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Teacups and Time Travel


The house elf that cleaned the girls dormitory that night didn’t know what to do when she snuck into Lily Evans’ dorm room to collect her laundry. She stared through the dark to the boy the lay asleep across the foot of Lily’s bed, her ears wiggling uncomfortably. She looked over her shoulder at the corridor, half expecting someone else to be there, but there was no one, and she inched slowly over and took hold on the toe of the boy’s trainer, shaking his foot and leg persistently. “Sir… sir, there isn’t to be any boys in the girls dorms! There isn’t!” When she got no reaction, she clicked her fingers, disapparating from by his feet and onto his chest and she pawed at his cheeks, “You is needing to be waking up, mister! You is not to be here!” She prodded at him.

James groaned and pulled himself out of sleep. He stared up at the elf standing on his rib cage and he sat up, making her tumble onto the bed beside him. Lily moaned in her sleep as the elf hit her leg and he caught the elf up before she could scramble and actually disturb Lily.

“Oh you naughty, naughty boy, being in the girls dormitory! There is being detentions and punishments galore for things like this!” She looked agonized. “You is lucky it is a house elf that is catching you! And her a prefect!”

“Shhh, will you?” James hissed, glancing at Lily. “We aren’t doing what you think, alright? She’s just sad. Her - her -- boyfriend’s been sent to Azkaban.” James supposed boyfriend was probably the most accurate term for Jasper Odair. Lily obviously loved him still - she’d basically said as much when she’d cried into his arm, when she’d said that everyone she loves gets taken away… when she was worried about being a jinx… James’s heart had broken for her.

“Sent to Azkaban!” gasped the little elf. “But isn’t you her boyfriend?” she looked fearful.

“No… no I’m not,” James said, though the words stung. “I don’t reckon Evans would notice if I got sent to Azkaban anyway. No. It’s Jasper Odair that I mean.”

“The Hufflepuff boy? Was he being a bad boy and sneaking into girls dormitories as well?”

“No,” James replied. “Bleeding hell, they won’t send somebody to Azkaban for having sex. I hope. Gods alive, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin would be permanent residents there by now if they did.”

The elf looked appalled.

“Sorry - shouldn’t have told you that. I s’pose that was a bit more information that you’re needing.”

“A bit sir, yes,” the elf nodded.

“My point is that Evans just needed some company and… and I’m just here for her, that’s all. She fell asleep when I was comforting her before and I moved her here to the bed so she’d be more comfortable. I’m just being her for her. That’s all.” He held up his hand to swear an oath to the elf.

The elf sighed, “Well, I is warning you, if you is being caught up here by the wrong people you is being sent home with no return of coming back to Hogwarts!” the elf said.

James shrugged, “It’s worth it knowing Evans is alright.” Besides, he knew McGonagall would never let him be expelled. And besides that, who the bleeding hell was going to come around to Lily Evans’ dorm and look in on her? The head girl this year was a Hufflepuff, and Lily Evans was the Gryffindor prefect herself. There really wasn’t anyone else to catch them.

The elf slid down off his lap and scrambled for the laundry hamper’s bag and, with a fleeting glance back at the boy in the girl’s dormitory, she tugged the door shut and ran off.

James sat there on the end of the bed for several long moments in silence. He stared at his trainers, then stood up and stuck his hands into his trouser pockets. He went over to the window sill, where he’d deposited his jumper before turning into the stag earlier, and he stared out the window a moment as he gathered up the jumper, absently folding it over his arm as he watched the silhouettes of thestrals popping up over the Forbidden Forest.

“James?”

He turned around to see Lily was awake and pushing herself up. “Evans?” he turned back to the bed, carrying the sweater. “Are you alright? Did I wake you?”

“The elf did,” she said. She hugged her knees as he stood there, biting his lip, silhouetted by the moonlight coming through the window, his hair even messier than usual, his oxford half untucked from his trousers so that one tail hung over his thigh and the other disappeared beneath his belt buckle.

“I’m sorry, I tried to shut her up, she just wouldn’t stop going on about getting in trouble for being up here,” he apologized.

“It’s okay,” Lily said.

“Are you alright?”

“It hurts quite a lot,” she whispered.

James sat down on the edge of the bed beside her and put his arm ‘round her shoulders. “I’m really sorry. I don’t reckon I can even start at imagining how it is you’re feeling, Evans. I’d be wrecked if something like this ever happened to y-- to someone I loved.”

Lily stared at his knees, how they folded, his feet off the side off the bed.

“Would you like some tea?” he asked, “I can go and fetch you some tea… Milk and a spot of sugar, yeah?”

“You know how I take my tea?” Lily looked up at him in confusion.

He flushed, “I’ve seen you prepare it in the morning at breakfast.”

“But you remembered?” she asked.

“Evans… I remember everything when it comes to you.”

It was her turn to flush.

“I’ll be right back with your tea,” he said and he started to get up, but she grabbed his arm instead, stopping him. “What?”

“How do you take your tea?”

“Two sugars.”

“No milk?”

“Not a drop.”

She made a point of deciding to remember that.

“I’ll be right back with it, Evans,” he said again, and he got up and hurried across the room to the door.

Lily’s voice cut the dark as he touched the handle. “James.”

He looked back. “Evans?”

“I would notice.”

“You would notice what?” he asked, confused.

“If you were sent to Azkaban.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then nodded and said, “I’ll be right back,” and he dodged out of the dorm and hurried out to the stairs, which he stepped on, prepared for them to change to a chute, and skiied down them, a bit of a lightness to his step that hadn’t been there before.

Lily waited until he’d closed the door and she got up and hurried over to her dresser. She combed her hair quickly and set it to braiding itself with a flick of her wand as she smeared a bit of shiny cherry lip gloss over her mouth and then sprang back to bed, tucking herself into exactly the same position she’d been in before he left only just in time as he was returned with the tea cups. A bit had sloshed onto the saucers. He held out the one with the milk and she took it and he sucked the spilled tea from his thumb and smiled as he sat on the foot of her bed again, kicking off his trainers and sitting so his stockinged feet were tucked beneath his knees, twisting his long legs like a pretzel.

“So how is it that you get up here anyway?” she asked.

He smiled, “I’ll never tell.”

“I thought it was something like you go stag to sneak up, but I don’t see how you would’ve got the tea cups up here as a stag.”

“Oh no Evans, the stairs definitely pitches me as a stag. You should’ve seen it back at Valentines when I came up here as a stag and the stairs went flat and my hooves were skidding all over --” he flicked his wand so the tea cup hung in the air and flailed his arms to mimic what he’d done with his hooves on the stairs, “And then I splayed them out all spread up like --” he held his arms out at wingspan, “-- and I’m stuck there so I’m hangin’ out, braying like a ninny for help, but Sirius is busy doing whatever Sirius does (I shudder to think) and he doesn’t come to help me and all I can picture is you or somebody else coming in the common room and seeing me and so I let myself down and the stair chute just hucks me across the room so I slam into the couch!” He smacked the heel of his hand into his palm to describe how he hit the couch.

Lily laughed and he smiled, enjoying the sound of her laughter even more knowing he’d caused it, despite how bloody sad she was.

Then -

“Wait a second. You were up here at Valentines?”

James blinked. “Erm… no.”

“Erm yes, you’ve just said it.” She put the tea cup on her night stand. “What were you doing up here on Valentines?”

He stared at her.

“Potter.”

“Okay, see. Evans. It’s like this. I --”

“Hang on. You couldn’t have been here on Valentines.”

“What?”

“You were in the Great Hall. You and Maryrose. You were at the very next table and you did that stupid Odair you are joke at poor Jasper and -- and you were in love with Dumbledore all weekend thanks to that stupid prank Sirius pulled with the Dumbledore confetti and the love potion. You didn’t have any time to be coming up here on Valentines. What are you on about?”

You idiot, James thought, You’ve screwed up the timelines again. Go on and explain yourself out of this one, Potter.

“Did I say Valentines? I’m mad. I mean…. Holiday. Christmas. Yeah.”

“When you were at my house and fighting with Severus Snape then?”

“I didn’t fight with Severus Snape,” James said pointedly.

“James Potter.”

He stared at her. His mouth sort of flopped about like a fish.

“Why are you lying?”

I’m not, he thought. I just don’t know what your truth is.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

“Seriously, James. Why? Why would you lie about coming up here at Valentines?”

“I’m not lying,” he said.

Lily said, “But James, you were right there next to us and --”

“Did you or did you not find a bracelet up here? Silver chain with a heart shaped closure and a silver teacup charm?”

Lily stared at him. “It was from Jasper.”

“The note was signed J. Not Jasper. You assumed it was Jasper.”

Lily blinked. She had thought it was weird though that when she wore it about, Jasper never said anything about it. “You left it?”

James nodded.

“But -- when? Why?” she asked, “You were still with Maryrose.”

James said, “Oh Evans, you’ve no idea how mad I’d sound if I tried to explain it to you.”

She stared at him. “Try me.”

He stared back.

Then -

“In April, I went back in time using a funny device that the Blind Seer, Mopsus, made. I went back in time to save Maryrose Jenkins from being murdered and left in a lake in a cave that Lord Voldemort fills with loads of inferius. I saved her and changed the course of the entire bloody spring and I haven’t barely any idea what really happened and what only happened in my head and there’s this weird phenomenon called artefacting, where little things that happened in my timeline have somehow crossed over to the real timeline - your timeline - and that bracelet is one of them. I was never here, I never bought that bracelet, never wrapped it in pink paper, never wrote a note that I signed J. I never carried it up the stairs, I never dropped it on your floor by accident - yet it still found it’s way up here somehow through the divining of the fates. I broke up with Maryrose because, in my timeline, we were broken up anyway - well, she’d died, so we were broken up by default. In my timeline, Evans, you stole a kiss from me during one of Sirius Black’s parties. In my timeline, Evans, we kissed on the grounds coming back from Quidditch in the rain and it was the most fucking perfect thing that ever happened in my entire life and it was taken away. All because the bloody first years stole my invisibility cloak and tried to go kill the Dark Lord and save Harold Minchum and you stood me up in the Three Broomsticks for our date and my dad was kidnapped and dying in the Malfoy’s dungeon and then Rudolphus Lestrange killed Sirius Black and I had to bloody save the lives of every bleeding person… and in the transaction, I lost moments that meant a good deal to me. I lost things that ought’nt be lost.” He stopped and stared at her, waiting.

She stared back.

“That is almost as mad as the bloody werewolf story you told me back in third year.”

James shrugged.

But there was something familiar about what he’d said.

“You’re mad,” she whispered.

“I told you,” he said, shrugging.

“Absolutely mental.”

He took his tea from the air beside him and sipped it.

She was still staring at him.

Then --

“You’re serious.”

James nodded.

“You went on, like, some… crazy… Doctor Who sort of… wibbly wobbly… space-time adventure… thing?”

James smirked, “Bloody hell, I am like the Doctor.”

Lily was still staring at him like he was mad.

“Do you believe me Evans?”

“I… I dunno.”

“It’s okay if you don’t. I barely believe me.” He sipped his tea again, then put it back up in the floating saucer at his shoulder and he said, “I’m not supposed to tell anybody though so I’d really like it if you didn’t say anything to anybody about it.”

Lily snorted. “Because I’m going to go tell Marlene McKinnin and Alice Prewitt that you bloody time travelled and expect them not to haul me off to Madam Pomfrey’s for a good dose of sanity solution?”

James smirked. “I dunno where you get your kicks from, Evans.”

She kicked his shin from under the blanket.

He laughed.

She hesitated, then, “Are you really serious or are you joking, trying to prank me into believing you?”

“Evans,” he said, “I swear to you I’m telling the truth.”

“But --”

He pointed at the photograph of the pair of them that hung on the wall. “Do you remember taking that photo?”

She stared at it for a long time, trying ro recall the memory.

“It was my birthday present, that photo.”

“Your birthday present?”

James nodded. “We took it with a Polaroid down at the table in the common room and you took me up here and let me hang it up because I noticed when I was up here at Valentines that I wasn’t on your wall. Everyone else. Everyone but me was there. And for my birthday present, you took a photo with me and brought me up here and you let me hang it up on the wall.” He stared at it. “It was everything I wanted, Evans.”

Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her ears.

His lip sort of trembled and he looked down at his hands in his lap. “I’m a git, I know… go on and say it.”

“You aren’t.”

“I am. Loving a girl so much that doesn’t even like me.”

Lily’s heart ached. “James.”

He looked up at her.

She wanted to say it.

But the bravery blew out of her and she looked away.

James looked back at his hands.

“I better go,” he said, and he magicked away his cup with a flick of his wand as he got up and grabbed his Gryffindor jumper, hurrying from the room.

Lily sat, shaking from the nerves that twisted through her. She reached for her cup and picked it up, her hands shaking so much that the china clinked and she downed a good deal of it, hoping the notes of chamomile she smelled would help calm her… Her eyes flitted to the pattern. Blue with deer - a stag and his doe, standing before a cottage, the stag nuzzling his doe gently…

Lily’s heart ached.

“Why am I such a bloody idiot?” she cried and she shoved the teacup onto the nightstand so quickly that she missed the surface and it fell - shattering on the floor as she began to sob.