Author's Note: You guys! I have love for you. I was so happy to wake up to such lovely reviews this morning! It made me giggle to see some of you speculating on what James' new costume would be, and I'm going to have to disappoint you because it's actually something quite boring. Oh dear. Someone left a review saying that this fic felt like a one-shot, which is namely because it actually was, to begin with. However, it was just far too long to be enjoyable as a one-shot, I think, and I much preferred the way it has been panning out as a multi-chaptered fic, too. This way I can give more attention to each of James' wishes. Tee he he.

This fic is still for Emily, who basically yelled at me to update before she'd even read chapter one. Have I mentioned to you guys that I love her? Because I do. Also, she is a total Betty and I am kind of dazzled by how pretty she is. Had we gone to school together I would have shirked away from her in the corridors and never spoken to her because she is just too beautiful to be as nice as she is, and I would have assumed that I was too much of a dork to be worthy of her attention. It totally does not compute, though, because she's amazing. Love.

Wish One

"My dormitory?"

In hindsight, James probably shouldn't have shouted up the stairs after her, especially since she was still only mere feet away. It attracted a lot of unwanted attention from the surrounding drunkards, including Sirius, who was watching the both of them with a knowing, filthy smirk on his face.

Lily stopped walking five steps up and turned around, rubbing the crease between her eyebrows with her finger, as though James was stressing her out with his obvious statements.

"Yes, Potter," she said impatiently. "Your dormitory. You do know how to get there, right?"

James followed her up a couple of steps so that they were eye level and regarded her seriously, or as seriously as a man dressed in a giant banana costume could regard a sexy Fairy Godmother. "People are looking at us, Evans."

Lily spared a glance for the watching students, and shrugged. "So?"

"Aren't you worried about what they might think if they see us going up to my dormitory by ourselves?"

James wasn't exactly fond of the idea that Lily Evans could develop a reputation as a harlot, just for his sake. It'd only set him back a million years when the fallout eventually occurred and Lily blamed it all on him. However, she didn't seem to care at that very moment, in spite of the obvious murmuring and pointing that was going on below them.

"If you care about what a group of gossiping schoolgirls have to say about us," she said fiercely, taking his hand in hers and yanking him further up the stairs as she continued in her walk. "Then get off my lawn, Potter."

Hardly inclined to object to the girl of his dreams holding his hand and leading him anywhere, James protested no longer and walked with her to his dormitory. He desperately tried to remember if he and the boys had left the dorm in a really nasty state and what Lily would think of him if they had, whilst simultaneously worrying that his hand was going to get clammy and disgust her. When they walked into the room, however, it was thankfully not as bad as it normally was, and his hand was still relatively dry. Success.

"Where do you keep your clothes?" Lily immediately demanded to know.

"Um, Lily?" Not that James had a problem with all of the hand-holding that was going on, but he was a stupid boy, and stupid boys sometimes said stupid things. He looked down at their entwined fingers. "You're still holding my hand."

"Oh, sorry," said Lily, with a dollop of irritation and a hell of a lot of sarcasm, and dropped his hand, suddenly flushed and huffy. "I didn't know it was a criminal offence."

"It's not," he began, mentally flailing, and helplessly feeling like he was missing out on something he shouldn't have been. "I just tho-"

"Never mind," she snapped, and tossed her hair again. This time her tiara stayed firmly in position. "Where'd you keep your clothes already?"

"Er. Over there," said James, mystified, and pointed over to a chest of drawers that stood next to his bed. Seemingly undaunted by the prospect of rooting through his personal effects, Lily marched over to it and yanked the top drawer open.

"You're not going to find a costume in there," James remarked, stating the obvious, as Lily started to root through his clothes. He was still in the dark as to Lily's mysterious mood swings, especially when he hadn't done anything to warrant her disdain. Had they been fifteen again, and he had been bullying one of her friends or something, it would have made perfect sense, but now… "It's just a bunch of weekend clothes and school robes."

"Precisely," said Lily, taking the time to examine an old blue t-shirt of his before deciding she didn't need it and tossing it over her shoulder. "I'm going to dress you as a teenage boy who knows how to put an outfit together, a rare and beautiful thing."

"You don't think I can put an outfit together?" James asked her, genuinely mildly offended.

"No," said Lily bluntly, hooking a pair of underpants on her baby finger and dropping them hurriedly to the floor. "You've got some really nice clothes, but you wear them all wrong. It's the failure of your gender, I suppose, I can hardly blame you alone."

"Well golly, thanks a bunch," James murmured bitterly, folding his arms as well he could. Lily, however, ignored him and went on pulling clothes out of his drawer, and then throwing them violently away, for several minutes before she found what she was looking for.

"Aha! Now." She sighed with contentment when she pulled a dark coloured pair of jeans - jeans that James had only worn once since his mother had sent them to him, so vehement were her promises to end his life if he destroyed them because (she said) even with magic, mended clothes never look as good as they did when they were new – out of his drawer and tossed them on his bed. "You can put those on for a start. Christ, why do you have so many dull colours in your wardrobe?"

"Huh?" James quite liked his clothes. "What?"

"You shouldn't be walking around in earth tones and greys when you've got that colouring," she continued, not even sparing him a single glance. "You've got lovely dark hair and you tan so easily; you should be in reds and blues and bold, vibrant colours. Look."

Altogether jarred by her harshly-given compliment, James looked from the jeans on his bed to Lily, who was facing him now, holding a red, V-necked jumper out for him to look at. He assumed that she was expecting him to react to it in some way, even though it was nothing more than a regular old jumper that his mother had bought him once, so he merely shrugged. Lily sighed, and laid it down on top of the jeans.

"I can't imagine why you don't wear this more often, it's a lovely colour. Take that hideous costume off and put these on instead. Your runners will do for your feet."

She sat down on his bed and leaned back against the pillows as if she had no intention of moving from that spot, looking up at him expectantly. James' eyes widened behind his glasses; he hardly dared to believe what he was seeing.

"You want me to strip off now?"

"Yes."

"You mean, right in front of you?"

"Christ, Potter," she clucked impatiently and rolled her eyes. "I'm not asking you to get naked, and I'm hardly going to get off on watching you divest yourself of a banana suit either, don't be such a bloody prude."

"No, it's not that," he floundered, feeling suddenly stupider and more pathetic than ever before, standing in this costume in front of the most beautiful girl he had ever met while she looked at him as if he were the most greatly annoying thing on the planet. Why was Evans calling him a prude? Wasn't she the prude? Hadn't she once kicked Sirius in the unmentionables for dropping his trousers in the common room and announced that if she had wanted to see a boy's filthy boxers, she would have moved up to their dorm and lived a life of squalor? "Merlin, Evans, it's just a little bit strange that-"

"Anything, even the sight of your naked torso, is a pleasanter sight than that sodding banana you're wearing," was Lily's curt and informative reply. "If you feel self-conscious about your underdeveloped body, however, I'll not look until you're dressed."

"Hey. Hey." That. That was going too far. "Who said anything about self-conscious?"

James took great pride in his appearance, being a rather handsome fellow, albeit in an unconventional way. In his physique he took just as much. His arms and shoulders had benefited greatly from several years spent atop a broom and hurling Quaffles across the Quidditch pitch, not to mention all those hours spent polishing silverware in detention. He was already tall, his weight and skin never fallen foul of his passion for junk food, and while he had never managed to obtain those perfectly sculpted abdominal muscles that he had heard girls were fond of, a nicely flat stomach was the next best thing. He didn't have any horrible birthmarks or disfigurements, wasn't horribly hairy, and he didn't have a freakish, disturbing navel like Sirius did (but didn't ever show anybody). And even though it was true that standing half-naked in front of Lily Evans (who, in spite of whatever everyday human flaws that existed in her personality, was to his eyes nothing short of aesthetic perfection) made James felt about as attractive as a one-eyed, pox-ridden hunchback with an obesity problem, his pride simply wouldn't allow him to let that show.

"You're utterly ridiculous," Lily concluded, and reluctantly got up from her comfortable spot. "Turn around, I'll take it off for you."

With no consideration for either James' feelings or his personal space, Lily walked over, grabbed hold of the zipper that travelled down the back of his banana costume and wrenched it down with considerable force. "If I want something done, I'll have to do it myself."

Her fingers brushed ever so slightly against his now bare and unprotected back, and James very nearly died on the spot.

"I can, er, undress myself, Evans," he protested weakly, very glad that Lily was standing behind him and couldn't see his face. Honourable he may have been, but James was still a man, and the idea of Lily Evans manhandling him into a state of undress was almost as arousing as the idea of doing the same to her. He wouldn't have been human if the thought of ripping that tiny little fairy dress off of her slender body and flinging her against the nearest wall hadn't occurred to him at least five million times. Except now wasn't the time to think about that in too much detail, nor was it the time to bask in the loveliness that was being undressed by Lily, because thoughts like that left a very tell-tale sign and he wasn't wearing an awful lot under that banana.

"Hey!"

James was snapped out of his musings by a sharp poke to the back and a very irritated girl. Turning around, he looked down at the redhead and was met by a pair of extremely put out eyes and a sulky little pout. "Are you listening to me at all or just standing there like a lemon? I told you to wriggle your way out."

"Uh. Sorry." James was discombobulated and teetering on the verge of becoming very excited, but he managed to shove his head and torso out of the banana costume and push it down until it got stuck, so that it was gathered bizarrely around his hips and he looked like a moron.

"Hopeless, Potter, hopeless," said Lily in amusement, looking him up and down as he tried to pull the banana suit down his legs without accidentally taking his boxer shorts with them. She brightened visibly for the first time since he had wished for the removal of the stupid banana costume in the first place. "You know, you're not so underdeveloped after all."

"You did all this to see me in the nip?" James shook his head in mock disgust. "Hardly ladylike, Evans, I'm ashamed of you."

"You boys and your assumptions about girls," she scoffed, and gave him a wry smile. "You think we're all as pure as the driven snow and think only wholesome things. Not true. I think I have just as much right to appreciate a nearly naked boy as you do to appreciate a nearly naked girl, don't you think?"

"Pity there are no nearly naked girls around," he grunted, finally managing to divest himself of the banana suit completely, and kicking it violently towards Peter's bed. He was burning the dratted thing at the next available opportunity. "I don't see you offering to take off that fairy costume."

"Is that honest to goodness genuine muscle I'm spotting, Potter?" Lily suddenly squeaked, all wide eyed and plainly ignoring what he had just said, if her suddenly pink cheeks were any indication. She reached out and squeezed his upper arm, much to his surprise. "Rock solid, too. Oh. Oh wow."

"I'm actually bowled over," said James, to nobody and nothing in particular.

"Wow," Lily repeated, now poking his tummy. "James, you got all… manly."

"Well, yeah, I'm sort of... not eleven anymore." James was blushing more obviously than he ever had done in his life, it was mortifying.

"And your hands, too," Lily continued, completely ignoring James in favour of, well, James. "Your hands are so big now." She looked up at him. "You could carry somebody my weight easily, Potter, couldn't you?"

"… Do you want me to carry you?"

Like most people in love, James would never be convinced that Lily liked him back unless she plainly told him so to his face, and since she had never done so his little suspicions were only indication enough in the moment, before days passed and they got swamped by massive amounts of self-doubt and rationalization. James could suspect all he liked that his feelings were reciprocated, but generally he could admit to himself that he was really only imagining it.

No matter how wrong he didn't know he was.

"Oh, not now," said Lily dismissively, once again absorbed in poking his stomach. "I'm too busy adjusting to the fact that time passed and you grew up. I heard before that it happened but, y'know, you never really pay too much attention until you're looking at a half-naked man who was five foot nothing and skinnier than a broomstick just ten minutes ago."

"I suppose you could call that a shock to the system," said James dryly, having long since accepted the fact that Lily had developed breasts and a bottom and a certain sway in her hips when she walked that made it difficult for him to swallow his breakfast when she breezed past him in the Great Hall every morning. It hadn't exactly been a difficult revelation to deal with. "Are you trying to make me uncomfortable or something, Lil?"

"Oh, undoubtedly," she said brightly, giving him a big smile. "Since you are apparently so dead set on standing around in your boxer shorts for the rest of the night –good choice, by the way, I hate briefs on a man."

"So you think I'm a man." James thrust a fist into the air and grinned cheekily at her. "Progress."

"Yeah yeah, Bruce Wayne, put some clothes on before I go blind."

"Blind with lust," James scoffed loudly, even though he himself had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and pushed her gently in the direction of his bed. "And don't even think about watch me change, I'm a very sensitive boy, you know."

Lily said nothing in response, but sat down on the bed and demurely covered her eyes with her hand as James dressed himself in the outfit she had picked out for him, clearly peeking through her fingers. When he had finally clothed himself, she took her hand away and looked him up and down with a critical eye indeed.

"Much better than that banana," she finally concluded, smiling the self-satisfied smile of one who had done a fabulous job, and knew it. "You're almost handsome in it."

"Cheers." James couldn't see what was so great about a red shirt and a pair of jeans, but Lily was clearly the one with the passion for fashion in this scenario, so he wouldn't question it. If she thought he looked good, he wasn't going to complain. "I'm almost grateful."

"You lie, you lie." Lily waved his words away and grinned up at him from her spot on his bed. "Of course you're grateful. If it wasn't for me, you'd still be downstairs, wallowing in self-pity, trying your best to look tortured and failing because you look absurd."

"If it wasn't for me," James responded, quick as a whip. "You'd still be downstairs, pretending to listen to Harding's self-important tripe because you couldn't bear to be impolite and tell him to toss off and leave you alone."

"I'm only ever impolite to you, honey," Lily responded silkily, batting her eyelashes in an exaggerated manner.

"Only because we know each other so well and you love me so, darling."

"I wouldn't be missing my best friend's birthday party if I wasn't here, you know."

"You chose to come up here and take me with you."

"I only did that because you desperately needed a different costume and I don't have the heart to let you die of embarrassment."

"Call this a costume?" James lay down on the bed next to Lily and looked up at her, pulling at the fabric of his jumper, just in case she was short sighted and under the impression that she had picked out something different. "I was expecting something a bit more imaginative than this, Evans, maybe an old timey white shirt with an open collar that could billow impressively in the wind as I stood around looking manly, waiting for a damsel to save. And a sword," he suggested, as an afterthought. "I'd look good with a sword."

"You'd look like a ponce!" Lily exclaimed, laughing, while James stretched his limbs and crossed his arms beneath his head. "I couldn't sleep at night for shame, if I'd done that to you."

"I'd look like the manliest of men, Lily Evans, and you know it," he argued stubbornly, bursting with self-importance. "I didn't ask to be born beautiful, you know, it just happened. It's a curse, living with it every day, feeling bad because those around me are destined to mediocrity whilst I am fit to shine in the palaces of kings. But I don't complain, Evans," he said seriously, gazing up at her with the most earnest expression he could muster, all the while thinking that he was making a tit out of himself and she was never going to talk to him again and Merlin, even though Lily Evans was sitting on his bed, all he could talk about was himself. "I do not, even when girls demand to feel my arm muscle because the mere thought of it sends them spinning into dizzying satisfaction."

"Your muscle isn't all that impressive," was Lily's dry response, even as she gave his arm another squeeze. "You were so deflated after the banana suit, I just didn't want to damage your masculine pride and say so."

"You've damaged my masculine pride so viciously and often that I'm entirely impervious to your words."

"Does that apply only to insults and put-downs or will you ignore any compliments I might feel like throwing your way?"

"Oh, I'll take the compliments, any and all. Feel free to start now."

"That's a double standard."

"So, I'm a hypocrite," he concluded, and grinned up at Lily's look of disapproval. "You could call me out on it, but we've already established that I'm disregarding your callous words intended to hurt, so I wouldn't bother if I were you."

"You stupid arse," Lily scoffed, and ruffled his hair before getting up off the bed and brushing invisible dust off her dress, thus giving James, who was still lying on the bed, a fine view of her bottom and the silky looking pants she was wearing underneath that tiny little skirt, which made him sit up like a shot, which gave him a head rush. "Come to the kitchens with me, I want some chips."

"There's a wide array of snacks downstairs," James pointed out, squeezing his eyes shut while the pain passed. "And it's your best friend's birthday party. Won't she miss you?"

"Mary has Eddie," said Lily, fluffing her hair and fixing her dress. "I think she's good."

"Oh yeah, she's still with him." James didn't really understand the deal between Lily's best friend and her boyfriend. As far as James knew, Mary and Eddie had been mortal enemies for most of their school careers because of a row during first year when Eddie had made fun of Lily for not knowing what Quidditch was and Mary sprang viciously to her defence, and then one day they were just… together. Bang. Poof. No explanation required. "They're still going strong then, huh?"

"Oh definitely, even though Mary will lie and tell you they're on the verge of breaking up any day now," Lily explained airily, as if this wasn't a rather strange thing to say. "They really love each other, you know, they just won't admit it to one another. Or to anybody else, for that matter."

"Why?" he asked, still sitting on the bed and staring up at Lily, genuinely curious. "If they both feel the same way about one another, why bother keeping it a secret? Aren't they just lying to themselves otherwise?"

"Not everyone is as emotionally healthy and trigger-happy as you, James," Lily pointed out, although not unkindly. "This is obviously just conjecture, but in Eddie's case I'm pretty sure it's because he knows that Mary won't let him. He's afraid that if he tells her he loves her at anything other than the absolutely perfect time, she'll freak out and slap him, or break up with him. So he's treading on eggshells right now."

"And Mary?"

"Mary..." Lily frowned to herself, and faltered a little before she could continue to speak. "Mary is a very strong person, and she's used to relying on herself, so I guess she finds it hard to trust people, especially men. She's had a few bad experiences, and maybe a different kind of person would have let them slide, but she's just not like that. Deep down, she knows she can trust Eddie, but she still doesn't want to. She's just…" She shrugged, appearing to be a little bit uncomfortable. "She's just really scared."

James frowned back. He had never thought of Mary MacDonald in that respect, she had always seemed so capable and confident and so, well, so like Lily, really. "Sounds like you've given this a lot of thought."

"Yeah, well," said Lily lightly, as if they were discussing a matter of no real importance, but her eyes were boring directly into his and for some reason, it made him feel nervous. "She and I are alike in that respect."

"Oh really?" he replied, with a curious raise of the eyebrow.

"As like as two peas, Potter. We understand one another. See, what you have to realize about Mary is that despite all of her hang-ups, she's not stupid. She'll get over it eventually, well," she paused, and gave a short, pretty little laugh. "You know, Potter, I think she already has."

"Well, if she has gotten over it," said James slowly, chewing over the matter, which seemed so simple and easy to fix in his mind. "What's to keep her from telling him how she really feels?"

"Maybe because she's pushed him away so much before, she feels like she doesn't deserve him," she suggested quietly, and with an exaggerated shrug that seemed hastily added to keep the tone of the conversation a little lighter.

"And what about you?" he pressed on. "Do you think she deserves him?"

She paused, and locked eyes with him. "I think Mary does."

"Oh."

Once again, James was struck by the feeling that he was missing something, something really important, and it was just there in front of him to see if only he could. He felt like he'd been missing out on something since Lily had first approached him, like he needed to hole away by himself for a few minutes and go over everything in his head so he could grasp whatever the hell was going on. Whatever that thing was, he suspected, Lily was a lot more clued in on it than he was.

The moment passed, though, when Lily spun on her heel and skipped over to his bedroom door with renewed vigour. Evidently, the deep and meaningful conversations had ended for the night.

"C'mon, idiot," she called over her shoulder. "Kitchens. Food. You need to think of a second wish."

A/N: WHAM! Next update won't be for a few days because I'm going to my cousin's for the weekend and leaving my laptop behind. Ah, Lizzie, do not miss me.