thirty2flavors (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thirty2flavors) wrote2007-03-18 05:25 pm
thirty2flavors) wrote2007-03-18 05:25 pm
Entry tags:
big bang, little girl, run away with me
So yes. Welcome to the post of DELETED STUFF. Hurrah!
Firstly, a scene from Silly Love Songs that is so ancient and so deleted that I'd forgotten I'd ever written. Why was it deleted? Well, for one thing, when you read it, it should speak for itself (see: terrible style and content). I can't remember exactly where it was situated, but evidently somewhere after James and Anna start going out.
Anyway, it gives you a little insight into James' motivation -- but not really useful information, because the story's now gone in an entirely different direction and his motivations are not the same anymore. Or something. I don't know, but it's pretty hilarious. Check out how lame he is in the end, there.
“James Potter!”
It was the first time in seven years that Lily Evans had ever been to the boys’ dormitories, largely because she’d never had any desire to spend more time with any of the four who inhabited it. That was a large part of why it was so shocking to see her swing the door open and storm in, looking rather livid. All four of them were there, by that time, and every one of them looked up from whatever it was they were huddled over. For a second, the fact that she’d actually used the name James was startling. A second after that passed, though – it was used, not in a friendly manner, but more in the way most mothers tended to use full names when particularly angry. James felt quite sure that if she’d known his middle name, she’d have used it.
“Evans?” was the initial response as he blinked at the girl.
“You!” the girl started, eyes narrowing. She swept over to him, quite probably about to launch into a huge spiel, before noticing the other three males were still present and sending them pointed stares. “Do you mind?”
It did not seem very wise to argue with the girl. Peter and Remus, at least, certainly didn’t seem to think it was worth it, and slowly moved toward the door. On the contrary, Sirius was more stubborn. He stood where he’d been originally and folded his arms over his chest.
“Do you mind?” he returned, voice rather mocking. “This is our dorm, in case you haven’t noticed.”
James, to some extent, was bracing himself. Raising a hand to his temple he sank down to the end of the closest bed. “Sirius, maybe you should just go.”
That in itself did not go over particularly well. “James-“
“Out!” Lily shrieked again, and Sirius sighed, defeated. With a peculiar sort of stare in James’ direction, he followed Remus and Peter out of the room.
James sighed, gaze on the closed door, and gave his head a little shake. He seemed to be quite oblivious to the seething girl before him, and he sent her a calm, although somewhat tired, look. “Evans,” he began.
“You idiot!” Lily shrieked again, and James raised a finger to rub the inside of his ear for a moment. “You broke up with her?”
He stared at her plainly from his position on the bed, blinking. “I thought that was what you wanted,” he pointed out with a bit of a sneer.
“No,” Lily said defiantly, arms folding over her chest again, “I wanted her to break up with you.”
James snorted and rolled his eyes.
“Besides that!” Lily continued, “Why in the hell would you break up with her just because you thought I wanted you to?”
Having been staring at nothing in particular, avoiding her gaze, James’ eyes snapped to hers and he arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t.”
Lily looked mildly surprised and her glare lessened. “Then why did you?” It was quieter than before, not quite as harsh.
He kept her gaze, watching her silently for a second. Lily wished she had the first idea how to read the boy. His friends she knew could do it easily, but she honestly had no idea what was going through his head at any given time. It was one of the things that drove her insane. People were like loose cannons if you had no idea what was going through their head.
That was part of the reason she was surprised when his eyes narrowed into a glare and he stood up sharply, suddenly, it seemed, angry. “Because you were right, Evans, just like you always are.” His tone was low and dark, and it might have been threatening, were Lily not scared of the boy in the slightest. She wasn’t sure why he didn’t scare her, he just never had.
“…what?”
“You were right!” he repeated, throwing his hands into the air for added affect. The tone was gone; his voice was loud now. “You were right just like you always are. I thought about it after you left, you know. I thought about the possibility that you actually knew what you were talking about, thought about the possibility that maybe I was desperate enough to trick myself into believing I was over you, and you know what? You were right again!”
Lily blinked again, anger fading in wake of the surprise. She hadn’t expected James to start yelling. He was doing that a lot, now, apparently. “There’s nothing for you to get over, Potter,” she said quietly, eyes still on his. “There’s nothing between us for you to have to get over. The only reason you want to go out with me is because I’m a challenge, I’m the one who turns you down.”
James smirked. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too, Evans,” he remarked bitterly. He broke their gaze and swept to the other side of the room, staring out the narrow window. Lily watched him curiously for a second, still standing where she had been before.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?” he snapped over his shoulder, sending her a small glare before turning to the window again. “That’s what I figured it was, Evans. For a while, at least. You’re right. I like challenges. They make things interesting. At first I figured you’d just be some trophy to add to a collection, and that once I actually went out with you I’d be cured of this ridiculous obsession. But no, you’re stubborn, so that wasn’t working. Getting a date with you looked like it’d be a lot harder than getting over you.
So I got a date with someone else. I figured that having someone else to fawn over would get rid of you. It worked for a bit, a little while, until I realized that it just wouldn’t work. The relationships never lasted much longer than a week, because usually that was just about how long it took me to realize that they weren’t right. And you know why they weren’t right, Evans?”
Lily had the distinct impression she didn’t want to know, but she shook her head mutely at him when he glanced at her anyway.
“Because they weren’t you.”
She wasn’t quite sure why it surprised her. She knew James held her in some ridiculously high regard, for whatever reason. Still – and perhaps it was the fact that he was actually talking about it – she was surprised. She thought it was odd of him to compare every other girl to her. Why? She certainly wasn’t perfect, certainly wasn’t worthy of the sort of worship that seemed to entail.
“Every time,” he continued, gazing once more out the window, “Every time I thought it would be different. I figured, hey, new girl, maybe this time I’d actually be able to fall in love with her. Things started off well, because for some reason the girls always seemed pretty taken with me, and for that week or two you’d be out of my mind. For a week or so, Evans, I wouldn’t be thinking of you all the time.
And then that week or so would pass, and I’d start to realize that, nice although the girls were, I didn’t love them. I couldn’t love them – so I ended it before it got too out of hand. Before I lead them on too much. Somehow, the best I ever got was a week, and after that I’d be thinking about you more often than I’d be thinking about them.”
She stared at the floor for a second, trying to collect her thoughts. There’d been plenty of girls that James had gone out with, and certainly, for the first week, the couple seemed plausible. The relationships always ended, though, and rather quickly. By seventh year, James had something of a reputation, which only furthered Lily’s hesitance to accept his offers. She didn’t particularly want to be in a relationship at all, so why go with someone who had trouble sticking to one girl for over a week? She’d always sort of figured James just wasn’t the type for commitment. Of course he wasn’t. James was a shallow, womanizing charmer, and somehow she seemed to be the only one inoculated against the infection.
“You got rid of something that could have been real for something that wasn’t,” she said after a moment, lifting her gaze from the ground.
“Couldn’t have been real, Lily,” he said in response, fingers drumming against the glass. Her eyebrows shot up at the use of her first name. “Not so long as I was thinking about you all the time.”
She knew a lot of James’ ex’s seemed to hold her responsible for the breakup, but she’d never really seen why. It wasn’t as if she’d ever lead him on. It wasn’t as though, during the time when he had a girlfriend, she acted any nicer to him than she had before, giving him reason to believe he had a chance. She’d stayed consistently short with him, and so each time they blamed her for it, she’d thought they were merely trying to find someone to fault apart from themselves or James.
She supposed now that in a way they were right.
“What about Anna?” she asked after a moment, focusing her attention back on him again. “Were you just using her in an attempt to get over me?”
He turned around, leaning his back against the window. His expression was a peculiar one. It was …apologetic? Was that it? “I thought I wasn’t,” he said softly, “I thought it was different … then I talked to you.” He trailed off and shrugged. “There was no point in dragging it out.”
And, simply because we're on the topic of deleted scenes, I initially tried taking the end of Truce somewhere else, but it didn't really work out, and I had to go back and play around with it. I still like bits of this version, but I sort of wrote myself into a corner, and when I went back and tried it with angry!Lily, it seemed to work out much nicer. =)
He saw her shoulders tensed and could easily imagine her deer-in-the-headlights look. She held her silence for a moment, before she finally offered a tight-sounding “piss off, Black.”
This, Sirius thought, was the sort of thing they ought to teach you in Care of Magical Creatures. It was far more likely than an encounter with a Hippogriff, and probably more dangerous.
“Well, it’s tempting, to be honest,” he said, moving slowly around the bench and taking a seat next to her, “but I’m afraid I’d feel like a bit of a jerk.”
Lily snorted, looking in the other direction. “Oh, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
Deciding it was probably the safest not to comment, Sirius reached into his pocket for the tissues he’d thought to conjure on his way. More specifically, they were tissues that Remus had told him to conjure, but as he’d done the actual act of conjuring himself, he supposed he deserved some credit.
“You’ve got – er – black leaking from your eye,” he said, observing her smudged makeup and offering a tissue.
She glared at it, but snatched it from him and dabbed at her eyes anyway. “Eyeliner,” she explained, shrugging. “Waterproof my arse.” After wiping the makeup from either eye, she balled the tissue in her fist and glared straight ahead at the trees.
“I was trying to be nice, you know,” she said.
Feeling once again as though he’d clubbed a baby seal, Sirius nodded. “I know.” He heaved an awkward sigh. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Lily nodded mutely, staring at the tissue in her hands.
Damn, he thought. She’s going to make me say it.
In many was, he thought, it was like asking the Pope to renounce Jesus. While he had nothing against apologies in general, apologies to Lily Evans were something of sacrilege.
He sighed and decided to do away with dignity. “I’m sorry, Evans.”
To his surprise – they were crazy, crazy creatures, women – Lily smiled in a peculiarly sad way, playing with the tissue in her hands. “Did James tell you to apologize?”
Had James told him to apologize? Did Lily honestly think he was so low on the evolutionary chain that he could not make a decision for himself unless James approved it? Did she think so little of him that she thought James was responsible for any marginally moral act he committed?
“What?” he asked incredulously. “No – are you kidding? Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but my nose is still very much intact, which strongly suggests that James is entirely unaware of the whole ordeal.”
Wasn't that fascinating.
<3
Kali
Firstly, a scene from Silly Love Songs that is so ancient and so deleted that I'd forgotten I'd ever written. Why was it deleted? Well, for one thing, when you read it, it should speak for itself (see: terrible style and content). I can't remember exactly where it was situated, but evidently somewhere after James and Anna start going out.
Anyway, it gives you a little insight into James' motivation -- but not really useful information, because the story's now gone in an entirely different direction and his motivations are not the same anymore. Or something. I don't know, but it's pretty hilarious. Check out how lame he is in the end, there.
“James Potter!”
It was the first time in seven years that Lily Evans had ever been to the boys’ dormitories, largely because she’d never had any desire to spend more time with any of the four who inhabited it. That was a large part of why it was so shocking to see her swing the door open and storm in, looking rather livid. All four of them were there, by that time, and every one of them looked up from whatever it was they were huddled over. For a second, the fact that she’d actually used the name James was startling. A second after that passed, though – it was used, not in a friendly manner, but more in the way most mothers tended to use full names when particularly angry. James felt quite sure that if she’d known his middle name, she’d have used it.
“Evans?” was the initial response as he blinked at the girl.
“You!” the girl started, eyes narrowing. She swept over to him, quite probably about to launch into a huge spiel, before noticing the other three males were still present and sending them pointed stares. “Do you mind?”
It did not seem very wise to argue with the girl. Peter and Remus, at least, certainly didn’t seem to think it was worth it, and slowly moved toward the door. On the contrary, Sirius was more stubborn. He stood where he’d been originally and folded his arms over his chest.
“Do you mind?” he returned, voice rather mocking. “This is our dorm, in case you haven’t noticed.”
James, to some extent, was bracing himself. Raising a hand to his temple he sank down to the end of the closest bed. “Sirius, maybe you should just go.”
That in itself did not go over particularly well. “James-“
“Out!” Lily shrieked again, and Sirius sighed, defeated. With a peculiar sort of stare in James’ direction, he followed Remus and Peter out of the room.
James sighed, gaze on the closed door, and gave his head a little shake. He seemed to be quite oblivious to the seething girl before him, and he sent her a calm, although somewhat tired, look. “Evans,” he began.
“You idiot!” Lily shrieked again, and James raised a finger to rub the inside of his ear for a moment. “You broke up with her?”
He stared at her plainly from his position on the bed, blinking. “I thought that was what you wanted,” he pointed out with a bit of a sneer.
“No,” Lily said defiantly, arms folding over her chest again, “I wanted her to break up with you.”
James snorted and rolled his eyes.
“Besides that!” Lily continued, “Why in the hell would you break up with her just because you thought I wanted you to?”
Having been staring at nothing in particular, avoiding her gaze, James’ eyes snapped to hers and he arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t.”
Lily looked mildly surprised and her glare lessened. “Then why did you?” It was quieter than before, not quite as harsh.
He kept her gaze, watching her silently for a second. Lily wished she had the first idea how to read the boy. His friends she knew could do it easily, but she honestly had no idea what was going through his head at any given time. It was one of the things that drove her insane. People were like loose cannons if you had no idea what was going through their head.
That was part of the reason she was surprised when his eyes narrowed into a glare and he stood up sharply, suddenly, it seemed, angry. “Because you were right, Evans, just like you always are.” His tone was low and dark, and it might have been threatening, were Lily not scared of the boy in the slightest. She wasn’t sure why he didn’t scare her, he just never had.
“…what?”
“You were right!” he repeated, throwing his hands into the air for added affect. The tone was gone; his voice was loud now. “You were right just like you always are. I thought about it after you left, you know. I thought about the possibility that you actually knew what you were talking about, thought about the possibility that maybe I was desperate enough to trick myself into believing I was over you, and you know what? You were right again!”
Lily blinked again, anger fading in wake of the surprise. She hadn’t expected James to start yelling. He was doing that a lot, now, apparently. “There’s nothing for you to get over, Potter,” she said quietly, eyes still on his. “There’s nothing between us for you to have to get over. The only reason you want to go out with me is because I’m a challenge, I’m the one who turns you down.”
James smirked. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too, Evans,” he remarked bitterly. He broke their gaze and swept to the other side of the room, staring out the narrow window. Lily watched him curiously for a second, still standing where she had been before.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?” he snapped over his shoulder, sending her a small glare before turning to the window again. “That’s what I figured it was, Evans. For a while, at least. You’re right. I like challenges. They make things interesting. At first I figured you’d just be some trophy to add to a collection, and that once I actually went out with you I’d be cured of this ridiculous obsession. But no, you’re stubborn, so that wasn’t working. Getting a date with you looked like it’d be a lot harder than getting over you.
So I got a date with someone else. I figured that having someone else to fawn over would get rid of you. It worked for a bit, a little while, until I realized that it just wouldn’t work. The relationships never lasted much longer than a week, because usually that was just about how long it took me to realize that they weren’t right. And you know why they weren’t right, Evans?”
Lily had the distinct impression she didn’t want to know, but she shook her head mutely at him when he glanced at her anyway.
“Because they weren’t you.”
She wasn’t quite sure why it surprised her. She knew James held her in some ridiculously high regard, for whatever reason. Still – and perhaps it was the fact that he was actually talking about it – she was surprised. She thought it was odd of him to compare every other girl to her. Why? She certainly wasn’t perfect, certainly wasn’t worthy of the sort of worship that seemed to entail.
“Every time,” he continued, gazing once more out the window, “Every time I thought it would be different. I figured, hey, new girl, maybe this time I’d actually be able to fall in love with her. Things started off well, because for some reason the girls always seemed pretty taken with me, and for that week or two you’d be out of my mind. For a week or so, Evans, I wouldn’t be thinking of you all the time.
And then that week or so would pass, and I’d start to realize that, nice although the girls were, I didn’t love them. I couldn’t love them – so I ended it before it got too out of hand. Before I lead them on too much. Somehow, the best I ever got was a week, and after that I’d be thinking about you more often than I’d be thinking about them.”
She stared at the floor for a second, trying to collect her thoughts. There’d been plenty of girls that James had gone out with, and certainly, for the first week, the couple seemed plausible. The relationships always ended, though, and rather quickly. By seventh year, James had something of a reputation, which only furthered Lily’s hesitance to accept his offers. She didn’t particularly want to be in a relationship at all, so why go with someone who had trouble sticking to one girl for over a week? She’d always sort of figured James just wasn’t the type for commitment. Of course he wasn’t. James was a shallow, womanizing charmer, and somehow she seemed to be the only one inoculated against the infection.
“You got rid of something that could have been real for something that wasn’t,” she said after a moment, lifting her gaze from the ground.
“Couldn’t have been real, Lily,” he said in response, fingers drumming against the glass. Her eyebrows shot up at the use of her first name. “Not so long as I was thinking about you all the time.”
She knew a lot of James’ ex’s seemed to hold her responsible for the breakup, but she’d never really seen why. It wasn’t as if she’d ever lead him on. It wasn’t as though, during the time when he had a girlfriend, she acted any nicer to him than she had before, giving him reason to believe he had a chance. She’d stayed consistently short with him, and so each time they blamed her for it, she’d thought they were merely trying to find someone to fault apart from themselves or James.
She supposed now that in a way they were right.
“What about Anna?” she asked after a moment, focusing her attention back on him again. “Were you just using her in an attempt to get over me?”
He turned around, leaning his back against the window. His expression was a peculiar one. It was …apologetic? Was that it? “I thought I wasn’t,” he said softly, “I thought it was different … then I talked to you.” He trailed off and shrugged. “There was no point in dragging it out.”
And, simply because we're on the topic of deleted scenes, I initially tried taking the end of Truce somewhere else, but it didn't really work out, and I had to go back and play around with it. I still like bits of this version, but I sort of wrote myself into a corner, and when I went back and tried it with angry!Lily, it seemed to work out much nicer. =)
He saw her shoulders tensed and could easily imagine her deer-in-the-headlights look. She held her silence for a moment, before she finally offered a tight-sounding “piss off, Black.”
This, Sirius thought, was the sort of thing they ought to teach you in Care of Magical Creatures. It was far more likely than an encounter with a Hippogriff, and probably more dangerous.
“Well, it’s tempting, to be honest,” he said, moving slowly around the bench and taking a seat next to her, “but I’m afraid I’d feel like a bit of a jerk.”
Lily snorted, looking in the other direction. “Oh, we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
Deciding it was probably the safest not to comment, Sirius reached into his pocket for the tissues he’d thought to conjure on his way. More specifically, they were tissues that Remus had told him to conjure, but as he’d done the actual act of conjuring himself, he supposed he deserved some credit.
“You’ve got – er – black leaking from your eye,” he said, observing her smudged makeup and offering a tissue.
She glared at it, but snatched it from him and dabbed at her eyes anyway. “Eyeliner,” she explained, shrugging. “Waterproof my arse.” After wiping the makeup from either eye, she balled the tissue in her fist and glared straight ahead at the trees.
“I was trying to be nice, you know,” she said.
Feeling once again as though he’d clubbed a baby seal, Sirius nodded. “I know.” He heaved an awkward sigh. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Lily nodded mutely, staring at the tissue in her hands.
Damn, he thought. She’s going to make me say it.
In many was, he thought, it was like asking the Pope to renounce Jesus. While he had nothing against apologies in general, apologies to Lily Evans were something of sacrilege.
He sighed and decided to do away with dignity. “I’m sorry, Evans.”
To his surprise – they were crazy, crazy creatures, women – Lily smiled in a peculiarly sad way, playing with the tissue in her hands. “Did James tell you to apologize?”
Had James told him to apologize? Did Lily honestly think he was so low on the evolutionary chain that he could not make a decision for himself unless James approved it? Did she think so little of him that she thought James was responsible for any marginally moral act he committed?
“What?” he asked incredulously. “No – are you kidding? Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but my nose is still very much intact, which strongly suggests that James is entirely unaware of the whole ordeal.”
Wasn't that fascinating.
<3
Kali
no subject
no subject
And as for the sort of alternate ending, I think it's more humorous than the first and I rather like it! Your work is always worth the read!
no subject
(BTW, I'm notsosoft on ur.org. I followed you over here from there.)
no subject
I miss Silly Love Songs too, which probably sounds retarded because I am the author, but um, what can you do. I don't want to abandon it completely, I really don't; I just end up writing myself into corners unintentionally and taking six months to figure out how to write my way back out again. That is, essentially, where we're at right now -- I've got a couple scenes floating around to write, it's just a mattter of sitting down and actually writing them, and putting them in a chronological order.
Anyway, your comment made me smile, and I like your work, and when I've got more time (because I definitely need to go to bed now, haha, whoops) I'm going to go read Don't Fear the Reaper. Which is a great song.
...ANYWAY. I'm also going to friend you. =)
<3
Kali
no subject
And I totally understand about writing yourself into corners. I can never seem to write a multi-chapter fic because I always start off with a really awesome (I think, at least) first chapter and then have no idea where to take it. One-shots are the only way to go for me.
Am friending you back. :)