Summary: Lily doesn't understand how people could fall in love at such a young age, until of course it happens to her.
Disclaimer: I don't own it.
Sweaty Palms
a Siriusly Klutzy story.
I realized something really quite strange today. Have you ever noticed that the weirdest symptoms are associated with love? I mean sweaty palms? Upset stomachs? Gross. It doesn't even help make up a nice, first love story. Think about it:
"Oh, honey, what was the first thing you thought of when you realized you loved me?"
"To be honest, I thought 'Why in the name of Merlin are my palms sweaty?'"
See what I mean? It just doesn't work. Why can't you have good symptoms? And why is love associated with illness? I mean, that happens to me when I get the flu, though I guess that's why it's called being love sick. Not when I'm in love. Not that I've ever been in love with anyone before. Sure, I've loved people, like my family and friends but I've never actually seen a guy and thought, "Huh... I'm in love with that boy."
It hasn't happened yet. And I'm seventeen! Seventeen years is long enough, don't you think? I should have been in love eighty times by now! But I guess then it wouldn't even be true love. It'd be lust to be honest with you. Most girls here- well the younger ones anyway- claim that they have been in love before. And like I've said to Alice, they're thirteen! You don't fall in love at thirteen. Trust me. I'm seventeen and much wiser. I know these things.
Alice agrees with me about the whole not being able to be in love at such a young age. But she's in love with Frank. Or, at least, that's what she tells me. But can you really be in love at seventeen? True, unrequited, I'll be with you until the end of time love? And is seventeen that much different than thirteen? It's only four years.
And boys four years ago were quite strange. Actually, boys are always strange, but they were much less mature back then anyway. Not that they're mature now. But this immaturity, I'm sorry to say, is actually somewhat attractive. Really, who wants to have a completely mature boyfriend, lover, fiancé, and all those things? How boring. But now they're not concerned with putting frogs on your arm and pulling your pigtails- both of which Sirius Black did to me constantly because he knew James Potter wouldn't do it.
See what I mean? But now they're more... worldly. They're still immature, yes, but neither Sirius nor James has put frogs on my arms since third year, though that could be because I stupefied them both.
So there I was, trying to figure it out while Alice was humming to herself as she finished her Astronomy homework. Well, maybe she wasn't finishing her homework. She was probably doodling in the margins or something. Alice liked to procrastinate.
But it was all going through my mind. I'm sure some thirteen year olds have been in true love before. I mean, wasn't Juliet thirteen? And you can't get much more famous in the love department than Romeo and Juliet. And... wait a second. Wasn't Romeo sixteen or seventeen? Somewhere along that age? So, basing my entire thought train on Romeo and Juliet, wasn't it completely possible to be in love at thirteen and seventeen?
But then again, that was also a play. Made up. Based on nothing as far as I know. But the love was real, right? You can't just make that kind of stuff up... Or could you? Shakespeare was no fool. He knew what he was talking about. So if he said that Romeo and Juliet were young and in love, who should doubt him?
"So it is possible?" I asked out loud, distracting Alice from her doodling.
"What's possible?" she asked as she tried to figure out if I'd said anything before that, which of course I didn't, but my inner monologue escaped.
"To be in love?" I asked, not bothering to go back to my inner monologue. Too many of those make me a bit crazy sometimes and then I need lots of chocolate and a shopping trip to bring me back to reality.
Alice gave me a duh look and grinned. "I like to think so," she said sappily, glancing across the room to where Frank was losing miserably to Benjy Fenwick at Exploding Snap.
"Even at thirteen?" I asked, looking around the Common Room. There was a couple, no older than fourteen I'd say, sitting on the sofa, holding hands and talking with their friends. Of course, they were about a cauldron's width apart, but the hand holding was still there. Well, I should say the girl was talking with their friends. The boy was looking at her, completely mesmerized.
"It's not impossible," she answered. "You've been doing your inner monologue thing again, haven't you?" She was grinning and sitting up much straighter now. "Good, I've been needing a new pair of shoes."
I grinned and nodded. Alice and her shoes, though I could use a new pair, too.
Once more I looked at the young couple, the boy still staring and the girl chatting away, not even realizing how adored she was. If that wasn't love, it was pretty damn close. Unless of course he was acting, or she had something really strange on her face and he couldn't look away.
I drifted to look a couple chairs away from them. And do you know what I saw there? A couple, one I recognized as a fourth year, the other a fifth, snogging like if they stopped the room would explode.
"Is that love? Or lust?" I asked Alice, pointing subtly over to the rampaging couple.
"Definitely lust," Alice answered with a nod.
"How can you tell?" I asked curiously. And since when did Alice get this eye for deciphering love and lust?
"Well... I saw them when they first met," Alice answered, tipping her head to the side. She shook it and continued. "Massive public display of affection much? Anyway, yeah. I saw them when their friends introduced them."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah, it was about an hour ago. So definitely lust."
I nodded. "Wow. They're... energetic aren't they?"
She laughed. "Pent up tension perhaps?"
The whole searching the Common Room to help me answer the question didn't help at all. All over the place there were examples of love, lust, friendship, hate. Nothing to help me figure out if I should have fell in love with someone by now, if it's normal that I haven't. Maybe I'm overly sensitive. Or just totally and completely over thinking it, which was most likely the case.
But all of these people had something. And what did I have? Nothing. Granted, they had to suffer through sweaty palms, upset stomachs, and over active hearts, but was that better compared to nothing at all? Except for the rare flu symptoms which could easily be cured in one trip to the Hospital Wing?
Those were all things I wondered. Before.
Does it randomly show up when you're least expecting it? That one I could answer truthfully because I'd experienced it a mere minutes later.
Like I said, it was Alice and I in the Common Room filled with emotions, potential heart breaks, and future marriages. I went back to contemplating all of that, not sure if Romeo and Juliet could relate. They were star crossed lovers, met because fate had told them to. Does that happen to every one?
The answer is simple. It does.
Of course, it's not always at first sight. Believe me. I'm sure it happens sometimes. Perhaps if that one couple that Alice deemed full of lust really was really in love; it was probably at first sight since they were going at it an hour after they met. But not all the time. However, all it could take is just a simple glance. A glance to look at the clock and your eyes graze over him and you realize you can't live without this boy. The first time you ever really, truly think to yourself, "Huh... I'm in love with that boy." The first time your breath catches in your throat and you think everyone in the room realizes that you just realized yourself that you were in love, but they, of course, knew it beforehand.
Of course, people already know you're in love, but they don't realize that you realized it once you do. They go about their daily business while you sit there, looking around frantically and stopping on the one who just made your heart speed up.
Which is what happened to me. I was staring, and he looked over at me and grinned- a grin that made my heart melt. I turned my head to the side and gave him a peculiar look before standing, completely unaware of what I was doing.
"Uh, Lily?" Alice asked confused as much as I was by my sudden action.
I waved a hand in her direction, signifying for her to get back to work. Of course, she didn't, but I didn't realize it at the time. And frankly, I didn't really care.
I marched right over to him and looked into his glasses-framed eyes and said, "Erm, James... I think I love you."
By that point, my heart was beating faster than I thought possible without slamming through my chest and covering James in Lily guts. Wouldn't that be a great way to end the tale? Finally realizing you love someone, telling them, and then exploding?
Needless to say, his eyebrows, along with a vast majority of the people around him, shot into his hair. Sirius's wand, which he was using to whisk his Charms book across the room, fell to the floor with a clatter, closely followed by the thud that the book made somewhere away. Remus started coughing, trying to free his windpipe of the chocolate frog he inhaled, and Peter took a loud intake of breath.
"Are you... all right?" he asked, probably surprised seeing as the last thing I said to him was along the lines of wondering how Dumbledore could ever make him Head Boy.
"No," I said with a small smile. "I'm not. My hands are sweaty and my stomach hurts and my heart feels like it's going to shoot out, but it's okay."
"I think she needs the hospital wing," Sirius muttered, earning him an elbow to the stomach, courtesy of Remus, who I must remember to thank later.
"You- you're serious?" he asked, shocked eyebrows still hidden by his hair.
"More serious than I was for OWLs," I answered happily. James would know how serious I was. He disrupted my studying for two minutes and I cursed him. He had a plethora of facial hair for a week because Madam Pomfrey couldn't figure out which spell I'd used.
His eyebrows relaxed, thankfully (I was starting to think they took residence up there) and a monstrous grin spread across his face. He didn't jump for joy like immature James would have three years ago, he didn't snog me senseless, he stood up and looked at me, right into my eyes and said, "It took you long enough."
I grinned as he enveloped me in a hug. A giant, protective, bear like without the wanting-to-kill part hug. After about a minute, he let go, which was good because he was squeezing my lungs, not that I minded of course. It was just another thing to add to the list of things love does to you.
A/n: Wow, that was really random wasn't it? I'm not normally one to rant about love in a fanfic. But I'm blaming the fact that I was ranting earlier about how love was annoying because it makes your palms sweaty. A very OOC Sirius Klutzy fic. If it doesn't make sense, it's because I'm not good at this. I'm more of a humor writer, obviously, but this was still fun. And I've been dying to write one like this for a while now and it's out of my system! Yay!!
Anywayyy I hope you liked it! Oh, Romeo and Juliet are the ages I put, right? That's what sparknotes told me. I originally though Juliet was 12 and Romeo was 17 but that could have just been me not paying attention in English when we read it. But now I want to go watch the movie, with Leonardo DiCaprio of course.
Much love and cupcakes!
Siriusly Klutzy