Disclaimer: I don't own HP, JKR does. Please don't sue me, Ms Rowling...
Author's Notes: Just a little drabble, written mostly for my own amusement, and on some twisted level intended to combat the frustration of absurdly sore wrists/hands.
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Normally James hates clichés, the way he hates to see Snivellus win, or Sirius frown, or his mother cry (the first because that's just him at his childish best, the second everyone with eyes in their head could tell you, and the last he won't admit to anyone). He knows that it's a cliché, but for some reason this is different and he loves seeing Lily get mad.
It's the only way that he can make her face light up and her eyes shine. She's beauty when she's angry, the purest form of it he's ever seen, and he knows it isn't proper, it's just not right or fair that such a divine being should make him act so badly. He thinks he rather wants to be good, for her sake and maybe someday his own, but he can't help misbehaving, especially when she might catch him at it. It's the knowledge that if she finds him out, she will fling off her ordinariness like a cloak and become again a valkyrie; when he is wicked and she knows it, she is affected. Her indignant rage gives her wings and so she soars.
If he were good always, he fears, she would be forever simply there. Just plain Lily dear, the prefect and top student, whose smiles sing when no-one listens. She would sit constantly, steady in this pathetic life of normality and mere perfection.
He wants to see her fly.
If he were good and decent as she says he should be, he could be her friend, could be her companion, to stand beside her as an oasis of fairness in her desert of injustice. She would look at him, and she would listen to him, and someday she might even like him.
But he wants her to see him, and to speak to him. He wants her love -- and if he cannot have that, until he is allowed that privilege, he will take her hatred, but he will never surrender to being an indifference in her mind.
It is a cliché, but it is true of Lily, and his secret is that he makes her mad on purpose, because then she is beauty.