My first attempt at a James/Lily fanfic. I've already done a songfic for them, but I thought this might be a little more challenging, and the idea just came to me. Please excuse any issues you might have with this.

She was his beauty, she was his passion, she was his arrogance. And, for the longest time, she was his goal. The things her beauty drove him to do were the things that earned him his title. Whatever he did to impress her only gained him disapproval. He tried so hard to do anything he could for her, and yet he could only succeed in driving himself into a more depressing state of existence; a state that made his friends roll with laughter every time he failed, miserably, again. He could only pretend that he was that much closer to success so as not to become upset with his ever-growing list of exhausted attempts.

She was Lily Evans. As a first year, she was immediately noticed for her brilliance. She was a bookworm, much like a large-toothed, bushy-haired brunette we know so well. Only this Lily Evans attended Hogwarts many years before our beloved Miss Granger.

Perhaps things would have all been completely different if she hadn't had her nose stuck in her book during her first breakfast at Hogwarts. Perhaps she would have seen a small, black haired boy glancing in her direction every few seconds, his hazel eyes darting back and forth behind smart looking glasses. And possibly she wouldn't have come to hate him for the obscene things he did, because if she had taken notice of him, maybe he wouldn't have had to make a prat of himself trying to get her attention.

Five years later, and he had grown considerably. His mousy hair, though still untamed, always had a windswept look, due to a love for Quidditch as well as an incessant habit of running his fingers through his hair. He was no longer small. On the contrary, his constant Quidditch training had toned his muscles. Also, as a result of being a growing teenager, he had sprouted several inches over the years. His glasses, which he had long since grown tired of, contradicted his entire personality.

Since the day James and Sirius met back in their first year, all of Hogwarts forgot what it was like to have a strict, smoothly running school. Day two and they had nearly gotten themselves expelled. They were the most sought-after boys in the entire school, and it probably had a lot to do with their good looks. Of course, any boy who knew he could get whatever he wanted was bound to have an overlarge head. And thus the reason for this story is finally revealed. What if there was something that this boy James, in all of his glory, could not get by just standing around looking good?

It was rumored so often that James Potter had dated every girl at Hogwarts save for Lily Evans that, after a while, people began to take it as fact. James and Sirius were, without argument, the best looking boys to walk the halls of Hogwarts during all the time that they schooled there. And so if it were rumored that you had dated James Potter, would you argue with that? Of course not. In fact, there was only one person who knew otherwise, and that would be James himself. And even he, sometimes, would forget the truth.

The truth, though, is something that few people wanted to hear. Who wanted to hear that James had had only enough girlfriends to count on his two hands, or maybe even a few less than that? Nobody. Even Sirius laughed when James had tried to convince him that he didn't snog any girl who passed by in between classes.

This was, inevitably, what led Lily Evans to despise James with every fiber of her being. She was disgusted with his seemingly insatiable need for sexual attention. She could not stand the way that his head had grown so overly large that he thought it necessary to bully every person he could for even their smallest faults, and that he found it hilarious to do so. Who could be so inhumanly awful? And why did he think he was so much better than everyone else? What right did he think he had to put people down? So what if he had a bit of talent on a broomstick and mild attractiveness!? Needless to say, Lily wanted nothing to do with him.

But James wanted everything to do with her.