A/N: Yay! Almost done now! Ah, I love this story!

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formality

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James proposed to her in earnest after their second Potions exam ever, on which he did notably poorly.

"Lily Evans," he said with a flourish, after Slughorn had publicly humiliated her with repeated public congratulations on her marks, "if you marry me, we will make fabulously clever children who take after you, and dashingly handsome ones as well."

"Those ones will look strangely like me," Black interjected with a lewd wink in Lily's direction. "James need never know."

Lily sniffed haughtily, but in reality she was flattered. "Unfortunately, my hopes for you two were to breed you out of the gene pool rather than include you in it, so children are definitely out."

"You'll make lots of money," James assured her. "Surely you'll need a trophy husband for big Ministry events and suchlike." He smiled widely, in a way he clearly thought was charming. "I'm your man."

Remus snorted at that one, poking James in his puffed-out stomach as he walked by. "A man is something you're decidedly not."

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"Hey Evans," James said to her in second year, when saying hello was akin to a marriage proposal, and a date to the tantalizing idea of Hogsmeade next year signified a lifetime together.

Lily ignored him.

"Um, Evans," James persisted.

Lily persisted in ignoring him. She was working very hard on her Astronomy chart and it really wasn't making any sense to her at all, whatsoever.

"Evans, that's actually the wrong name. Wizards don't call it Orion's belt."

"Potter, what do you want?"

James smiled widely and tried to look mature. "Want to take a walk with me."

"What, now?"

"Yes, it's quite beautiful out. I didn't know if you'd noticed, since you've been buried in the library for the past year or so, but it's actually May now. That signifies nice things that people like, such as sunlight, warmth, light breezes, etc."

Lily eyed him distrustfully. "I know it's May," she said slowly, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth.

"But do you? Do you really?"

She stood up, stretching and massaging the back of her neck. Warm, twelve year-old-hands pushed hers aside, thumbs pushing on a few choice knots and eliciting a brief sigh before she brushed him away. "Alright, alright Potter, I'll give you a walk."

"That," James laughed. "That, Lily Evans can concede upon."

It was the first time she'd ever thought of him as James, as they talked and laughed and she ignored the fact that they didn't really hang out, and this was weird, and all the numerous things running through her mind. He took her by the lake, and she would eventually realize that this was his favorite walk. They would walk the same path so many times that she felt they had worn a rut in the ground: the only memory of them remaining on the surface of the earth, an imprint of their footsteps.

"So you're really taking Divination?" She asked James wryly, realizing belatedly that she was practically teasing him.

He winked at her. "That's how I know you'll end up with me."

"Oh, is that so?"

He dropped onto one knee, then, and they were enough out of sight of people that there was no one she could look around frantically toward and make eye contact with as if to say "so this is weird."

"Marry me, Evans, right now. Why delay the inevitable? Say yes now and you'll only regret it for, say, five or six more years."

"What, do your divining skills extend only five years forward?"

"No," he replied, still on the ground. "The tea leaves just aren't that definite in terms of time period."

His face was so straight that for a moment Lily missed a beat, missed a breath, even, and gazed at his large unblinking eyes with a mixture of shock and a flush of fear that somehow equated to the strangest anticipation of her future that she could ever articulate. It was a moment that she'd soon forget, but the sensation would haunt her. "Potter, you are so very odd."

"Evans, my pearl, my sweet, I hope you know this isn't the end," he said as he stood up.

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," she responded.

He opened his palm, revealing a small wring woven of grass that he must have knit while prostrating himself in front of her. He grabbed her hand so gently and surprisingly that Lily couldn't have stopped it if she'd tried; it would have been like kicking a puppy. He slipped it on to her ring finger (on the wrong hand) and grinned in what would eventually be called rakish and heart-throbbing, but was currently just a little bit lopsided.

He would grow out of this phase soon, they both knew. He would become a whiny teenage boy who hated girls, and was unknowingly cruel. He would loose this strange wisdom (she hoped), this odd sageness that made him old before his time. And he would stop talking to her, flirting with her, and making her laugh. He wouldn't wait for her always, Lily knew. Or, felt relatively certain about.

So she smiled at him back, curled her fingers into a fist around the ring, and trudged out of the glorious sunshine and back into the library. But she pressed the little ring in between the pages of Hogwarts a History, and told herself that she could maybe use it for blackmail later.

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She cried on his shoulder third year and then forgot about it, trying desperately hard to distance herself from anything that reminded her of her father's death, and embarrassed that she'd soaked a veritable stranger's shirt with tears and snot and Merlin knows what else.

They didn't speak—literally, not a single word—until he dumped mud on her at the end of fourth year. It hadn't really been hostile, but any blossomings of friendship between eleven- and twelve-year-olds faded rapidly once hormones became involved. James had begun to form his little clan of bandits with a strange earnest dedication, and Lily was awfully close with Alice, Lorraine, and an older boy named Frank.

But she had a really bad feeling that, rather than an ending, the mud business signified a beginning. And it did. Fifth year was miserable for Lily, and not just because of her period and the incumbent mild acne that fifteen brings with much joy.

James Potter seemed to dog her steps, appearing at random intervals when she looked her worst, had gotten the least sleep, and was hungriest. Basically, she blamed him completely for turning her into a heinous bitch and not even feeling sorry about it. She wasn't even that close with Sev anymore, but he was the only one who could calm her down after a Potter episode, and so she saw more of him that fall.

"Hey Evans, whatcha doing this weekend?" It was early October, and little did Lily know that this was just the beginning.

"Not you," Lily said.

"Aw, Evans, why you gotta be like that?" James asked, mussing his hair and leaning on the wall, blocking the door to Transfiguration. Lily balanced her giant stack of books (which he was not offering to help her carry, despite all this professed interest) and grinning at a group of fourth year Ravenclaws walking by. Lily was exhausted. She'd been up until three a.m. that morning, working on the Transfiguration essay due that day, and she was in no mood for Potter.

"Potter, seriously, I just want to sit down."

"Evans, baby," he leaned in, and she recoiled in horror. "C'mon, Evans, just one date," he said. "You know you want to let loose."

Lily sighed, trying not to snap. "I let loose just fine, thanks, with my friends."

"I can be the best friend you've ever had," James leered, and Lily's palm started to itch. Her books were extremely heavy.

"Potter, please get out of my way."

"Oh Evans, you don't mean that."

Lily tried in vain to push past him, and the top book on her stack fell off as he refused to budge. "That's it!" She snapped, dropping all her books. "I've had it up to here," she raised her hand to the height of her eyes, "with this crap. Potter, you need to leave me alone. I am not going on a date with you, so please go pursue someone who cares!"

James stared at her, and under the façade of teenage blankness, she saw a brief flicker of despair, quickly tampered by disdain. "Let me know when you manage to get that stick out of your ass," he said, and sauntered into Transfiguration.

Lily bent down to pick up her books, and felt a little spiral of anger snap inside her. She grabbed up her prized fifth edition Transfiguration tome and hurled it at James's back in deadly smooth motion, just as he calmly turned and caught the book with a smack in between his palms. Someone sitting down let out a breath, and Lily flushed with anger and embarrassment as James turned toward them to smile cockishly. Not even sparing her a glance, he let the book slide from his fingers, falling to the floor. Lily left her essay on the desk and skipped Transfiguration.

She never skipped class again, nor did she try and throw books. Instead, Lily tried to infuriate James with her ability to control her temper; to sit on her anger and not respond. In retaliation, he deliberately provoked her more and more aggressively, going out of his way to draw a reaction. They were each successful about half the time, with Lily often leaving the argument the victor, but less than proud of many of the things she'd said.

"You're such a loser," she snapped at James, one weekend in April, shortly before the conflict over Severus by the lake. Things were coming to head, although she didn't know it then. All she knew at the time was that they had been fighting like children all year, and she really couldn't take much more.

"At least I have friends," James retorted.

"Whatever, you know that's not what I mean or what I care about. I mean this, Potter, this. What are you doing? What are we doing? I'm exhausted, I'm tired of fighting with you. You have to know by now that this isn't going to become something."

James was silent for a moment.

"Hello-o, Potter, seriously!"

Then he summoned a grin, and a well of resilience. The boy's capacity for rejection astounded Lily. "Evans, here's one of those infrequent times," he smiled, "when I'm right, and you're wrong." Lily actually bit her lip to hide her smile of surprise, and remembered with sudden clarity James's ability to be funny, to be strangely adult and self-mocking. He had just admitted that she was generally right, had suddenly uttered a sentence so jarringly amusing and adult that Lily was dumbfounded.

"We both know," James continued, "for a fact, that is, that you want this." He gestured up and down his torso. "And we both know it's gonna happen." He winked lewdly at her, and bucked his hips a little bit.

Lily pulled back her hair and fake-vomited all over his shoes, then left.

Two weeks later, he tortured Severus by the lake, and later that evening she cornered him in the hallway. She had been patrolling for Prefect duty, and was actually fairly sure that he was doing something he wasn't supposed to do, but she could care less about those sorts of dumb rules at the moment.

"What did you think you were doing earlier?" She demanded, invading his personal space against the wall, squishing him between a suit of armor and the cold stone.

"Beg pardon?" James asked. His mouth was definitely full. Ah, kitchens, Lily realized.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about," she hissed, and James hastily gulped down his mouthful, wiping his sleeve across his mouth to dislodge a few crumbs.

"Erm, yeah, about that.."

"You are such an asshole." The poisonous words seemed to unlock a floodgate, and suddenly Lily was telling him everything she'd wanted to all year. And unlike most other boys her age, he didn't look at her like she was crazy and back slowly away. He stood there, watching the girl he loved, absorbing the flash of anger in her emerald eyes and the flush high on her cheekbones, and savored every moment. "You're so arrogant, Potter, and it's got to stop. You can't torture people, it makes you know better than the Death Eater insurgents. I hope you know that, that that's what it is, too. Torture, Potter, that's what picking on people littler and weaker than you is defined as, especially in groups. And all this harassment, I mean, seriously? I'm sick of it, sick to death of all of it, and I have other things that I need to be worrying about. I don't even know what you want anymore."

She finally stopped, breathing heavily, and James slid a hand onto her shoulder, reveling in her closeness. "Lily Evans, will you marry me?" He said, completely serious, and Lily started to cry and sweat with exhaustion and frustration.

"Potter, please, leave me alone."

It was his third proposal. "Consider it, Evans," he said, and then pulled her loosely into a hug, where she cried a little and then breathed deeply until she calmed down and tried to pretend that she didn't like the way he smelled. Because James smelled like a tennis court in the summer, after a thunderstorm. He was warm and the scent of dust and sun clung to him, overlayed by the musky, boyish scent of fresh rain and reassurance. His arms around her were gentle, still spindly and teenaged, and somehow undemanding. And Lily wondered for the hundredth, millionth time how he knew her so well, and how sometimes this strange, grownup person would break through this angsty adolescent and give her just exactly what she needed.

"I won't marry you," she told him finally, drawing away, her anger gone. She wasn't quite smiling, but the fury was absent.

"I'm sorry about Severus," James said. "I'll talk to Sirius."

"You probably would want to have a rushed wedding, and I couldn't really do that."

"I guess we have been taking things too far," he admitted.

"I want the big white dress, the flower girl, everything. I don't know if you'd be willing to go through that."

James drew close once more. "Evans, for you, I'd go through anything."

She placed a hand on his chest to halt his advance, but couldn't help smiling. "Oh, Potter…" She sighed. "You should go, before I have to take off points or something for you being out of bounds."

He smiled mischievously at her. "I know your patrol routes, Evans. Don't think for a second that this was accidental."

She sighed. "It never is, is it?"

He darted in, kissing her on the cheek before she could register the motion and try to slap him or something. "I don't leave you to chance, dearest." He darted away down the hallway, settling into an easy jog, long limbs folding and unfolding fairly gracefully for someone who hadn't quite outgrown their gawkiness. Lily sagged against the wall, letting out the breath that she'd been holding along with her hatred.

They might never be best friends, she decided. They would certainly never go to Hogsmeade, or get married, despite James's oddly long-lasting conviction, but they could be casual with one another eventually.

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And so it was that when James took her flying around the Quidditch pitch after graduation, and reminded her of their first ride there, and then dove down and fell off and rolled onto one knee, so it was that all these proposals flashed abruptly before Lily's eyes and she realized that she'd said yes a long time ago.