Author's Note: You guys are so lovely. Thank you so much for the sweet reviews and nice words. I know some of you weren't happy about James' costume, and I assure you that Lily would normally have put him in something grand, but he missed her obvious hint and she was pissed – you'd hardly want to put effort in after an ego bashing like that, right?

This fic remains dedicated to Emily, who told me to stop flattering her, so I won't. Emily, seriously, even though you are way hotter than Tom Felton, I hope he dumps his two-bit girlfriend for a slice of your warm apple pie, if you know what I'm saying.

Sorry this took so long, I actually scrapped the entire chapter I had written (it sucked) in order to replace it with this. I think it works a lot better this way, although it's still not fabulous. I want to give special love and thanks to my darling best pal Leonie, who inspired James' wish for this chapter a very long time ago.

Wish Two

"Oi, hang on a second, Evans!"

In spite of James' demand, Lily did not listen to him and loped out the door, probably in a hurry to get her mitts on some chips. James would not have said no to some chips, either, but even he thought it was a bad idea for Lily to go roaming the school after hours, since she wasn't in possession of what he and Sirius liked to call 'street smarts'.

And by 'street smarts', James was thinking of his map and his cloak.

"You can't just roam around the school at night without knowing if there are teachers around!" James hollered again, quickly scrambling up from his bed and racing after her. Terrifying visions of being forever held responsible as the man who had influenced Lily Evans to blight her otherwise pristine school record danced threateningly through his head. "That's a one way ticket to deten-"

He grunted in pain as Lily flew back into the room unexpectedly and barrelled straight into his middle, completely knocking the wind out of him in the process. The force at which she collided with him sent them both flying, but he managed to keep his balance before he fell backwards and took her with him, unthinkingly grabbing her around the waist to keep her steady.

Lily, who had clutched the front of his shirt, as a reflex, he supposed, started to giggle like a loon. She seemed unhurt, which meant that she had fared better than James, who was finding it rather difficult to breathe.

"Oops!" she said giddily, very pink in the face, with his shirt still held firmly in her grasp. She looked up at him, and her laughter died a little, concern filling her eyes when she saw the pained expression on his face. "Oh God, did I hurt you?"

"Me, hurt? Pah," James hissed, his stomach contracting in pain and his chest tight from lack of air. Lily had walloped him right in the gut with a vengeance; he felt like falling to the ground and curling up in a tiny little ball but he would not show such weakness in front of her. He was a man, and men didn't resort to the foetal position when the chips were down. "Never. Why'd you… ugh." Pain, so much pain. "Why'd you come running back like that?"

"Because, James," she said, frowning up at him as she let go of his shirt, clearly not fooled by his protestations of physical wellness. "You can't just roam around the school at night without knowing if there are teachers around; that's a one way ticket to detention."

"Novel idea there, Evans," he grunted.

"So anyway, it occurred to me as I was going downstairs that we needed to take your map with us."

"My… My what?" Unable to handle the pain in his stomach while he was standing, James sat down heavily on Remus' bed, which was the nearest available surface. He must have looked very attractive as he stared goggle-eyed at Lily, who did not seem to be aware that she had just dropped a bombshell on him and was more preoccupied with looking him over concernedly.

Perhaps she hadn't dropped a bombshell, and he was just imagining things. There was no way on earth that Lily Evans could have known about the Marauder's Map , because nobody had told her about it. If anything, James was the most likely out of the four boys to tell her about it, and even he knew better than that.

"How'd you, ugh," he groaned, nearly doubling over. "How'd you know about the map?"

"Oh, you poor baby, I did hurt you," she pouted, and both immediately and inexplicably sat down next to him and started to rub his tummy, which was very pleasant but did nothing to soothe his frazzled nerves. "I actually caught Peter using it last year. You and Sirius were in detention; he was sneaking out to see you."

"What, when and how?" James was stumped that he hadn't heard of this. Peter usually couldn't keep a secret to save his life. "He never said anything to us about it."

"Yeah, I know," Lily sighed. "He let slip that he was only using the map because you wouldn't let him use your Invisibility Cloak, so -"

"YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT?" James really shouldn't have shouted when his lungs were temporarily robbed of their ability to function properly. A sharp, stabbing pain brought him back down to earth and he hissed sharply.

"Well, I knew that if you knew I knew, we'd have to have a confrontation about it and I didn't really want that, so I told him that if he told you I knew about the map, I'd tell you he'd told me about the cloak," Lily babbled, but she had the good grace to look guilty. "Although I guess I just did tell you. Shit."

"Fucking little rat never said," James murmured bitterly, and looked down at Lily's hand, which was still gently caressing his stomach. It struck him that this was way, way more important than Peter's accidental blabbing, and he might as well enjoy it to the fullest.

"It really hurts, Lily," he pouted, adopting a wounded expression. Lily laughed, but not unkindly.

"What hurts, darling?" she asked, resting her cheek against her shoulder while she rubbed his affected stomach. This small, affectionate act made him smile. "Peter's callous betrayal of your precious secret, or those manly abdominals of yours?"

James laughed, too. "My stomach, Evans. You bashed it pretty hard."

She winced. "M'sorry."

"Nah, it's fine," he assured her. "If you hadn't come back in, you would have run off like a psychopath and risked your perfect, untarnished record for the sake of chips. What would I have done if you'd ended up earning your first ever detention on my watch?"

"Excuse me?" Lily snorted; he could feel the vibration of her silent laughter against his shoulder. "I've gotten a detention before, Potter."

"What?" He would have nudged her off his shoulder so he could look at her and give her some sort of irritating smirk, but he was enjoying the stomach rub too much. "How come I never knew about this?"

"I was fourteen, you were my mortal enemy," she said, with a giggle. "I would have jumped off a cliff or burned my own eyelids before letting you find out."

"What did you do to get a detention?" he asked, curious.

"Nothing," she replied hastily. "Minor indiscretion. How's your stomach?"

James' tummy was feeling fit to enter a race, bounce on a trampoline and sign up for the next World War, and as much as he would have liked to sit there being massaged by Lily Evans for the rest of his natural born life, he suspected that she would only believe him to be in pain for so long. Besides, it was twenty to eleven already, and he had two more wishes to go before midnight.

"It's fine now. What'd you do?"

"Nothing."

"What'd you do?"

"No-thing."

"Lily," he whined. "The way you omit such things makes my tummy worse."

"Shush, you!" she demanded, immediately stopped rubbing his stomach and slapped his hand instead, but without any real force. "Have you thought of a second wish yet?"

"James considered wishing for her to reveal why she had gotten a detention, but that was something he could find out from Mary or Alice. No point in wasting a wish on that.

Actually," he said, stretching his arms above his head. "Now that I'm no longer scared of putting a pox on your perfect school record, I think I'll go all out on wish two. Think of something really spiffing, you know?"

"Nobody uses the word spiffing any more, James," said Lily, looking up at him with something like reminiscent of fondness in her eyes, maybe. "How terribly geriatric of you."

"It's young and fresh," James argued, scowling down at her pretty face. "All the cool kids are using it these days."

Lily gave another snort. "Cheyuh, Dumbledore's so trendy and with the times."

"Those spangled purple robes of his are a breakthrough in wizarding style," said James, attempting to pull off an affected little sniff, and failing. "I have some just like it."

"If I had found robes like those in your drawer, Potter," said Lily, pointing at his dresser, which now resembled a bomb site. "I would walked right out of the room in disgust."

"Just leaving me here with the banana?"

"Yup."

"And told tales of my freakish secret love of garish millinery far and wide?"

"Absolutely, dear."

"And never spoken to me again?"

"Not ever," she agreed solemnly. "What's your wish?"

"My wish?" He screwed up his eyes and pretended to think hard, even though he already had a good idea about what to wish for. Something outrageous and stupid, or dangerous, would be even better. Something that she would look back on in shame when she was old and grey. Something that she would still be mad at him for in years to come. Something that Lily Evans would never do.

"My wish is that you, Lily Evans," he said, slowly, so as to build a suitable anticipatory air around the situation. "Will come with me right now…"

He trailed off, always a man of mystery.

"… and?" said Lily, after several seconds of patient waiting, looking as if she'd like to clock this particular man of mystery right in the jaw.

"And steal McGonagall's tartan biscuit tin from her office," James finished proudly, with a triumphant grin. "How'd you like that idea?"

Lily must have liked his idea, really liked it, in fact, because she burst out laughing.

"Are you fucking kidding me, Potter?" she squeaked, red faced, looking at him as if he truly had lost his mind. It was testament to how ridiculous she thought it was, because Lily always made a point to at least try to avoid using crass words. "Steal McGonagall's biscuit tin?"

"Yep."

"From her office?"

"Yep."

"Even though she'll be sleeping in there, and will have who knows what manner of magical guards around the place?"

"Pfft," James did not care for such protestations, he was a Marauder, after all. He scoffed loudly and ruffled his hair in a self-important manner. "Mere trifles, Evans. She's got a separate bedroom, and I'd hardly think she's booby trapped her office; it's the dullest office in the school. Nobody in their right mind would want to break in there."

"Except for maniacs like you, apparently," Lily argued back, the delight and excitement of her countenance clearly visible no matter how hard she tried to hide it. She was looking forward to doing this, no matter what she might have thought to tell James. "You could have thought of three really cracking wishes, but no, it's divest you of a banana suit and steal a poxy tin of ginger snaps. One day, Potter, I'm going to snap and kill you out of sheer frustration."

"Sexual frustration, obviously," he put in, unable to resist doing the typical teenage boy thing and sticking in a bad joke.

"They'll find you knifed to death on your kitchen floor, not even killed by magic. I'll do it the Muggle way, out of spite, and when they put me in Azkaban I'll still maintain that I'd do it all over again, if I could."

"Complain all you want about my preferred activities, Evans. Your life would be lacking without me."

"It wouldn't be lacking in anything particularly positive," said Lily, getting up from the bed and walking to the door, which James took to mean that she had agreed to grant his wish. "I think I could live without your presence in my life, to be perfectly honest. Things like meringues and shoelaces and nail polish, now, they're things I couldn't live without. In comparison to them you're just..."

"Shut your trap, you shameless liar," he finished for her, catching up with her as she started down the stairs and putting his arm around her shoulders. "You'd be lost without me."

"You act so important," she said contentedly, as they entered the common room and heads turned in their direction. Immediately after, of course, the whispers began. "People are definitely going to talk, now."

"Particularly since I'm sporting a change of clothes," James agreed, nodding away happily. "It's your fault, midget, you just had to get me alone. Now everybody is going to think you're my girlfriend."

It would have been a lie were James to say to himself that he wasn't happy about all of the attention they were garnering at that moment; in particular the look of jealousy that was slathered all over Robert Harding's face was like manna to a hungry soul. Judging by all of the thumbs up and knowing looks that were being sent in his direction, it seemed that his housemates were mostly still in support of the idea of an Evans/Potter union, which somehow, inexplicably, made James feel as if it were actually probable.

"Oh, but I really don't care," said Lily as they reached the portrait hole and she pushed it open, perfectly at ease with herself and the world. She waved over at Mary, who had just smooshed her ice cream sundae into her poor boyfriend's costume, but Eddie did not seem to mind; on the contrary, he was happily eating off his shirt. "I'm having such a good time with you, besides," she added quickly, perhaps to erase that unexpected compliment. "It might not be that bad, they might just assume that you're merely my little bitch boy and I used your body for the night."

"Heh," said James, pushing her gently out of the portrait hole and dodging a cloud of glitter that her huge fairy wings attacked him with. "You act so important."

She laughed.

Once they got out of the common room and fobbed the Fat Lady off with an excuse, it was several floors down to get to their Transfiguration professor's office, which was located on the first floor, while they were on the seventh. It was a walk that seemed to pass in mere minutes, however, as they chatted happily about unimportant things and debated silly topics. His walks around the school with Lily, although frequent now due to patrols, always seemed to pass away too quickly. Often James would be alarmed to learn that he had forgotten the time and allowed the two of them to ramble on slightly past curfew, even for Head students. Perhaps it was because he was so used to patrolling with Lily at night in an environment where they were allowed to be outside of the common room that he failed to realize that he had not brought his map or his cloak with him until they were a floor above McGonagall's office, when he suddenly stopped in his tracks outside Moaning Myrtle's bathroom.

"You won't believe what mess I've lead us into, Evans," he said loudly, far more loudly than he should have, given the circumstances. He laughed at himself. "I've forgotten the map."

"And your cloak," Lily offered helpfully, also stopping in her tracks and turning to face him with her arms crossed over her chest. "I noticed about twenty seconds after we left the common room."

"And you failed to tell me because... you're mentally subnormal?" he suggested, with a raised eyebrow.

"I figured if we got caught I could tell whoever found us that you kidnapped me and forced me to come with you," she said, shrugging. "It's believable, I think I've got a good shot."

"I can see how believable that is, since I'm always bossing you around and forcing you to bend to my will," he interjected, still laughing at himself and the situation, and also at the thought that Lily would ever allow herself to get bossed by anybody. "Christ, Evans, stop being such a doormat and grow some balls, you're far too easy to subjugate."

"I bet it'd work," she said squarely, standing up all prim and proper, a definite challenge in the gaze she directed at him. James snorted, and mirrored her pose of arms folded across the chest.

"Please, this is a school full of hormonally barbaric teenagers; if we got caught, they'd just think we snuck off to snog somewhere."

"Well, that's ridiculous," Lily scoffed loudly. "Snogging in the corridors. If you want to snog me, we can just do it in your dorm, why would we do it out here? It doesn't matter, anyway, because we're not going to get caught."

Silence.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a fashion, during which time his heart had stopped beating and had been jump started back into life by some bizarre miracle. He stuck a finger into one of his ears and mimicked an attempt to rid it of water in an exaggerated fashion. "What did you just say?"

"I said we're not going to get caught," she repeated slowly. "Don't you ever listen, Potter?"

"Nononono, not that," he said hurriedly, while Lily started avoiding his gaze and carefully examining her hair. "Not that. The other thing. The thing you said right before, what was that?"

"That was nothing, I just, oh," said Lily suddenly, as she looked up for the slightest second and caught sight of something over James' shoulder. The colour drained from her face, and she tensed up. "Oh. Oh. Oh, crap."

"What are you doing, Evans?" he began, confused, but got no answer, for Lily gave a small squeak and jumped behind an ugly looking stone gargoyle. Before James could even ask again, he got the answer he was looking for.

"Potter?"

There was no mistaking the booming, self-important voice that rang out loud and clear behind their backs, even if the speaker did appear to be thoroughly confused. James spun on his heel and simply stared at Professor Slughorn as the fat Potions professor advanced upon them; feeling uncharacteristically like a deer caught in the headlights because he had no map and no cloak, and was in the company of a girl who could cut and run on him at any given moment. This was why it was far more sensible to do these kinds of things with Sirius, a man needed a co-conspirator he could thoroughly rely on.

"What are you doing out here at this time of the night, m'boy?" called Slughorn, waddling towards them both at snail's pace and obviously not noticing Lily, who was still half-hidden by shadows and that hideous looking statue. In his peacock blue dressing gown and gold embroidered slippers, and with his peacock blue, gold trimmed nightcap to complete the ensemble, he cut a dashing figure. "Patrols ended hours ago, it's against the rules for... for..." he gasped, and even his nightcap fell off his head in surprise. "Evans?"

Perhaps Lily had been trying to sneak away or perhaps she had tired of being hidden and decided to show herself. Either way, one minute she hadn't been standing at James' side, and the next minute she was.

"Professor," she said, oddly flushed, voice wavering, as if she was teetering on the verge of a giddy fit. Or a nervous breakdown. "Shit."

Definitely a nervous breakdown, James decided silently. Slughorn's eyes widened in, if it were possible, even more shock than he had experienced already.

"P-p-p-pardon me?"

"Sorry, I meant… poppycock," Lily amended quickly, redder in the face than James had ever seen her.

"What on earth are the two of you doing, roaming the corridors at this hour of the night?" he said, gawping at Lily as if he could not believe his eyes as he finally stopped in front of the two of them, leaving his nightcap behind on the floor, the embroidery on his dressing gown glittering in the dim light of the torches. "I would have expected this from perhaps a year ago, Potter, but Miss Evans? I simply can't believe it!"

His was the voice of a man whose ideals had just been cruelly crushed by the world. "This is highly uncharacteristic of you, Lily. What on earth has possessed you to wander through the school after curfew?"

"Oh," said Lily blankly, and James had to check himself lest he laugh, because Lily was always saying that she could handle any situation that got thrown at her and now she was clearly struggling. "Oh, well, you see the thing is that I actually, um…"

"She's got her period, sir."

Both Slughorn and Lily turned their eyes on his face, and while Slughorn's gaze contained nothing more than purest bewilderment, Lily was looking at him as if he could expect to die shortly after they resumed their current conversation, in a slow and painful manner best befitted to rapists and mass murderers.

"I... what are you talking about, Potter?" said Slughorn, baffled.

"Yes, Potter," Lily hissed between her teeth, visibly seething with embarrassment. "What?"

Nonplussed, James shoved his hands into the pockets of his lovely jeans and balanced on the balls of his feet.

"She gets maniacal this time of the month, sir. Stark-raving mad. Like a hyena." He paused for thought. "A rabid one, you know, with rabies."

"I don't, I don't, how does this, what relevance..." Slughorn was muttering to himself, while Lily's eyes got wider and wider and wider. James' death would be prolonged and agonizing indeed.

"The hunger pangs are the worst, sir. She tears through the common room like a freight train roaring through the castle," he carried on, quite at his ease. James always excelled when it came to making up nonsense. "She steals food from the first years. It's awfully traumatising for them. I hardly think it's fair on myself, either, when I stop and think about it. It's hard enough to convince the student that gingers are people too without Evans here rampaging through the school like a maniac and nicking sandwiches from helpless eleven year old kids; I mean, I try, but I'm fighting an uphill battle most of the time, you know? Of course you know, you're in charge of Slytherin, hardly a house that's known for amiability. But I digress, what was I saying?"

"Merlin, boy, I don't know," said Slughorn, who seemed to have aged ten years. Lily was now trembling with fury.

"Huh." James frowned for a moment, until he recovered his original point. "Oh! Well, Lily was prowling around for food and I could tell it wouldn't be long before she transformed into a raging Chimera and sent us all to our fiery graves; you learn to recognize the signs - anyway, I agreed to accompany her to the kitchens. For the sake of the younger students, sir. I can't allow them suffer on my watch."

Slughorn was thoroughly lost now, and looked at Lily helplessly, as if he expected her to explain the nonsense to him, to lead him by the hand to salvation once more. Unfortunately, Lily was mentally dead. At least, it looked like she was.

"Miss Evans," he said faintly, wiping his forehead with a gold embroidered handkerchief that he had pulled from his gold embroidered pocket, and James had to stifle a laugh for a second time. "I don't know what to make of this. Is this... is this true?"

Struck dumb, Lily seemed as if she had not even noticed that Slughorn was still there, for she was still gazing at James. He had to elbow her in the side to wake her up, and she blinked rapidly several times before she seemed to get her bearings.

"I love food," she said blankly, her voice tiny, and in monotone. "It's edible."

"But if you were so very desperate to eat," Slughorn pressed on, apparently happy to accept her bizarre answers and not James'. "And believe me, Miss Evans, I understand the pangs, surely there was no reason for Potter to come along with you?"

"She's scared of the dark," James put in smoothly, as Lily seemed to flounder for words once more. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to his side, figuring that if she really was going to injure him beyond human recognition, he might as well do the job thoroughly. "Completely petrified. She's come sneaking into my bed after a nightmare more than once, although why she can't just go to Mary or Alice's bed when she shares a room with them and I'm all the way on the other side of the tower..."

"That's quite enough of an explanation, Mr Potter," Slughorn hurriedly interrupted them, looking ill. He gave Lily another once over, as she stood stock still and clamped against James' side, and shook his head confusedly. "But Evans, why on earth are you dressed like that?"

James nearly swore out loud and had to bite his tongue to keep himself from doing it, just as he had to ball his hands into fists to keep from smacking himself in the forehead. He'd forgotten about the costume; there was no way on earth that they'd be able to keep the party a secret from the teachers now. There was no other possible reason for student to be prowling the corridors, or even staying in their common room, wearing an outfit like the one Lily had on. The students at Hogwarts didn't even dress up on Halloween itself; it was a Muggle costume that too many of the students either didn't know about or were willing to ignore.

"Potter made me wear it," said Lily, having recovered herself. It was James' turn to die of shock now.

"Eh?"

"Potter made you?" Slughorn looked at James in disbelief.

"Sir," began Lily, her eyes wide and innocent, lashes all a flutter, lips pouting. She had smoothly shifted gears to vulnerable Lily mode, and James knew from experience that men were powerless to resist. He had lost many a last biscuit or given up many comfortable seats by the fire because of that look lately. "Everybody else was asleep; I didn't want to wake anyone, but I really was so hungry and the dark is so very scary. I don't like to admit it because it's so very foolish and I am a Gryffindor and we're supposed to be valiant by nature, but such irrational fears are to be expected in a person, right?"

"Right," said Slughorn, sounding dazed.

"I asked Potter to come with me and he said he would, but only if I dressed like him to satiate his lustful desires," she finished tragically. "He's a sexual deviant, sir."

There was a silence. It was long and uncomfortable, the kind of silence that might often follow a late night conversation between student and teacher concerning the Head Boy and his tendencies towards sexual deviancy.

"I see," said Slughorn, after a fashion, and he finally looked as if he could comprehended the situation. "I see indeed, Evans. So you would allow a sexual deviant to accompany you places in the dark and put his arm around you?"

"I, er," Lily, most bizarrely, looked to James for help with the scenario. "I guess so?"

"She likes it, sir," said James happily, giving Lily a good-natured smack on the bottom, to which she went bright red and squeaked like a little field mouse.

Slughorn raised an eyebrow, or more accurately, tried to raise one eyebrow and ended up raising two.

"I'm so sorry, professor," said Lily earnestly, all of a sudden, and James didn't know if she was apologizing for his words just then or for the entire evening. "We should know better than to go sneaking around the school for food after curfew and it will never happen again. Also, incidentally, I do not like it one whit, sir. Potter shouldn't speak for other people."

"Oh, of course, of course," said Slughorn genially. He now seemed to be in a better mood. "In any case, something like this deserves punishment, and I simply cannot let it go unnoticed."

""Oh, yes sir, of course," said Lily earnestly.

"So, let's see," he continued, tapping his chin with his finger and considering the matter thoroughly. "Perhaps your punishment should be that you attend my next Slug Club meeting together. You know, I'm planning a little Halloween get-together for Monday night, and I have some very important people coming. I was rather hoping that our Head students would both be in attendance in order to greet them."

James very nearly groaned. He was always being invited to Slug Club meetings and never went, but Lily, who always did, elbowed him sharply in the ribs and nodded her head vigorously. "Of course we will, professor. I'll make sure James turns up, too; I'll take him with me personally."

"Well," said Slughorn, beaming at James as if he had gotten all he wanted from this conversation, and James felt once more like a prize fool. Finding him sneaking around outside school hours was probably exactly what Slughorn had been hoping for. "I think that settles the matter, and we should all be heading back to our beds, don't you?"

"Oh, definitely," Lily agreed, still nodding away. "We'll go back to Gryffindor tower right now."

Slughorn smiled indulgently, turned back around and walked off in the direction from which he had came. "Incidentally," he called over his shoulder. "Should you ever feel like eating again, I'd suggest you do it in the privacy of your own dormitory, yes? Goodnight, you two."

"Goodnight, professor."

"Night, sir."

They stood in as they watched Professor Slughorn waddle his way down the corridor, although who knew why the Potions professor was plodding along the school in his fancy pyjamas after dark, and waited until he had ambled round a corner and appeared to be out of earshot. As soon as he did, Lily rounded on him, eyes dancing in amusement.

"You shit!" she accused, which James supposed might have been a step up from 'arrogant toerag', one of Lily's old favourites, and smacked him on the nose with her wand for the second time that night. "That was so not the way to deal with that situation."

"I was smooth back there, Evans, admit it. If I'd been relying on you to get us out of trouble we'd have detention slips in our hands right now."

That was not necessarily true, since Slughorn had pounced on the Slug Club punishment so quickly, but James wasn't about to own up to that.

"The only smooth thing about you is the way lies slide from your greasy tongue, you shameless prat," she berated him, although without any sting, because she was trying very hard not to laugh. "Since when have I stolen food from first years?"

"Lily," said James simply. "You're always stealing food from the first years."

"Well... yes, but I don't threaten them. You, mister, are taking great liberties with the truth."

"Because you never exaggerate to suit your own means, huh?"

"And, and, and," she pointed an accusatory finger right in his face, face flushed and eyes sparkling. "You used Slughorn being here as an excuse to feel me up, didn't you?"

"Of course I did, Evans," he said smugly. Like that was ever even a question. Lily gasped as if scandalized, but her indignation was completely feigned. In fact, she looked happier than James had seen her this whole evening. He grabbed the hand that was looming in front of his face and held it captive, grinning down at her. Having successfully dodged punishment from a teacher and most certainly saved Lily from meeting a similar fate, James was feeling a lot more confident. "I'm a man, it's my duty."

"To sexually harass unsuspecting girls when you know they can't stop you?"

"To sexually harass unsuspecting girls when you know they secretly like it."

"That's a very presumptuous statement you just made, Potter," she levelled at him, narrowing her eyes.

"Isn't it?" James was unconcerned. "And yet, you haven't stormed off in a huff. You're still just standing there, smiling like a loon, letting me hold your hand..."

"It grates against my soul to stay here, with you, after what you've just done to me," she insisted dully, pulling her hand from his grasp. She was, indeed, still smiling. "Alas, I must grant you that wish, and then a third, before I can escape your evil clutches and return to normalcy."

"You poor thing," he cooed. "I guess we should get this wish over with quickly before you die of unhappiness right here in the middle of the corridor, huh?"

"I think that would be wise."

"McGonagall's office it is, then?" suggested James tenuously, lest Lily actually be in the mind to tell him to suggest a different wish, since, they had already been caught by one of their teachers tonight and Slughorn was generally known to be the most lenient of the lot. McGonagall would not let their transgressions slide so very easily. "Or do you want me to pick something else?"

"No, there's no need," replied Lily simply, shaking her head from side to side. "McGonagall's office it is."

So he guessed they were going to McGonagall's office, after all.

"Right, Evans, on your broom," he said, patting her bottom once more for good luck before taking hold of her arm and gently steering her down the corridor. "I don't know about you, but I've got a really strong craving for ginger biscuits."

A/N: KAPOW! That was all just filler and nonsense. The real stuff begins next chapter and then it will be less carefree for a little while. I think it'll be five or six chapters with an epilogue. Wish me luck!