Jily oneshots

they were zoomates

done by elanev91 on fanfiction.net

'Oh, for fuck's sake.'

Lily clicked a little bit harder than was probably strictly necessary on her trackpad and the poor thing gave a deep, sad little groan. 'Sorry,' she said, absently running her fingertips over the trackpad as she scanned her computer screen, trying, desperately, to increase the download speed of this fucking driver with her eyes.

'You should have downloaded it before your meeting.'

Marlene, Lily's incredibly unhelpful roommate and even worse best friend, was sitting on the sofa, smirking at her like the fucking Cheshire Cat.

'I thought I'd downloaded it already,' Lily said. It was a blatant lie and Marlene knew it. She damn near laughed in Lily's face.

'Well, okay,' Lily pushed up from her computer and walked into the kitchen, snatching the kettle off the base and all but chucking it into the sink so she could start to fill it. 'I thought that it would download quicker than this.'

'You know that everyone's home now using the wifi. Our bandwidth is going to be fucked.'

'Because that's what we're all supposed to be concerned about right now while we're literally on lock down because of a pandemic.'

Marlene just held her fingers up at Lily over her shoulder.

'You could have quarantined with Dorcas, you know,' Lily said. She switched off the tap and set the kettle back onto the base.

Marlene turned around on the sofa and smiled at her, all sugary sweet. 'But then who would be here with you, my love?'

Lily rolled her eyes. 'Do you want tea?'

'Yeah, go on.'

By the time Lily finished preparing their tea, her Zoom client had downloaded and had been sitting there waiting for her to start up for who the fuck knew how long. She swore loudly, practically threw her mug onto the table as she sat down, and set Marlene's mug down, as far as she could reach, on the other end of the kitchen table.

'Tea's here. Gotta login to my meeting.'

Marlene grumbled theatrically as she pushed herself to her feet, but Lily ignored her. She clicked into Slack, scrolled back up to find the initial Zoom request, and clicked "Join". She took a swift sip of her tea — it was literally like sucking molten lava through a bloody straw — and was still making a sort of gagging face when her image preview popped up onto her screen to ask her to approve her audio and video access.

'What service,' Marlene whispered.

Lily held her fingers up at Marlene from behind her computer screen. Marlene just winked at her before she turned and padded off to her bedroom.

Everyone was already logged into the meeting when Lily's screen loaded, and she took as quiet a breath as she could muster as she adjusted her posture in her chair. No one seemed to have noticed that she'd arrived and she was keen to take a second to get herself settled because christ almighty, what was it about these video conferences that always made you look —

'Hey, Lily!'

James Potter's picture jumped to prominence on her screen as he spoke, and Lily physically started, one, because she hadn't expected James Potter to suddenly pop up on her screen like that, and, two, because now her boss was going to fucking know she was late, James.

As if on cue, Minerva cleared her throat and she popped up onto Lily's screen. This "focus on whoever is talking" thing was going to give Lily a bloody headache, but she also knew that her entire side of the company was on this Zoom chat right now and she wouldn't be able to see anyone if she made every one's picture the same size.