She looked up from her book. "Only that I'm going. I've worn my quill to a nubbin."
James shook his head. "How can one person write so much?"
"Innate talent."
"Anyway -- want to go with me?"
Lily gave James a look that reminded James of Henry at his most flat-eared. At least Henry no longer gave him gratuitous clawings. "You gave up."
"I did. But we'll both be walking down to the village at the same time in the same group of people anyway, so there's not much in it, so if you're not specifically going with Mr. Brick Sandwich, you might as well be with me, right?" He decided to believe that Lily's fit of giggles for his renaming of her thickheaded beloved was a good sign.
"Right. If you're willing to be bored silly shopping for quills, that is -- otherwise I suppose you can continue walking with the rest of the group."
"Remus would probably like something from there for a birthday present; you can help me find something good while we're at it."
"Diricawl feather, maybe? Now go back to giving up so I can finish my Transfiguration essay."
"Giving up," James announced, and grinned. "Or did you miss me chasing Emmeline 'round the table earlier?"
Lily gave him a look of open and amused skepticism. "I did miss that. I thought Sirius was the one for chasing Emmeline, however."
"Not unless she'd stolen his hairbrush."
Lily looked puzzled.
"I'm not supposed to know, but..." James glanced around. Nobody else was in easy earshot. "He doesn't much care about girls," he finished in a whisper.
"Sirius?" Lily whispered back, incredulous.
James nodded.
"Are you sure? "
James nodded again. "He's with Peter."
"Peter? " She seemed to believe that even less.
"I'm not supposed to know." He grinned. "But they aren't as discreet as they think they are. Not in the dormitory."
Lily shook her head. "If I'd thought about it, I might've guessed Remus."
"No. At least, I hope not. Otherwise he's really left out and I'm really outnumbered."
Lily began to giggle, then covered her face with both hands and shook with laughter.
"Okay, pay back. What sort of unnatural goings-on are there in the girls' dormitories?"
Lily stifled her laughter long enough to gasp out, "Wouldn't you just like to know?"
"Fair's fair."
"None. None I know of. Of course, I totally missed yours..."
"Hard to miss if you live with it, unless you sleep like a log and have an innocent mind. Trust me. What's so funny?"
She wiped her eyes. "About... two years of jokes I didn't get."
Two years? Somebody had been way ahead of James, too. Someone may even have been ahead of the involved parties. James thought he knew Sirius better than anyone else did, but apparently not on that point. "Whoever it was must have a good ear for a line to make you laugh this hard."
"Nothing I can quote," Lily said breathlessly, and shifted back in her seat with a grin. "Thanks. I needed a good laugh."
James wished he could feel entirely responsible for giving it to her. And he wondered how a girl who could reel off a class lecture from memory suddenly couldn't quote a single joke. Presumably she was protecting the guilty. "You're very welcome." He bowed sitting down, which wasn't easy. "Don't let them know I told you, all right?"
"Of course not. I can usually manage to keep a secret."
Well, he certainly had enough evidence of that.
"I don't even know why I'm trying to do N.E.W.T.-level Transfiguration. Thanks for the help."
"I don't know why I'm doing N.E.W.T.-level Charms, so thanks right back."
"You're doing Charms because you needed one more class and it was that or Potions, am I right?" Lily grinned at him. He'd given up -- he was absolutely not going to make a stupid pass at her for that grin.
"Not to disparage your favorite subject, but yes. Once stopping Snape from blowing the castle sky-high was quite enough."
Lily shrugged. "That must have been an off day. He hasn't done it again."
James paused in their stroll from library to common room and stomped his feet on the reassuring solidity of the stone floor. "Must not have -- it's still here."
Lily had stopped with him, and suddenly stepped forward and hugged him. He stood perfectly still, not believing, unable to get any message from his brain to his hands.
"What's this for?" he asked her hair, indistinctly. When had Lily gotten so short, anyway?
"Being friends with Morag's cat. Studying. Asking the right sort of questions. Getting through your last several sentences without the words 'bloody great idiot' showing up even once."
"Oh." Some connection finally clicked, and he managed to put his arms around her.
"Did I earn that somehow?"
"Getting through the last several sentences without the words 'swollen head' or 'Giant Squid' turning up."
"Oh." She pulled back without letting go of him, checked both ways down the corridor, guided his head down, and kissed him.
He wondered if she'd practiced on someone else, then wondered if he should have, and then remembered that he'd given up on her and shouldn't be enjoying this -- and to hell with all that. He kissed her, too. In all his happy unfulfilling daydreams of kissing Lily, this had certainly never been how he'd gotten here. He told his stupid brain to shut up already and learn to enjoy what it had. He'd wanted to win her with some deed that was noble and heroic and impressive -- and, in retrospect, probably stupid -- and all this time apparently she'd wanted him to be smart and thoughtful and, well, maybe still noble.
And he still couldn't help wondering if there was someone, somewhere in the Wizarding world, who was smarter and more thoughtful and yet thick enough to overlook a girl like Lily, and if she'd done any better a job of giving up than he had himself.
He broke off the kiss and studied her expression. She seemed quite sincere and a bit puzzled. "Does this mean you really did give up on the brick?" he asked, and regretted asking it.
She nodded once, perhaps a little misty-eyed, and smiled a little. "Bricks make good solid friends. Does this mean you really didn't give up on yours?"
James discarded six answers to that question before settling on, "I'm stubborn that way. Remus says I should work on that."
"Don't you dare," she said, and kissed him again.
Well, a man only had so many hours in the day. He'd much rather work on kissing Lily than on decreasing his stubbornness, and did so now. A faint sound caught his Snape-trained attention, and he broke off the kiss again to look around.
"You tease," Lily said playfully.
"I thought I heard someone."
"Peeves, show yourself!" Lily snapped -- quietly. Using the name too loudly could get a poltergeist where there had not been one before. Nothing happened. "He's the only invisible one I know of."
James knew of one more: himself. But the Invisibility Cloak was safely upstairs in his trunk, unless...
No. Sirius wouldn't pinch his cloak. Remus certainly wouldn't. Peter -- well, Peter would certainly be more discreet about it. James was pretty sure his was the only Invisibility Cloak in the castle. With a mental shrug, he decided the remaining time before curfew would be better spent kissing Lily than wondering what a noise might have been.
When James went up to bed late that night, three curious faces greeted him from three sets of bedcurtains. "Well?" Sirius asked.
"Well, what?"
"Oh, come on. Spill," ordered Peter.
"Spill what?" How could they possibly know already?
Remus gave him an unusually toothy grin. "You only think you're sneaky, Prongs. You're blushing."
"I think someone else is sneaky." James yanked open his trunk. The Invisibility Cloak was almost -- almost -- where he had left it. Looking up, he found one curious face and two very guilty ones. "Remus. Do me a favour. Sit on Sirius for a bit so I can punch him a few times once I'm done with Peter."
"I'm your prefect!" Remus protested, without much force. Sirius observed his indecision with open humour.
"Fine, assign them lines, then sit on him!"
Remus put on a lecturing look. "All right, both of you: 'I will not spy on James Potter's love life,' three hundred times."
"Is that each, Mr. Perfect Prefect, or total?" Sirius asked, cheeky. Remus tackled him without further ado, and they rolled laughing on Sirius' bed. It wasn't in the spirit James had hoped for, but Sirius was out of his hair for the moment.
He'd given Peter too much warning. "Rictusempre!"
It was hard to stay properly angry when being tickled half to death. Once James was helpless on the floor, Peter peered over the edge of the bed at him and removed the spell.
"All right, Prongs?"
For answer, James reached up, grabbed Peter by the collar, and yanked. Quidditch reflexes were useful things. A moment later he was sitting on Peter and strangling him lightly. "Don't get into my stuff again, and don't spy."
"I won't spy on you!" Peter choked out.
"Never mind me; don't spy on Lily!" James shook him once more for emphasis, released his hold, and sat up on Peter's stomach to see how Remus was getting along.
The inventor of the Two-Way Mirror, the Lock-Picking Knife, and the Nose-Biting Teacup sat proudly beside a human-sized cocoon of bedcovers. The cocoon seemed to be expressing the belief that Remus Lupin would certainly have won any fair fight and that Sirius Black was a dirty dog. Sirius promised, "I won't spy on Lily either; now get off poor Wormtail before he blows a gasket."
Before he blew a what? James decided not to ask. He never could stay properly mad at Padfoot. "If you'll get off the end of that sheet before Moony smothers." Padfoot always did find the most ingenious uses for the most mundane of objects.
"Agreed."
The two boys released their victims by standing up; James gave his friend a good glare. "Don't do it again."
Sirius tossed his hair back. "I already said I wouldn't. Which brings us back to -- well?"
"Well?" James mimicked. "You should know; you were there. And why were you there, anyway, under my cloak?"
Remus fought his way free of the covers long before Peter had caught his breath, and put in his own glare at Black. "It seems I missed a lot this evening by sitting tamely in the common room, reading. Padfoot and Wormtail prowling about invisibly, Prongs getting kissed at long last. Should I feel left out?"
"You'll keep getting left out of my bit, mate." James turned a grin on the other two. "How about it? Want to explain to your friend here why three is a crowd?"
There was a long elastic silence. Sirius seemed to have frozen in the middle of an expression of interest, Peter in an aspect of guilty glee now slowly crumbling. Remus studied each face and reached the wrong conclusion. "Well, if you've decided you're tired of your monster prefect tagging along and getting in the way --" And he slammed out.
"Nice one, Prongs," Peter said in the echoes of the door's crash.
"I don't see either of you leaping off after him to explain that wasn't what you had in mind." James scooped up the cloak in case of emergencies -- it was long past curfew, after all -- and followed Remus.
He caught up not far from the Fat Lady's portrait. Remus stood facing the wall, one arm against it above his head, the other cradled carefully as if injured. "Go away, James; you're the one I'm not angry with."
"Yeah, well, the ones you are angry with are still upstairs trying to figure out how to tell you they're queer, okay?"
"What, they'd rather say that than..." Remus gave him a sideways look. "You meant that, didn't you?"
"I meant it. And I wish I slept as soundly as you must."
"Well." Remus stared at the stone wall as if it might tell him something interesting. "And that's why they were sneaking off, then?"
James shrugged, though Remus wasn't looking at him. "Most likely. Feel any less left out now?"
Remus snorted. "Maybe. Yes. Probably. "I mean, I'm not one bit interested in whatever they do together in that case."
That covered the yes, but not the maybe or the probably. "But?"
"But... Sometimes I hate not being at the top of anyone's list. Sorry, Prongs, but there it is."
James had never thought of that. Remus was just -- well, Moony, reliable and predictable, the sensible one who happened to turn into a wolf every twenty-eight days. Even that was reliable and predictable. "If we didn't like you pretty well, you wouldn't be calling me Prongs."
"I suppose not."
"Come on, we'll get you a girl too, and then the four of us can triple-date."
That earned him a thin smile. "Not much point in that. I can hardly marry and have a family, can I?"
"Of course you can. We'll all live close together, and once a month the Midnight Marauders will prowl again, and the rest of the time you can go on being the respectable one."
Remus spoke a few words on the subject of respectability.
"You punched the wall, didn't you?"
Remus nodded once.
"Break your hand?"
Through tight lips, Remus indicated that he had.
"I can fix that for you; no need to bother Pomfrey."
Remus gave him a decidedly worried look.
"Oh, come on. Quidditch. I know about broken bits. If I break the last bit of me left to break, I may not want to date Lily anymore. "
His friend finally laughed a little. "I'll take the high road on that one and assume you mean your heart."
"The high road? What other road could there possibly be?" James laughed back and drew his wand to mend the broken hand. "Episkey!"
Flexing his fingers, Remus admitted, "Not bad, Prongs."
"Not bad," James scoffed good-naturedly. "You're as hard to impress as Evans. Ready to go up again?"
"No. Let's go nick something from the kitchens first. And you can tell me on the way just how, exactly, you finally managed to impress her."
"What, just march on down there, Mr. Prefect?"
Moony bared a few teeth. "You came charging down here without the cloak? I may have to set you a detention for that."
"No, you won't. Of course I've got it. Let's go stuff ourselves and let those great idiots we live with wonder what we're up to. But I'm not too sure what I did right, so you have to kick me if it looks like I might stop doing it, before Lily gives me the boot. You're the only one I can trust with the job."
"Count on me. Do you suppose there's any pie left?"
"I was hoping for treacle tart, myself."
"Addict."