over and places his hand over hers, and while it's not the traditional kiss, she wouldn't have the new year brought in any other way.
"Names."
"That's a very random subject change of you."
"I'm like that sometimes, Jack."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"So... names."
"No Tom."
"Or Sarah."
"Or Kevin."
"Or Juliet."
"Or James."
"So really, we can't name our baby a name we've heard before."
"No. Just names that have been associated with past relationships."
"Oh, so no Sayid then either."
"..."
"... I'm kidding."
"That wasn't funny."
"The look on your face was."
"I didn't make a look."
"Yes, you did! You looked like you were going to march out of the bedroom and hunt Sayid down and murder him in some super secret doctor way."
"No I didn't."
"You did so."
"Names, Kate. We need to think of names."
"Wouldn't you rather hunt Sayid?"
"Okay, forget it. I'm done."
"Jack! C'mon!"
"Nope. I'm no longer inspired to name our child. You do it."
"Okay, fine. I will."
"... you're going to pick something ugly aren't you?"
"Probably."
"Poor kid, it never even stood a chance with us."
"James! I swear to God if you put those damn bows in our son's hair again, I am going to kill you with my bare hands!"
The only answer Lily gets from the living room where she stupidly trusted her husband to handle getting Harry dressed and ready for when her parents and sister and brother-in-law and nephew show up for the family's traditional Christmas dinner is the sound of laughter and then some whispering that sounds highly suspicious. She should never have agreed to let Sirius come over for Christmas dinner. Then again, she should never agreed to host the damn thing either. She's too swamped at work to handle cooking an entire dinner and cleaning the house and shopping for all the presents and decorating the house and while James is a darling and she loves him with all her heart, all he's good for when it comes to domestic matters is entertaining a baby for hours on end. She's pretty sure it's because he's at the same maturity level as his five month old son.
But she'll be the first to admit that James taking care of Harry has taken a huge weight off her shoulders. Now if he would stop thinking bows are an okay thing for a male child, however funny they might be, he'd be damn near perfect.
"James! I mean it!"
"Hush, Lily. You'll upset the baby!" James retorts.
Lily stops mid scrub and turns to face the doorway leading into the living room. He did not just hush her. She's the only one that gets to do the hushing around here. "Excuse me?" she demands.
James appears in the doorway, their son in his arms, dressed and giggling and completely bow-less. "He doesn't like it when you yell."
"I don't either," Sirius chimes in purely for speaking's sake.
Lily throws him a dirty look before smiling at her boys. "Have I told you that I love you lately?" she asks James.
He laughs, bouncing Harry a little. "Yeah, but I can stand to hear it a little more. I resisted the bows after all."
"James, come on. Talk to me."
"No, you called my hair 'unfashionable'," he retorts, crossing his arms over his chest childishly. "I'm not talking to you anymore."
"You're talking to me now," she points out reasonably.
His eyes narrow immediately and he looks more angry with himself for falling into that one then at her for pointing it out. He lifts one shoulder in a shrug and pretends like he didn't hear her very reasonable logic.
She waits through a couple minutes of silence before making an annoyed noise in the back of her throat, and slapping the back of the couch with her palm. "James, damnit, stop being such a bloody baby."
"I am not being a baby!"
"You're not talking to me because I called your hair unfashionable," Lily snaps back. "It is unfashionable. It's positively horrible."
For a moment he looks like he'd punch her in the face if she wasn't a girl and his girlfriend at that.
"Well, me and my positively horrible hair don't talk to people who insult it," James retorts.
Lily rolls her eyes, throwing up her hands. "I never insulted it. I just said it was bad."
"How is that not an insult?"
"Because I love your hair the way it is," she answers with a smile. "All messy, unfashionable, horrible, and bad."
"The hair and I think we like you again."
"I feel so blessed."