The Day Chivalry Curled Up and Died

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The Day Chivalry Curled Up and Died

Chapter 1: A Man of His Word

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"Sorry I'm late."

James Potter looked a lot of things as he breezed into the small classroom with his Quidditch robes ten itches deep in mud; cocky, reckless... disarmingly attractive but he did not look sorry. Bringing in with him that new morning smell; cut grass, the warm day to come and something uniquely him, she could appreciate why people found that self-assured grace attractive.

Cue the apocalypse. She'd finally let herself think it: James Potter was attractive.

Especially mid-flight, poised sinuously on his broom, face wracked with concentration and muscles rippling with exertion... He would be damn near perfect in every conceivable way, if he didn't redefine the words 'insufferable fuckwit' every time he opened his mouth.

He swiftly removed the outer layer of his clothes and she had to ball fistfuls of her robe under the table to stop her brain pressing the fast forward button and picturing him in decidedly less.

She desperately wanted to be swimming in the sheets of her canopy bed rather than swimming in lusty thoughts of a scantily clad Potter as she sat next to the reality, a thoroughly clothed version, through a Heads meeting at the ungodly hour of 7.30 on a Saturday morning.

Attempting cold and detached, she inwardly tried to suppress that warm feeling low in her belly.

"Professor McGonagall can't make it. So for my sanity, let's make this quick and painless."

Her clipped business-like tone was accompanied with downcast eyes that never left the pieces of parchment on the table.

"Hard and fast, just the way you like it, Evans." He leered at her, straddling the chair next to her and scooting closer to her person.

"I am fairly certain you wouldn't have the faintest idea how I'd 'like it,' Potter." She punctuated the words bitingly and flung a stack of papers down on the table in front of him.

"Let's do these Prefects' Rosters with as little interaction as possible," she added decidedly, maintaining distant frigidity. Her chair scraped noisily on the parquetry as she tried to re-establish some space between them.

"Get in... and get out. Got it," he replied, nodding knowingly, his voice once again laced with unmistakable innuendo.

Scowling, she buried her nose into the pieces of parchment and scribbled furiously. If enduring and maintaining civility with one James Potter meant that she had to deal with his woeful attempts to bed her and generally make her uncomfortable then she would stab him in the eye with her quill by meeting's end.

But, she reasoned, cold-blooded murder and death-by-writing utensil wouldn't really do much for her job prospects at the end of the year, especially if her victim of choice was the Hogwart's fucking golden boy. So she sat deathly quiet, squirming inside, thinking about ways to disembowel him ("and," the little voice said in the back of her head, "then kissing it better.") The silence was deafening. And she kept throwing him these scathing looks, as if trying to flirt with her was a crime against humanity.

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"Evans, why are we doing this the long way? " he admonished teasingly. "You're Flitwick's bitch, can't you just charm these lists into existence?"

Her pursed-lipped silence only spurred him on.

"Anyone would think that you were trying to get me alone to have your wicked way with me."

She tried to bite her tongue, she really did. But when he looked at her that way, somewhere between curiosity and puzzling familiarity, she surged with some indescribably urge to take him down a few notches.

"That's exactly right, Potter. I mean, I don't want anyone around when I'm dumping your body."

He laughed off the hidden sting of her words and patted her hand good-naturedly.

"Are you coming to the game tomorrow?" he asked, as if the question was a logical progression from swapping insult for innuendo.

"Anything that involves the possibility of you falling off your broom to meet an untimely and horrific end, count me in on," she retorted with infuriating disinterest.

Sometimes he couldn't take the hint. Sometimes she didn't want him to.

"I didn't know you cared. But you needn't worry about me. I'm a big boy... a very big boy," he added saucily and watched her face contort into an expression of disgust. She grumbled incoherently and her eyes did a slow rotation of their sockets.

Once again, silence overwhelmed them to the faint sound of scratching quills against course paper.

He drew up the next list without any further attempts to test her patience. In truth, he was a little distracted. Lily and Quidditch, he breathed in the prospect, in all its delicious implications and blessed his vivid imagination.

Such a pretty picture he painted, of her, of them. They were soaring through clouds, the wind causing her hair to float around her as if she was underwater. She was pressed into him, flush against his front, his arms slipped around her waist to grasp her small hands around the handle of the broomstick, her head cradled in the crook of his neck and her breath tickling him when she laughed.

"I've never seen you fly." His voice, almost ragged, broke over the silence. The smile still lingered at the corners of his mouth, his wayward thoughts still playing out inside his head.

"There's a reason. I've never flown," she retorted with irritation, looking pointedly at his discarded list and quill.

"You've never flown before? Ever?" He found it near impossible to keep the incredulity from his voice. Absently, he picked up the quill and spun it in his fingers.

"Nope." She didn't look up this time, her eyes scanning a section of parchment McGonagall had left as if her life depended on its contents.

"How have you made it seven years at Hogwarts without stepping on a broom?" he asked, smiling through his surprise.

"This concept will be foreign to you, Potter, but after I refused a couple of times, people started to take the hint." Her words dripped with sarcasm but her gaze remained fixed on the desk in front of her, making a show of organising the sheets of parchment into even piles.

This hostile and aloof demeanor seemed to fall on deaf ears.

"You'll have to let me take you out flying sometime then." He shot her an uncertain look, eyebrows raised in question, barely concealing his eagerness.

His hesitation threw her. And that smile was oddly unsettling.

"Why?" She looked at him quizzically, trying to discern his motive.

He didn't seem to catch her annoyance because his next words, in such low tones, were nearly enough to undo her.

"Because I think you'd enjoy it. The wind whipping through your hair, your body pumping with adrenaline" His gaze was penetrating but he seemed very far away. His voice dipped lower, "And you can see for miles and miles... chasing the horizon on the wings of outstretched arms..." He trailed off and had the sense to look mildly embarrassed.

It was hard not to be taken in by his words.

"I... I'm not really one for heights," she stammered dimly, inwardly berating herself for seeming affected.

"You can hold on tight to me then," he suggested, grinning roguishly, blinking back images of his daydream.

"I think I'll pass," she managed somewhat dryly.

"Forget the flying part then. You can just hold onto me tightly with your feet on the ground." He flashed her a perfect row of white teeth but his words rang almost tender.

"Does strangling come into that equation at all?" she retorted, regaining some of her previous archness.

"I knew you couldn't wait to get your hands on me, Evans."

"What will it take to get you to shut up?" she seethed.

"You can gag me while we paw at each other in the supplies closet?" He grinned and gestured to the cupboard door that was slightly ajar behind them.

"That'd be a cold day in hell, Potter,"

"I'm sure we'd find ways to keep warm," he countered with another leering grin.

She groaned in frustration but that only seemed to provoke him further.

"Too much too fast? But then, I thought you liked it fast, Evans?"

Her sharpened quill gleamed encouragingly up at her and she teetered on the brink of running with the aforementioned death-by-writing-utensil plan.

"Seriously, what will get you to leave me alone?"

His heart beat erratically against his ribcage at her cheeks burning prettily, her eyes blazing and her full cherry lips pursed together tightly.

"--A kiss... On the mouth," he supplied quickly, his smile wide and dangerous.

She scoffed and sent him a perfunctory chance-in-hell look.

He tried to organise his thoughts and scrambled to form them into a coherent sentence.

"And... I'll leave you alone...Won't speak a word to you outside formal Head duties and schoolwork for"-- and here he swallowed thickly -"the rest of the year."

His eyes were trained on the soft slope of her bottom lip and he willed himself to look up to meet her expression of doubtful disdain.

"If you th---" But something stopped her, causing her to trail off inelegantly mid-sentence. She was caught between the stupid pathetic niggling attraction that would not leave her and the thought of a virtually Potter-less existence. One without his sexually laced barbs, his relentless flirting, his teasing and her humiliating and unauthorised inclusion in those stupid pranks him and his friends pulled.

An existence which would signal an end to her perpetual boyfriend drought because of that big fat invisible stamp on her forehead that said she was spoken for, that Potter had some sort of claim on her.

An existence, which would mean a professional and efficient working relationship between the Head boy and Head girl, free of any of Potter's Potter-y Potter-esque Potter-isms...

He was a jackass, yes, but he was notorious for keeping his end of a bargain. It was the Gryffindor pumping in his veins, running through his big beating excuse for a heart that saw him always true to his word.

"On the hand?" she offered hopefully, somewhat lamely.

"No offence, Evans, but for 200 or so days free of my attentions, I'd be looking for a different kind of 'hand' action."

She gritted her teeth and stared at him fiercely.

"On the feet?" she suggested tartly, sounding utterly ridiculous and smiling in spite of herself.

"Wasn't there a tinea outbreak that came from the Gryffindor girl's shower block?" he questioned playfully and she rolled her eyes lightly. Suddenly, she realized their proximity. Somehow, he'd managed during the course of their conversation to reclaim any space between them.

"On the cheek?" she offered weakly, chewing nervously at her bottom lip at the prospect. The thought of his lips anywhere near hers produced somersaults in her stomach. Where had her resolve gone? Why were her knuckles white with panic?

There was a long pause and her breath hitched at the palpable shift in mood, tiny hairs on the back of her neck standing on end from the shiver than ran through her.

The room seemed to be closing in as he moved towards her slowly. Her eyes flitted between his lips and his dark eyes. Her own lips parted softly in anticipation.

Inches from her ear, he whispered something, his voice like velvet.

"Cheek it is, but I'm warning you, I have terrible aim," his words resonated with a teasing lilt but he looked at her hungrily.

"The Quidditch captain has... terrible aim?" She was trying for 'high and mighty' but the string of words ran together in a lustful sigh.

She'd been denying her attraction for months, hiding behind professions of loathing and her own thoughts of disembowelment. But in that moment, feeling his warm breath against her cheek, his soft touch run down her arm, his knee pushed intimately against the side of her leg, something between them shifted.

He answered her with the tip of his nose, tracing the arch of her ear before touching the rim with his lips. Her eyes fluttered closed and her breath caught in her throat discernibly as his lips traversed the journey from the nape of her neck to the curving swerve of her jaw, trailing along the soft downy expanse until he arrived at the corner of her lips.

The lingering contact was like a helium buzz in the brain, it was unencumbered sensation and something surged up inside of her, pressed her palm roughly against his cheek and lowered his lips to meet hers. His hot mouth moved against hers, slow and soft and wet. She felt the electric tip of his tongue run along the length of her top lip and barely suppressed a shudder of pleasure. His large hand moved to cup her cheek while the other grasped lightly at her elbow.

Somehow though, she seemed to feel his exquisite touch everywhere else; caressing the soft skin of her stomach, the small of her back, sliding under her skirt. It was like flying, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling.

Falling higher and higher, over the castle, over the school grounds, over the great lake, the mountains, the patchwork quilt of fields, the tiny pinpricks of farms and the houses in the villages. It was freeing, this flight. Just like he'd said.

The old rules she had built up between them seemed no longer binding, right spilled over in wrong, order into chaos, self-control into wild abandon, loathing into... lov...

No. Not that.

She broke away abruptly and she stared at him dazed, thoroughly kissed. She felt like she'd just stepped out of time and her eyes widened in horror at her actions.

"God! What is wrong with you?"

She left him no opening to answer, making her escape in a rustle of robe and parchment.

The sound of her shoes, as she broke into a run, echoed down the shadowy corridor.