A/N: Bathroom issues are going to start getting addressed here – and as for food, Marly did leave some, a fact I mentioned nearly in passing in the very first chapter. In case you're still wondering.

So, erm, here you go, & thanks a million for your lovely reviews!

Broom cupboards were just so boring.

James couldn't even fathom what had been going through Marly's mind when she first hatched her plan to trap them in one. Who locked people up in bleeding cupboards for the fun of it, for Merlin's sake?!

It was stupid – and it was never going to work. If Marly had expected Lily to fall on top of him and snog the bloody hell out of him during the night, she either didn't know her best friend very well or she was simply too optimistic for her own good, most likely a mix of both.

Lily Evans was simply a damn impossible force of nature sometimes – she really couldn't be reasoned with when she was dead-set on not listening. And she'd made it clear from the very beginning that she had no intention of listening to him.

It was just tremendously wearisome for him to observe though; he'd shared one of his biggest secrets with her, in the hope that she would perhaps…well, it was silly to think about after the foulness that had gone on afterward, but a part of him had truly hoped that Lily would take him a bit more seriously after she figured out he was more than what she had assumed he would be.

He supposed it was just his luck though – maybe he never had been destined to be involved with this girl at all, seeing as he could only tick her off, upset her, scare her off, or all of those at once.

How utterly depressing.

Sighing to himself, James vaguely wondered what the time was. Lily had the watch, so he would never know for sure because he knew better than to ask her, but it felt like it was later in the evening; the two of them had been cooped up for quite a long time already.

When he'd last inquired after the time, it had been seven o'clock – he deduced that it had to be at least eight or eight thirty by now.

Yes, it was about time for him to start eating dinner, take a bathroom break, and claim an early night; yesterday night (which felt so extraordinarily long ago, after the kind of day he'd just had with Lily in this damned cupboard), he'd stayed up late with Sirius for a few Marauder-related affairs that had demanded his attention.

He was obviously a tad exhausted, and had been looking forward for the solidity and comfort of his four-poster upstairs in the dormitory. So much for that plan.

This was merely too bloody tiresome for words.

James made a few faces in the dark, and entertained himself with a bit of mental swearing, but when the novelty began to wear off and boredom set back in, he realized his leg had fallen asleep again.

Fuck.

Only Lily knew how to cure this one – and they were in the middle of the very awkward silence that could only come from having another row.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Stupid bleeding leg. It really did hate him. Almost as much as Lily hated him – perhaps she finally had some decent competition in that particular war-arena.

Yes, it was a catty thing to think, but he was beyond reprimanding himself for cattiness. Cattiness-reprimanding could wait for an hour or two, or even until the morning when he would be allowed to bore Sirius to tears with his exhaustive retelling of this night of events – his leg could not, however, wait as long.

He had to take care of this immediately; and regardless of his quarrel with Lily, he would have to begin using his usual emergency maneuvers.

Standing up carefully in the small, messy space he had been sprawled in, he started to shake his leg with a desperate sort of vigor – though he did, to his credit, at least attempt to be quiet so as not to wake Lily, who appeared to be asleep.

Of course, she did wake up anyway, because he accidentally jumped too high and hit the ceiling of the cupboard, making a loud thud that made her eyes snap open, but even in classes, effort did count for something.

"What in the name of Merlin's yellow socks are you doing?" she inquired, rubbing her eyes and squinting to survey him irately in the dark.

"Nothing, nothing, go back to sleep, dearest hormonal princess of mine," he said sarcastically. "Wouldn't want to disturb you in your royal slumber, would I?"

Lily's mouth set in that determined, aggravated way that spelled out her abhorrence of his deed as clearly as if she'd printed it in foot-high letters on her forehead, and he knew he'd pushed the envelope a little farther than he'd intended to go.

"Your foot's asleep?" she guessed in a quiet voice dripping in suppressed fury, recognizing the agonized motions behind the noises she was hearing.

"Yeah," he mumbled, banging it with dissatisfaction to the ground.

"Well, then I certainly hope you won't ask me to do that charm for you again," she informed him, her voice alive with a note of finality as she laid her head back resolutely to shut her eyes once more.

"I wasn't going to," James retorted back at her, his maturity matching that of a child six or seven years of age, even though he was, in fact, considering asking her to do the charm in a minute or so.

"Good," she replied as she promptly turned her head so that it was facing away from him, despite not being able to see him very well anyway.

Exasperated, James swore under his breath at her (though he hoped she hadn't heard him), and continued to shake his poor leg in the hope that it would cooperate, for once, and stop tingling so uncomfortably.

Needless to say, his leg did no such thing. It remained as tingly as it had been before; if anything, the tingles only intensified.

His joy was beyond the realms of human contemplation by then. Truly, it was.

Sighing, James kicked the wall and made his toe sting in addition to tingling as he sat back in his original spot across from Lily. His hand went straight to his hair, as it always did when he was in such a mood, and he stared moodily at the shady shelves around him.

Bloody stupid. That was what this whole business was – bloody fucking stupid.

But, as he continued to think vaguely about how bloody fucking stupid he felt and knew he was going to be feeling later, he realized with a jolt that pressure was really starting build up in his stomach.

It wasn't a small amount, though – it was actually quite a lot of pressure, pressure that was beginning to make him squirm slightly where he sat.

And that was when, with a jolt, he realized that it must be exactly eight hours since he'd last gone to the restroom – he'd gone between Transfiguration and Potions, as he usually did, and this was around the time he would go again just before either finishing his homework or going to sleep.

Fuck times a million; he had to go the bathroom, and he was still stuck in this damn broom cupboard…

…with a girl.

If he was stuck on his own without anyone else, the bathroom would have been no issue – he would have gone in one of the plentiful buckets about the place.

But the fact that Lily was a female made things much, much worse.

How was he supposed to take his necessary pee when there was a sixteen-year-old girl in his presence, less than two feet away from him?!

Fuck times another million. Or five million, for that matter.

James started going through his hair with his fingers a few more times, chewing contemplatively on his lip while trying to ignore the building distress of his poor bladder.

Options. He needed options. It was simply very difficult to think of them when wanting to jump all over the place and scream bloody murder for the fact that he could not perform such a simple bodily task.

He'd never valued a toilet so much in his life.

But, back to the options – digressing would only make the process slower, something his body would not thank him for.

So he had the following options…

1) He could pee in his pants, but not only was that revolting, he'd then also have to live with the knowledge he'd peed in his pants, the physical evidence that he'd peed in his pants, and he'd have to explain to Lily why he smelled so strongly of piss. Not good.

2) He could not pee in his pants and risk an explosion…but that would probably lead him back to option one, which would, as aforementioned, not be good.

3) He could tell Lily that he had to pee, despite the fact that she didn't want to speak to him, and they could come up with a solution together. That, obviously, was a questionable alternative because of the fact that Lily would probably not react very well to the idea of having a young man ready to burst sitting so near to her, but it was an option to consider nonetheless.

That made three options to choose from. Which would it be?

Option one, he decided, he could rule out. Peeing in his pants was out of the question – he hadn't done it since he was four years old, and he was not about to start again at the age of nearly seventeen.

That also ruled out option two from his list, though, which left him with only option three: tell Lily.

He groaned internally at the thought; it was such a claustrophobic choice to have to decide whether pissing in his pants was worse than telling Lily he had to piss in his pants when she was still unwilling to talk to him.

He grimaced at her, as she so innocently sat there, ready to curl up and sleep for the night – this night had suddenly become even shittier than it had been when he'd first discovered the situation.

But, thinking the night sucked wouldn't help his bladder, which was making him squirm more and more noticeably in the silence and darkness of the broom cupboard. The only thing that would help his bladder was an empty bucket, but he really couldn't use one while Lily had only just fallen asleep.

If she was a light sleeper or wasn't asleep yet, and woke up to see him without his pants on, pissing in a bucket, she would either die, kill him, or do both simultaneously.

Even though he really had to pee and hated the situation more than he could possibly say, he didn't want to die yet. So, really, he would have to wait until Lily was truly asleep until he could pee in peace, which could take countless hours for all he knew.

And he really didn't have the countless hours necessary for the time being.

Fuck.

Biting his lower lip nearly until bleeding point, James finally decided to make a very, very rash decision. It was going to be one he would sorely regret the moment he made it, and he was sure it would live on in her memory and in her jokes as his blackest moment to date, but he knew he had to do it if he valued his very life.

It wouldn't be too hard, he told himself, even though he knew it would be. He just had to grit his teeth and do it. Take a deep breath. Recall to mind the Law of the Idiot, and its good result in a situation about as tight.

So, with a breath, James wildly jiggled Lily, his motions in tune with the frantic movements of his legs as he attempted to stop his bladder from bursting, and yelled her name until she could no longer ignore him.

"What the fuck do you want?!" she demanded sleepily, pushing him away roughly as her eyes glinted in the darkness.

"Lily, I wouldn't do this to you voluntarily, I swear I wouldn't, but I'm in the middle of a damn crisis here," James panted.

"What?" she asked, her eyes softening the tiniest bit at the edge of fretfulness audible in his tone.

"Merlin, I can't believe I have to say this to you," James groaned, closing his eyes against her pale, curious face, "but Lily Evans, I really, really need to pee, and if I don't in the next few minutes, I swear to whatever Higher Power is up there laughing at me right now that I will do it in my fucking pants. Help me!!"