A Gift For YLETYLYF: Lit Match (Alecto Carrow/Lily Evans, NC-17)

Dec 27, 2021 09:31

Author: PHANTOMATO
Recipient: yletylyf
Title: Lit Match
Pairing: Alecto Carrow/Lily Evans
Rating: Explicit
Word Count/Art Medium: ~2k
Summary: Redheads should stick together.
Author's Notes: Vaguely canon-compliant

I’m fourteen and Sev invites me to his common room to study, except that when we get there, he gets caught up in whatever rubbish Evan bloody Rosier has to say today and I’m left with my thumb up my arse and an unfinished essay for potions. I stick it out, stubborn beyond measure, and throw nasty looks at Sev’s corner of the sofa after each paragraph. That’s how she finds me, nits in my hair from worrying it and a line set between my brows from scowling.

“Your boyfriend left you?” she asks, just loud enough for Sev to hear it and go blotchy, not that he has enough shame to slink back over. Evan puts a hand on his shoulder and turns him away from me.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say, the automatic denial buying me time as I stare.

What I’ve learned about Slytherins is that they put on a bleeding good show. This girl’s no exception: she wears the badge of a prefect, so she’s older, but you’d barely notice it before you’re caught up in her hair. It’s long, shiny, and auburn. I feel like a redhead from a bottle in comparison, too gaudy and bright to be anywhere near a girl who makes red look fancy.

At home in the summer, Tuney picks up locks of my hair and sighs at the color. Like all things about her, her hair had the sense to fade from the adorable blondness of a little girl to the mid-brown of a sensible adult woman. I’m a freak in more than one way.

“Well, if he’s not,” the girl says, “then he won’t mind me rescuing you from studying.”

She takes my hand and pulls me up. Alecto Carrow, she says. Fancy name for a fancy girl. And back in her room, she sits me down on her bed, takes out her drawer of combs and barrettes and oils that smell like flowers I don’t know the names of, and she tells me-

“Us reds have to stick together. Sorry that your boy’s a wanker.”

When she sends me off with a new chignon-a fancy word from a fancy girl-and a hair clip made of horn, Sev asks, sullen, what I’d gotten up to without him.

“Girl stuff,” I tell him, touching my hair. “You would’ve been bored.” He gets that glazed look in his eyes that boys always do and lets it go.

I’m fifteen and every time Sev invites me to the Slytherin dorms to study, we get into a fight. The Gryffindor boys, he goes on, like they’re my fucking responsibility. And I fight back, telling him about the Slytherin boys, just to show him what it feels like. He runs off with Evan.

Alecto shows up after the Christmas hols with her hair chopped off, styled into a shag like Jane Fonda, and I want to stick my fist in it, rub my knuckles on her scalp and grab the long bits at the back and just pull. It scares me that I have this thought. She looks like she’d eat me if I tried.

“What’s your boy done this time?” she asks when we’re sat on her bed. Seventh-years get the best view of the lake, someone said to me, but I don’t know what makes a good view when it’s all murky and green.

“I don’t know why he asks me here when all he does is fight and ignore me.” I bash my fist against her bedspread and she tugs on my hair, still long, still perfectly feminine and pretty and much too bright. I feel like a little girl being coddled by her mum.

Filled with a need to prove myself, I turn around and declare, “I won’t be friends with him much longer.”

“You should hold out until the end of the spring term,” she says, her hands combing my hair to lay over my shoulders.

“And why’s that?” I demand.

“Because,” Alecto says, “it’s easier for us to do this.”

She’s seventeen and has five months left in school when she kisses me. I make a fist in her bloody Jane Fonda shag and open my mouth like Tuney taught me, the year after she started seeing boys and before she decided she was too grown for girlish gossip.

“What were you doing?” Sev asks me when I leave, my jumper twisted round my hips.

“Girl stuff,” I tell him, and he lets me go.

And he keeps letting me go, week after week, as Alecto kisses me and touches me and grinds me into her mattress until I start to like the murky green lake light, because it makes her skin glow like something ethereal.

I’ve turned sixteen by the time Sev calls me a slur and I throw out almost ten years of friendship. “It’s not really the name,” I tell Alecto at night, the last one before the train comes to take us home, “I mean, it’s a shit thing to say to a friend, but I know you all kind of think it sometimes and he didn’t mean much by it. I’m just so fucking tired of putting up with his moods.”

“Remember that for the next boy,” she advises me, kissing my cheek and twirling my long, red hair around her fingers.

“There won’t be a next one,” I vow. “It’s only two years til I’m out, right, and I’ll look you up.”

I’m seventeen when I break my promise. It’s only that two years is a long time to wait.

I didn’t have friends without Sev. There are no redheaded girls in Gryffindor.

James Potter wears me down and we fuck in a dusty stairwell and I close my eyes when I make a fist around his messy hair and think about auburn instead of black. He comes in a minute and tells me he loves me. While crying.

I pat his shoulder and say I’ll keep it in mind.

I do. He’s got three friends and a pile of galleons and his grandfather ran the government. I’ve got no friends and a Muggle surname and there’s rumors of people like me dying. Sirius Black hates me because he’s had a hard-on for James since he knew what that was, so I make sure to sit on James’ lap and snog him for the whole train ride home after our final year, fat fucking diamond on my ring finger.

I’m eighteen when I’m married. Tuney doesn’t show up, but she sends a card with her married name on it. I pull back my hair, cover it with a veil, and think she would approve.

Alecto is twenty-one, I think, when I see her again. We’re on one of the side-streets of Diagon, the narrower alleys where the good shops are sequestered, the ones with girl stuff.

Cosmetics. Maternity. Clothing.

Trousers that fit comfortably. Lipstick that isn’t politely pink. A stylist who’ll chop off my hair without tutting.

“Good work waiting,” she snipes, jealousy turning her face ugly as she glares at my ring. I didn’t know she cared that much.

“You never wrote,” I point out.

“Neither did you.”

I snort. “I’m lowborn.”

“And I’m the type to fuck with rubbish,” she says. No one stops to stare at us, two women having it out on the pavement, but I pull her into an alley between buildings anyway.

She’s still the only woman I’ve met who wears her hair in a shag. “Come to my place,” I say, thinking of red hair and soft hands and light on bare skin. “James won’t notice shit.”

We buy a bottle of nail lacquer in black. “Girl stuff,” I say when James asks what we’ll be up to, brandishing the bottle. “Have the boys over. We’ll stick to the bedroom.”

Alecto sighs when she comes, four of my fingers stuffed up her cunt and my tongue on her clit. She rubs me off after and I bite my own hair to quiet the scream. “I suppose we should actually paint our nails,” she tells me, palming one of my breasts and kissing the other, “or that boy might notice something.”

I roll my eyes. “Don’t bother. He barely cares to notice if I’m awake when he fucks me.”

I do paint her nails, though, and make her hold them above her head while they dry and I eat her out again. She can’t touch. She hates it so much that she laughs.

I’m twenty and I’m pregnant and I chop off all my hair to above the shoulder. I get bangs. It’s shaggy but not aggressively so, not enough, because James tells everyone that I’m getting a responsible haircut in preparation for being a mum, and they all murmur that that’s so sensible, that I’m such a good and reliable woman. I think about telling people that I did it because I saw a picture of Nina Hagen on an album cover, and her hair was bright fucking red-artificially red, absurdly red-and gelled to stand out and feathered and shaggy and so fucking hot that I thought I might die if I didn’t do it myself.

Alecto meets up with me for girls’ nights on Fridays. Not Saturdays, because those are the nights James takes me out to show what a good little integration case I am, and not Thursdays, because those are Order meetings and I’ve got to sit there and listen to all the ways a bunch of twenty-year-olds are our only hope. I make a Star Wars reference, once, but all that leads to is James deciding he’s Han Solo and burning down a sign outside the new café on Diagon when he’s high on himself and a little drunk and thinks, like Solo, that he’s got a right to shoot first.

Except it’s not a Death Eater, it’s slate with menu specials, and he has to pay a few galleons to replace it and hush it up.

So Alecto and I do Fridays, and by mutual agreement I don’t ask what else she does with her weeks, even as she listens to all of my complaints about mine. We open a bottle or three of nail lacquer and set them right by the bedroom door. James hates the smell of it, so he never gets close enough to knock.

“Your tits are getting huge,” she says, conversationally, sucking on them. Her fingers are up my arse and cunt, thumb on my clit, and I’ve come so many times I can’t see straight. “Maybe I should get pregnant, see if that helps.”

“I like you flat,” I think I say, but it doesn’t really matter.

I’d like her any way she came, because when she wipes her hand off on my thigh and kisses me down, she murmurs, “Your hair is really hot. You look like a lit match.” It’s a fucking absurd thing to say, but that’s what Hagen looked like too, a lit match, burning hot and bright and too too fast. I feel like one.

“I only need a few more years with him,” I say, confessing my plan to Alecto, who only ever judges me the same way I judge myself. “I want a couple of years of support while the baby is still young, then I’m going to leave James. Have you got room for two?”

“Sure, if it’s you and little red,” Alecto says, kissing my belly right over the womb. James always touches me too high, like the child is growing in my stomach.

“We’ll be there,” I vow.

I’m twenty-one when I break my promise.

pairing: lily/alecto carrow, .fic exchange: winter 2021-2022, *femslash

Previous post Next post
Up