Chapter Text
“Oi!”
Over by the side of the pool-sized bathtub, halfway through undressing, Lily paused to raise an eyebrow at James. He was still fully dressed, arms crossed and trying not to fluster himself further. It wasn’t working.
Lily was either incredibly oblivious to what was happening, or she was a better actor than Padfoot when McGonnagall asked him about the paw prints found on his Transfiguration essay. “Yes?” she asked, and it almost sounded sweet, the tosser.
James exhaled indignantly and pressed his fingers to his temples. “Can you be a little less blasé about my body, please?”
“What, this old thing?” Lily asked, even more blasé, and James had to stifle a laugh under a disgruntled cough.
“I know I have a hot bod,” said James, trying for cavalier, “but can you relax with the stripper routine?”
Lily smiled at him. “I’ve already been naked today. It’s nothing new. Now come on and take off your clothes.”
James silently thanked Merlin that he was still in Lily’s body for that statement, because the rushing of blood down to his crotch would have certainly resulted in popping a boner right on the spot. Lily had a head start on him, but James started taking off layers too, peeling off Lily’s sweater, unbuttoning her shirt, Godric’s balls, struggling with her bra until he gave up and used magic to unclasp it.
Keeping his eyes firmly at the ceiling, he quickly voided himself of the rest of Lily’s clothes and joined her at the edge of the bathtub. She had already poured the potion into the water, which was now a vivid grassy green. She dipped a tentative toe into the water, then looked at him from under a flap of his hair.
“Ready? We’re going to need to submerge ourselves entirely.”
“Let’s get this over with.”
The two of them stepped into the pool together, James giving Lily a wide berth and maintaining his gaze at the mermaid portrait. Swimming out a couple paces until they could both tread water, up to their shoulders under water, Lily plugged her nose with her thumb and pointer finger.
“Okay, try not to inhale too much. It’s fine if you swallow some of the potion, but it probably won’t taste very good. I think we’re going to try and stay underwater for about 30 seconds to get the full effect. The book said 10 seconds but just to be safe.”
James nodded and mimicked her, squeezing his nostrils closed. “One, two, three.”
The two of them bobbed down, and instantly, James felt prickles all over his body. It wasn’t painful, although the tingling felt like tiny needles. He had taken Polyjuice Potion only once in his life, after Sirius had nicked a vial from one of Slughorn’s lessons and the four of them had tried it out for fun, and it felt rather like that, except from the outside in instead of the opposite. He felt his thighs lengthen and his shoulders broaden, and after a few more seconds, keeping his mouth firmly closed, he broke through the surface of the water.
A head of red hair was floating a few meters away from James. It was hazy at best — his eyesight restored to its typical blind-as-a-bat-ness — but from all that he could see and feel of his own body, Lily’s antidote had been successful. He felt a pang of relief, and he understood for the first time that he had been worried. It wasn’t that he doubted Lily’s prowess for Potions and brewing, but he had been worried he would be stuck in Lily’s body for longer, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he would be able to deal with knowing that Lily had his dick attached to her.
With that thought, he remembered that he was naked in the Prefect’s bathtub where Lily, nearby, was also naked, and he tried very hard to not think about that any more than was absolutely necessary. He wracked his brain for extremely unsexy memories. Slughorn’s stupid Slug Club parties. Pete’s infected ingrown toenail. His mum’s cerulean coat. The time that Moony, while in werewolf form, had bit off the leg of a rogue bird in the forest and James had seen the bloody stump. Sleekeazy’s side effects: namely, turning his hair purple, smelling like stinksap. Feeling certain that his appendages were all behaving themselves, he called out to her.
“Alright, Evans?”
“I’m fine, James.” Lily started paddling towards the edge of the pool, and James followed suit. Back in his lanky body, he easily pulled ahead of her and reached the side first. He propelled himself out of the pool and strode forward to pick up his glasses. The world filtered back into focus, and he summoned two towels from the stack in the corner.
He turned around right as Lily was climbing out of the pool, and for a blissful, stupid second, he simply stared at her. She had bunched her wet hair up on the top of her head, leaving bare the curve of her shoulders, the swell of her breasts, water dripping down her stomach to her hips and her thighs…
James swallowed resolutely and shifted his gaze to the far wall. “I have a towel,” he said, unnecessarily, holding it out to the side to her. He heard the plonky footsteps of Lily approach, but she didn’t take the towel. He could feel her body heat near him, though maybe that was just his hopeful imagination. He squeezed his eyes shut and took a step to his left, trying to hold the towel closer to her without touching any part of her, though he desperately wanted to.
“You can look at me,” came Lily’s voice, soft, and he could hear the smile in her voice.
“What?”
He felt hands on his face, prising his eyelids open.
“You can look at me. I looked at you. You can look at me.”
With a gulp and a quick prayer towards whatever god controlled when horny teenage boys popped boners, James opened his eyes a slit.
Lily was standing in front of him, lips parted slightly, green eyes staring right into his. He kept his line of sight up at her face and her mouth twitched at the side. But below his periphery he could see the hints of her body, soft and beautiful. He might die here, in the Prefect’s bathroom, and honestly, it would be the best way to go. Not his ideal way, which was in a blaze of fire and fighting to protect his friends, but an enjoyable death nonetheless.
“One of the side effects of immersing oneself in an antidote with a base ingredient of salamander blood is profound sensory awareness,” began Lily, and James marveled at how it was possible for the dullest of Potions knowledge to sound fascinating coming from her mind.
“What’s that mean?” he asked, and he flushed at hearing his voice like that, low and quiet. His heart thudded in his chest.
“It means,” said Lily, and she grinned cheekily, and he could feel his heartbeat pulse all over his body, in his wrists and neck and legs, “that right now our bodies are very sensitive to touch.”
“What—”
Lily was touching him. Him. Running her fingers up his arm, up to his shoulders and neck, and she pulled at his head and his eyes dropped down to his own hands, which were inching out towards Lily’s chest free of his own doing.
He stepped back like Lily’s touch was burning him, (which it was, in a way), and sputtered at her. She just tilted her head and quirked an eyebrow at him.
“You don’t want me to touch you?”
“Obviously I want you to touch me!” he blurted, then raked a hand through his hair. “But I don’t think you want to touch me, not if it’s just some bloody side effect from the fumes of a potion, not after the day we just had!”
“Don’t be stupid, James,” and it was the sound of her saying his first name that calmed him down, because if that wasn’t a fucking sign...
He went to turn away from her and then his body jack-knifed unwillingly because Lily had taken his cock into her hand and Merlin squeezed it gently.
“Shh,” she said into his ear, and he nearly fell over as she started moving her hand. “I want to touch you because of the day we just had, you stupid boy.”
So James gave in.
Lily’s hand was hesitant at first, but James didn’t mind one bit. He was having trouble focusing his eyes but his sight was filled with the top of Lily’s head and the dark red hair he found there, smelling like citrus and jasmine shampoo. Slowly, he touched Lily’s hip, then the curve of her bum, then, gently, moved his fingers to the heat between her inner thighs. Lily gasped and her head lolled forward onto his chest as he pressed one finger into her. This was something he hadn’t done before, but not for lack of thinking about it, and from the way Lily was breathing, he thought he maybe was getting the hang of it. He pressed another finger up into her, curling at the finger joints, and she moaned.
Something was coiling in the pit of his stomach, rushing him forward, and after a minute or two of unadulterated bliss, hearing Lily groan slightly at his torso, James suddenly gave a shout and pushed Lily’s hand away.
“Sorry!” he apologized, panting, and Lily’s face was off his chest again, a quizzical look turned his way.
“Sorry,” he said again. “I… I felt like I was going to pass out if you touched me any longer.”
“Ah,” said Lily, and he couldn’t tell if she was about to laugh or scold him. He removed his hand from her crotch, then thought better of it.
“Should I — I mean, do you want me to keep going?”
“It’s okay,” said Lily, and then there was a blaze on her face, and she had raised herself up on the balls of her feet and was kissing him like nothing he had ever felt before.
To his credit, James responded relatively quickly, cradling her jaw and kissing her back. He tried to keep a space between their bodies, but then Lily’s arm snaked around his waist and pulled him flush against her, so he knew she could feel that he was still hard, and it was all so confusingly arousing, he didn’t know what got into Lily except that she smelled clean and was doing something with her tongue that he would never forget.
James had been snogged before — despite his all-consuming crush on Lily that lasted since the beginning of his fourth year, he had gone out with other girls before. But nothing like this, where he felt almost euphoric. His head was muddled with flashes of Lily — the way she bit her fingernails when she was nervous, the way she would smile at him across the breakfast table sometimes, her green eyes, her long hair. Her hair, which he now pulled out of its messy bun so it streamed down into his fingers. He had touched her hair all day when it was on his head, and now, because it was attached to her, he tugged on it lightly, drawing a muffled sound from Lily’s throat. He ran his fingers through her hair, then nestled his hands at the nape of her neck, feeling the firm bone of her skull and vertebrae and feeling himself more like jelly than like a man.
“Okay,” Lily said, still pressed against his lips, and she retreated back to equal weight on her heels. James followed her with his head, and she obliged him with another quick kiss before speaking again. “It’s after midnight, and we should probably head back to the dorms before we lose all hope of a restful night’s sleep.”
“Too late for me, thanks to you,” James muttered, and he pressed a kiss on Lily’s temple, her cheekbone, the corner of her mouth that twitched up even now into a half-smile. Then he straightened up to his full height and fixed his glasses, which had gone askew. “But you’re right. We’ll finish this later.” And he winked at Lily, who winked right back at him.
The two of them snuck quiet glances at each other as they cleaned up, Lily conjuring a bathrobe and James drying himself off with a quick charm before making his way to the pile of his clothes carefully folded by Lily.
“When I find out whoever hexed us I’m going to jinx them into the next century.” Lily was bent down at the pool, siphoning off dried potion from the floor.
“I dunno,” said James, pulling his pants on and admiring the view of Lily’s hair falling over her face, her lips still red and swollen from snogging him, lowly James Potter, undeserving of being ravished by wayward witches with dazzling pale freckles and 10 OWLS and the name Lily Evans. “I might just thank them.”