lily evans

A/N: this counts as Jily, yes?

@jilymicrofics

Lily Evans liked your photo  

James is mid doom scroll when the notification pops up and his brain, previously dulled by the blue light of said doom school shorts out.

He spends an indeterminate but probably absurd amount of time staring at the entry on his notifications list, somewhere between panic and absolute glee at the idea that Lily Evans is poking around on his Instagram. 

Eventually, he decides to follow the link so he can determine which photo struck her fancy. Maybe the one with Sirius’s new puppy - he looks relatively fit and it conveys his cuddly soft side which Peter says girls like. 

Or maybe it’s that post work out one from last week that makes him glad his mum isn’t on Instagram to comment and say he looks too skinny and needs to hydrate if he’s sweating so much. She doesn’t need to be - after twenty five years of life, he had the conversation in the first seconds after he took the photo.

With slightly trembling fingers he taps the link and his previous cheery nervousness turns to absolute mortification. Normally your crush liking a photo from four years ago is a beautiful moment. Instead it’s the worst possible case scenario. Shit.

Quickly, he swipes to call Sirius and doesn’t even let him finish whatever greeting was coming before he blurts, “SHE SAW THE PERM PICTURE,” James takes a steadying breath and now his voice is eerily calm. “I’m going to kill you.”

“Why did you even leave that one up?”

“Because I am bad at the internet. I tried to delete a picture once and almost deleted my whole account.”

“A tragedy.”

“I have all the cute puppy post saved.”

Sirius sighs and James can imagine he’s pinching the bridge of his nose like their chem professor used to, “Why are you calling me?”

“You’re the one who convinced me it was a good idea.”

The laugh that comes from Sirius spikes James’s heart-rate. He needs to punch something. Or eat something crunchy. “You’re the one who believed me for two weeks.”

He fumes for a second and pulls a bag of stale pretzel rods from the pantry. “How am I going to bounce back from this?”

“Say it was a wig,” Sirius says in that ‘your problem is a non-problem stop boring me’ way that has James snapping another pretzel in half. 

“Not sustainable you would out me in a second.”

“Yes I would.”

James begins a circuit of his flat, pretzel bag tucked under his arm, “This isn’t helping my Lily problem.”

After a few moments, Sirius sighs again. “It sounds like maybe you have a Lily not-problem.”

“How so?” James asks, desperate and gnawing on a pretzel like a rabbit with a carrot.

Now, Sirius’s previous disinterest melts into his patented cocky drawl, “I dunno that pic is from like at least four years ago.”

James pauses and does the math for himself, wincing when he sees the picture above the timestamp, “Yeah.”

“So she’s back four years on your Instagram,” Sirius prompts, firmly in his ‘you idiot’ voice.

James’s mouth opens and closes, the pretzels dropping from his arm. 

“It’s the old ‘all press is good press.’”

Convincing though the argument is, James can’t help but think this isn’t going to resolve in his favor. “I dunno she might have seen it, laughed, liked it, and then thought ‘hm I could never song a person who had that hair’, right?”

“Lucky for you, you don’t have that hair.”

“Dunno you could be snagging someone and remember something awful and then it ruins the whole thing - wait.”

“She dm’d you didn’t she?”

it’s none of that, it’s ‘I would know.’

love, buried three times