A/N~Thank you so much to ShootinStar(unfortunately the Magical Quill thing is over but you can still register in October...also you need an e-mail for Pottermore, I'm really sorry I couldn't make you one! Also you don't get to choose you're username), In Love With Prongs, EmilyLupin77, BlueSkies13, and myrrhanda! Your reviews meant the world to me! Also thank you to anyone who favorites or alerted, I appreciate it a lot!

Also thank you so much to my beautiful betas Hannah and Halle who stayed up all night with me and had a sleepover over the computer so we could all edit each others writing. Check out their stories, their names are: Pottergirl1130 and HarryPotterfanforeverr123

Disclaimer: Clearly Harry Potter isn't mine...

()()()

"James! James! Over here!" Little Peter squeaked from his spot in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room.

James shuffled over, covered from head to toe in mud and soggy Quidditch attire. He had just returned from his very first Quidditch practice of the season and he was in no mood to be accosted by his over-exhilarated mates. His scowl was extremely visible as he approached the three waiting Marauders, whose grins faded to frowns of concern and annoyance.

"What's wrong?" Remus asked, always the tactful one at the same time Sirius barked:

"What crawled up your arse?" Apparently over the summer, Sirius had learned some new choice swears from listening to his parents yell at him, and now he used them constantly. It was a bit shocking to hear such crude words come out of a thirteen year old boy's mouth, but Sirius always went against the grain.

"There's a new chaser this year," James grumbled, plopping down next to Remus on the sofa and kicking off his dirty trainers.

"Isn't that a good thing?" Peter asked, recalling the terrible House Cup match of last year against Slytherin, where the Gryffindor team had been crushed by 451 points.

"He's good," was James's blunt answer.

"And...?" Remus asked, "Isn't that good?"

"He's better than you isn't he?" Sirius asked knowingly, looking at the despair and rage on his friend's face.

"No!" James said hotly, then quickly corrected himself, "Well, he might be. I can't say for sure, but it's close, too close. And he's a year younger. A year! How did this kid get so good? I practiced everyday over the summer for this.'

"He probably did too," Remus conceded. "What's his name?"

"But I practiced harder!" James argued a fierce glaze in his eyes. "Shane something or other, he has two last names which I think is stupid!"

"But who knows, mate. Maybe he's just brill at flying! Although he does sounds like a prat!" Sirius countered.

"I'm brill at flying! It's my life! I'm supposed to be the best flier, the best chaser, and then this kid comes in and almost outdoes me!"

"Isn't it good that he's better? Then the team will be even stronger, isn't that what you want?" Peter piped up. After contemplating James's angry expression for a moment he continued, "Not that he's necessarily better...beginners luck and all..." he trailed off as James let out a low growl.

"There's no need to get your pants in a twist, you'll just show him how it's done next time, the kids only twelve!" Sirius said nonchalantly, dismissing the subject with a wave of his hand. "Anyways, there are more important things to discuss."

"Are there?" Remus questioned.

'Hey! Don't trivialize this it's—" James started but was cut off by a raised eyebrow from Sirius as if to say "now is it really?" James sighed, but gave in anyways. "What's so important then?"

"Birds." Sirius said simply, leaning back on the sofa a smirk playing across his lips.

"And?" Peter prompted.

"They exist?" James offered.

"They're in the room!" Remus joked.

"They have long hair," Peter said, joining in on the joke.

"They wear frilly clothes."

"They have high voices."

"They flutter their eyelashes when they want attention."

Sirius rolled his eyes but continued with whatever his point was.

"Yes they exist, and yes they are here, the other things are irrelevant," Sirius said offhandedly.

"Care to elaborate?" James asked, not liking being kept in the dark with whatever Sirius had in mind.

"They like us," Sirius said simply, as if that explained it all.

The three other boys looked around the common room to find at least five blushing faces look away.

"And we like them!" Peter said in a way that showed he still didn't understand what Sirius was getting at.

Sirius sighed and shook his head. "Do I need to write everything out for you dunces? They like us, we like them, we're thirteen, and we are the most popular guys in our year. We could get any girl we wanted—if we wanted," Sirius added quickly as he saw the looks on his friends faces.

"Why would we want them?" Peter asked.

"Because it's cool to have girls!" James nearly shouted, finally catching on to everything Sirius was saying. "If we get girls, then that will just boost our cool rating off the charts. We'll be the first guys in our year to ask out a girl, a pretty girl of course."

"That's unkind, James," Remus scolded, looking extremely uncertain about this new plan.

"People aren't going to like us any more if we snog ugly birds," Sirius said.

"I thought our thing was pranking?" Peter asked, honestly confused by this new Get Birds Plan that Sirius had concocted.

"It is pranking, but imagine how jealous everyone would be of us if we got girls too!" James explained. "We'll still prank, obviously we're never going to stop doing that! We'll just find girls who like us and you know, want to snog or something," James said cheekily.

"Sweet Merlin!" Peter squeaked at the idea, while Remus shook his head disbelievingly at the shallowness of his friends.

Not that he didn't want to find a girl who liked him. It was nothing like that, he was a guy after all. It was just that sometimes he questioned the motives of some of the things his friends did. For instance James teasing Lily. He hadn't relented yet, and it didn't seem he was going to in the near future, but Remus couldn't understand why. Lily was so nice, even to people she didn't know, and this year she had even started tutoring a first year in Charms. Remus couldn't understand why James liked so much to pick on someone who didn't deserve it.

Remus looked up at his still mud-covered friend. For a moment he thought that James was staring back at him, mouth slightly agape, but as he zoned in on James's line of vision he saw that James was looking somewhere behind his left shoulder.

Remus twisted slowly in his seat, looking to the corner of the common room where Lily Evans sat with her two best friends, Mary MacDonald and Emma Pernell. Her head was bent over a book, and her fingers were skittering across a piece of parchment. Unlike Mary who was measuring her parchment every time she wrote a sentence to see if it had reached the allotted length yet, Lily was concentrating so hard that Remus wouldn't have been surprised if she had written more than necessary.

"Remus, James, what are you looking at?" Sirius questioned, looking at his two friends strangely.

Remus turned back around and answered with a shrug of his shoulders. "Whatever James is looking at."

"Lily," James said shortly, snapping out of his semi-daze and closing his previously open mouth. "She's being such a dork," James recovered as the three Marauders gave him weird looks.

Peter and Sirius accepted James's excuse but Remus wasn't convinced.

"Anyways, I have a challenge of sorts!" Sirius said, excitement seeping into his voice.

"Alright," James perked up, "I'm up for whatever it is!"

"Me too," Remus said, surprising himself with how much he actually did want to do whatever crazy thing Sirius had concocted now.

"I'm in," Peter added too.

"So..." Sirius began deviously, "our very first Hogsmeade visit is coming up. Whoever can get a girl to go with them first wins."

"That seems too easy," James said, knowing that Sirius never liked easy challenges.

"Well, they have to be in Gryffindor, any age, but you have to pick who you think is the most fit—"

"Really?" Remus asked, shaking his head.

"I wasn't finished!" Sirius huffed. "And you have to decide now, because you only have one shot at this, with one girl. So look around and decide now because whoever you say you're going to ask is the only person you can ask. If you bring someone other than the one originally decided on, then you are disqualified from the competition."

"Fair enough!" James agreed wholeheartedly.

"I'll do it!" Peter said excitedly.

"Remus?" Sirius asked.

"Me too," Remus agreed with a shrug and a grin, "should be fun, right?"

"Absolutely! So I'll go first, since it was my idea after all," Sirius decided, looking around the room with a comical expression and squinted eyes, as if that helped him scout out the lookers in the bunch. "Dorothy Ferguson."

"The fifth year?" Remus asked, extremely surprised.

"Fine choice, mate, but do you really think you can get her to go to Hogsmeade with you?" James asked doubtfully, yet with a bit of an edge to show that he was challenging Sirius extra.

"Don't doubt my powers!" Sirius said in mock rage, clutching his chest in an "as if!" manner. "But go on, who's your pick, James?"

"Lily."

"Evans?" Peter sputtered disbelievingly.

"I'd imagine so," Remus said, as he pointed to James, who was yet again staring at Lily, but this time with a smirk and a calculating grin.

"You can do better," Sirius said but deemed Lily worthy and moved on, "and you Peter? I've seen you look at Melissa Saunders."

"She's a year above us!" Peter gasped.

"So? You can get her!" James said reassuringly, clapping Peter on the back. "Remus? Have you decided yet?"

"I'm not sure...Emma, Lily's friend, seems nice."

"Yuck!" Sirius gagged. "She's like James's sister!"

"No it's fine, I think Emma is a fine choice, Remus," James allowed, bestowing what could only be called his blessing on Remus.

"Well that's sorted then! We all have a bird to ask, and a challenge to win. Good luck comrades, you'll need it seeing as you're competing against me!" With that final word, Sirius got up from his seat and stretched his recently tall body and walked over to where the fifth year girls were sitting around a table.

"You don't think she'll say yes now do you?" Peter asked worriedly.

"Don't worry, Pete. Sirius isn't going to ask her yet, just butter her up. It's a good tactic, we should all applaud him," James said as his best friend looked up from his spot between Dorothy and one of her friends and gave a subtle thumbs up.

"He's a smooth one," Remus chuckled.

"He has that advantage already!" Peter huffed.

"It's a fair competition—it's all about timing," James informed the two other remaining Marauders.

The three of them continued discussing tactics until they realized that they hadn't done any of their schoolwork and all scrambled to get their essays and homework questions done.

()()()

"Lils how are you doing it?" Mary whined as she looked down at Lily's pincushion which had tripled in size.

They were sitting at the front of the Charms classroom with Emma, practicing the new charm that Professor Flitwick had taught that day: engorgio. Only five minutes into the class, Lily had mastered the charm and was trying to teach it to Mary.

"No no, see there when you turn it? You're doing a long swoop when really it's supposed to be a sharp twist, like this," Lily demonstrated for the fifth time and her pincushion swelled once more.

"You make it sound so easy!" Mary growled, face growing red and grip on her wand getting tighter.

"Aha! I got it!" Emma squealed, pointing at her pincushion that had grown rapidly but then shriveled up to a smaller size than before. She frowned at the small red ball, but rather than getting frustrated like Mary, she just continued trying, taking Lily's advice.

"I give up!" Mary cried dramatically. "Can't you just do it for me, Lily?"

"And what would you gain from that?"

"A fat pincushion?" Mary offered with a weak smile.

"I refuse!" Lily said, turning her nose up in mock pride.

"C'mon Lils...you know you want to..." Mary wheedled, waving the pincushion underneath Lily's nose like it was a tasty treat that Lily was refusing to accept.

"Evans would never do anyone's schoolwork, she's too much of a stickler for the rules," James piped up from the desk behind the three of them.

Lily twisted around in her seat and shot James an exasperated look.

"What's the problem with wanting to help someone rather than doing the work for them?" Lily asked stiffly.

"Doing it for them would be helping! They get out of the schoolwork, you get the extra practice that you don't need but obviously love, and everyone wins!"

"Yes and that's cheating, nobody learns by cheating."

"Says you, I've learned plenty that way!"

"You're just trying to get me riled up, too bad I'm not falling for it today. Bye Potter, focus on your own work and not others."

Lily turned around quickly and returned to helping Mary, who was now the only one out of the three who hadn't managed to do the charm. Emma was sitting and staring proudly at her enlarged pincushion when a little piece of parchment landed next to her left hand. She turned around to find James motioning for the parchment to be given to Lily. Emma looked at it unconvinced, but decided it was best for Lily to deal with it and handed it off.

Lily unwrapped the folded parchment and stared down at the four words scrawled across the paper.

Go out with me?

Her eyes widened at the ludicrous sentence and she nearly burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. Without looking she tossed the note over her shoulder and back onto James's desk, not even dignifying the joke with a response.

She heard James mumble something to Sirius who was sitting next to him, but whatever insult he had muttered had been drowned out by Mary's excited squeal of:

"Aha you little bugger! I got it!"

()()()

"James, there's only a week left until the Hogsmeade trip, you better start working some magic on Evans," Sirius said as they sat in the back of Potions on the Monday before the Hogsmeade visit.

"It's not like you've asked Dorothy yet."

"Yes but I have her wrapped around my finger, it'll be easy, she's basically waiting for me to ask her."

"Is she really? Because I'm pretty sure I heard that she's going to Hogsmeade with some guy in her year," Remus interjected, openly laughing at the shocked look on Sirius's face.

"You're lying! Where did you hear that?"

"From everyone! It's big news, apparently they've liked each other for quite some time now, everyone knew about it," Remus explained smugly.

"You knew about this the whole time didn't you? You cheeky bugger!" Sirius nearly shouted, attacking Remus with his potions textbook.

"Girls! Girls! You're both pretty," James joked, as Remus and Sirius continued their petty, pathetic fight.

They stopped abruptly as Slughorn continued his rounds in the classroom, reaching their back table and pausing briefly to frown at their half finished potions and then continue on to exclaim (to nobody's surprise) that "Lily, m'dear, that is the finest potion I have ever seen! Please fill a vial for me and leave it on my desk!"

"Oi, Evans!" James half-yelled across the classroom, just loud enough for Lily to hear and turn around, but not loud enough for Slughorn, who had continued on his wanderings around the classroom, to hear.

"What?" Lily asked, exchanging an eye roll with Mary at James's antics, which had recently become much more centered on her.

Since the first time he had asked her out a week ago, he had proceeded to ask her to Hogsmeade every day since, not even taking a break on Sunday. Today he had already asked her during first period Transfiguration, so she wasn't expecting another across the room call for attention from him. Even so she anticipated the next four words that exited his mouth.

"Go out with me?"

She shook her head, half exasperated and half annoyed at the joke that was growing old rapidly.

"No, James, I won't go to Hogsmeade with you and no I won't change my mind in the days leading up to our Hogsmeade visit, and no I will never go out with you, no matter what you do," Lily had officially rendered James speechless as she answered the questions that were still hanging in his mouth before he could even ask them.

"Not like anyone else is asking..." James mumbled to himself. Unfortunately, he didn't know that Mary had creepily good hearing and that she could pick up on a whisper from across the room.

"Excuse me James Potter, but who in Merlin's name do you think you are? Do you really think you can get away with making fun of my friend? No. You're wrong! Stay away from her and take back what you just said! There doesn't seem to be any girls flocking to your side so lay off. Got it?"

James looked taken aback but at least had the decency to look slightly ashamed, however, it was mostly because he had been called out for what he had said, not because he had said it in the first place.

"Looks like you aren't going to win our little challenge," Sirius whispered from next to James.

"Well neither are you!" James shot back.

Sirius shrugged, clearly not caring. But James was different. He wasn't going to give up that easily. He'd extend the deadline if he had to, but whatever happened he would get Lily Evans to agree to go on a date with him. Whatever the cost and however long it took. James Potter was not a loser, and he wasn't about to have Lily Evans make him become one.

()()()

A/N~Alright I know I said that each year until about the sixth one were only going to be one chapter but this chapter was getting rather long and I feel like the third year is an important year developmentally so I'm going to do a part two for third year.

Basically part two will consist of James bothering Lily more and the Marauders confronting Remus about his "mysterious absences once a month". Fun fun fun!

Please please please review! They mean the world to me!