AN: Just a warning –I've already got a multi-chap on the run; this one is just for fun and not my main priority, but I'm still full of excitement and ideas for it. Expect much ridiculous and irregular updates. To anyone who reads Tangled, this is in no way related and the characters may be completely different to those in that story. All that aside, I hope you enjoy.

Aunt Ginny (who, I have to point out, is not really my aunt), always just laughs and says I've got far better taste than to ever go for James.

Ha, if only she knew.

I just go with it though as I'd just die if anyone found out that yeah, I think James is alright. Alright in the way that's more than just matey-matey he's a good guy and more the like holy-shit-why-do-I-have-such-a-ridiculous-crush-on-my-loveable-cocky-idiot-of-a-best-friend, kind of alright. Plus I know there's nothing stupider than to engage Ginny Potter and her fiery-temper-that-could-rival-a-Hungarian-Horntail's in an argument, so I tend to just agree with whatever she says. For my own safety, you know. The woman's too clever and tricky and stubborn and persistent for her own good. I love her though.

Although not as much as I love her son.

…I didn't just say that.

ANYWAY. I stay in his room when I'm sleeping the night there because we've know each other all our lives and have been best friends since we were three-years-old and he pulled my pigtails and I pulled him off his toy-broomstick.

But it's not like it's just the two of us. Louis Weasley, James's gorgeous gay cousin, completes our pathetic trio of three people who couldn't be bothered making new friends upon starting school.

I sleep on the bed because James is too damned chivalrous for his own good (and if he wasn't so adorable I'd hate him for it). So I lie between his snitch patterned sheets and try not to feel creepy because I can tell that these sheets smell like him and I really rather like it and it's pretty damned distracting and doesn't at all contribute to the possibility of sleep.

Then James's voice speaks out of the near silence and the darkness and I nearly have a heart attack, thinking that it's something out of one of my daydreams that has just gone far too over the top.

"Alice," he says, "will you marry me?"

I open my mouth a few times but nothing comes out. I mean, really, what am I meant to reply to that? Yes, please? No. I decide to go for sarcastic. It's the language James and I understand best, after all.

"What, now?" I say.

I expect a reply much in the same tone. Maybe, "Yes! Call a carriage, summon me a dress! Away we must wed!" but I can see James now that I've opened my eyes and they're adjusting to the darkness, and he's facing me, his blue eyes wide and serious. Something stirs within me but I shove it down and force myself to concentrate, to wait for the punch line.

It doesn't come.

"No," he says, twisting the sheet nervously in his hands. "If we're both old and unmarried, you because you're all wonderful and successful, and me, because I've reached the point when you're not an eligible bachelor, you're just pathetic, and I'm living in a caravan with fifty cats, would you consider marrying me so I don't have to grow old alone?"

I know it's just the kind of honesty that just comes out in the darkness to the people you trust and in the morning we'll pretend this never happened but it really gets to me and my heart hurts for him, because I know this is as close as he'll ever come to admitting his true doubts and fears and insecurities. I know that he'll be the wonderful one; successful and happy, with a beyond beautiful wife and dozens of naughty, loving children, but he apparently he doesn't know that and it's just ridiculous, but everyone has these doubts, I'd know better than most, and contrary to popular belief, James is only human.

He finishes his speech and we just stare at each other. Then he adds, as an afterthought or maybe because it's the only thing his speech was missing, "and because I love you, of course."

I both hate and love how easily he can say it. But I only hate how little it means.

I groan, because that's all you can ever do to his ridiculous ideas. He doesn't like to go all deep-and-meaningful, and luckily either do I. "James, that's never going to work," I say.

He doesn't miss a beat. "I know, I have cat allergies."

I laugh and throw a pillow at him. He catches it with his stupid-bloody-perfect Quidditch reflexes and adds it to the pile of pillows he's resting his oversized head on.

"So, what is it Ali-cat? Want to get hitched?"

I didn't expect the seriousness to last a moment longer.

"And not now, of course," he adds. "We both need our beauty sleep. You especially. No, in a thousand years or however long it'll take me to get ugly, will you marry me?"

I look at him. Dark and ruffled hair that matches the messiness of his room. Pale skin, smiling lips, a splash of freckles across his nose. A t-shirt over muscled arms. A teddy bear almost proudly displayed on the shelf behind him.

My cocky, arrogant, loveable, idiotic, sweet, utterly gorgeous best friend.

I'd marry him right then and there.

But that's hardly the kind of thing you can just blurt out to the guy who sees you in no way more than platonically, so I just roll over so he can't see my face. So I can't see his.

"Only if we can get geese," I say.

"No way," he replies. "One once chased me a mile and then bit my foot. I couldn't walk for a week. How about chickens?"

I yawn. "Deal."

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