Author's Note: Yes, I do know that the dates do not fit with Rowling's idea

Author's Note: Yes, I do know that the dates do not fit with Rowling's idea. The story is very slightly AU. I just pictured James and Lily as a bit older when they got married.

Disclaimer: Unfortunately, it's not mine.

Chapter 8: Can't Stop Thinking

August 1972

The summer between sixth and seventh year Lily Evans knows she is changing. Her sister is getting married next week, she broke up with Fabian Prewett two days ago, her parents are fighting loudly downstairs, and she is questioning love. With her arms folded under her head and her chin tipped into the sunlight, Lily is lying in bed awake in the morning before she has the courage to conquer the stairs and meet her parents' dulcet tones.

"Stupid hormones," she mutters aloud to herself. She is thinking about a dream including a certain handsome, tall, dark-haired, hazel-eyed boy by the name of James Potter. Lily doesn't know why she's thinking about this boy now – doesn't know why she's thinking about him at all. She had thought she hated James Potter. That is, until this past year when he had saved Serverus Snape's life. Saved an enemy's life because he was a person and no matter how much he wasn't liked he didn't deserve to…die. Saved Snape's life because it was the right thing to do. Lily didn't think he'd had it in him.

Maybe, Lily thinks, he isn't as stuck-up as I thought he was. Maybe he's better than he seems. If he wasn't, maybe I wouldn't be thinking about him. I'm confusing myself. Stupid Potter boy. Man. He's 17 now. Maybe he's gown up. He's different; he's not an arrogant little berk anymore.

She gets out of bed and pulls her thick auburn hair back into a loose ponytail. "Why can't I stop thinking about him?" she says aloud to the mirror on her dresser. "Maybe it's me who's changing. Maybe Potter is the same. No, he can't be. He saved Snape's life. He can't be the same."

Try as she might, Lily cannot get the messy dark hair, soft hazel eyes and handsome figure out of her mind. "What is wrong with me?" her head screams."I can't fall for bloody Potter!" But she is. She is and she knows it, but she doesn't know why. They are opposites. She will never date anyone like him. They won't fit together. They can't fit together. Still, she can't stop thinking about him.

Downstairs now and blocking out her parents' screams, she sees the letter on the table. Lily opens it and a head badge falls out. She stares at it, wondering what Dumbledore was smoking when he made the head assignments. Lily is an average student. She failed her Divination O.W.L. and sleeps through History of Magic. "I can't be Head Girl!" Still, she rubs the badge on her shirt and smiles. She wonders who the Head Boy is. Maybe he'll take her mind off James Potter.

Sirius Black has never liked his family. They are evil. They think the wrong things, they have the wrong ideas. And so Sirius hates them. He wants to hate them. He cannot let himself love everything his family stands for – everything that is so wrong. If he even tries to accept it he is cheating his classmates, his friends. He is cheating himself.

But, somehow, in the very recesses of his mind, Sirius loves them. He loves them. How could he do that to his classmates, to his friends? How could he do that to himself? Why does he love the people who stand for what he hates?

He wishes human nature did not include innate tendencies to love one's parents. With all his heart, Sirius wishes he could hate them. He doesn't want to be with them; he doesn't want to associate with them.

Still, he would sacrifice himself for them. He would kill anyone who hurt them. Because that was what Sirius felt for the people he loved. He felt it for his friends – and, without wanting to, he felt it for his family.

It may be worse that they love him as well, only because of human nature. Sirius does not want anyone who supports ideas he is so against to love him. He does not want them to love him, because that makes it okay for him to love them. If it is not okay to love, he will have an excuse to hate.

Since, in this world, it is okay to love one's child, and one's parents, Sirius has no excuse to hate them. He wants to, desperately. For Lily and the other muggle born people his parents have wronged, and for James, Remus, and Peter. For himself, he wants to hate them.

So Sirius decides he will try to get out of this dilemma. He pushes his love deep, deep down inside him, so it will never surface again. He embraces his hate for everyone prejudice against non-pure bloods. And Sirius will never admit to anyone (not even James) that he ever loved his parents at all.

Somehow Remus Lupin can't convince himself that he hates Sirius. He's tried. All summer he's tried. He's tried to tell himself that Sirius is stupid, hateful, a horrible friend. But then a picture of Sirius pops into his head and the laughing, warm black eyes and almost messy hair melts Remus into knowing that all Sirius did was make a mistake. And Sirius, after all, is only human.

Remus doesn't want to forgive his friend. He knows he should and he knows he will, but he wishes sometimes that he wasn't always the quiet, kind, forgiving one. Remus wishes that every once in a while he could just be…mean. But he knows it will never happen. Because the next time he sees Sirius he knows he will forgive him, just like he always does. Even if he doesn't want to. Because Sirius is his friend, and somewhere, deep inside him, Remus knows that Sirius must be feeling awful about what he did. He remembers the day in the hospital. The face he turned away from because he couldn't handle seeing hurt in Sirius Black's face. Nobody hurt Sirius Black. Nobody. At Hogwarts, Sirius Black was invincible. And Remus hated that Sirius now had to realize that he wasn't. Remus couldn't hurt his friend. He wouldn't do it. He knew how badly it would hurt both of them if Remus didn't forgive.

Because Remus cannot stop thinking about his friend. And no matter how hard he tries he will never stop thinking about him. Remus will forgive him.

Attempting to tell himself to finally give up, James Potter knows that is not what he does. He can't, not on her golden red hair, not on the green, green eyes he wishes he could swim in, not on the sassy temper she will never let go of, or her charming, cheeky personality that had even old man Slughorn couldn't resist.

All his life he had been taught by his ambitious parents to strive, that if you loved something hard enough you could have it. Does he not love Lily hard enough? Does she need someone who really cares about her? But James does care about Lily Evans; that much he knows. But she does not, and that kills him – that she thinks he is the kind of man who wants her only as another notch on the bedpost – this kills him.

He folds his hands under his head, laying on the bed at his father's house, trying to remember exactly what his parents had told him about perseverance, and whether or not they had specified how far to take it. They themselves had not gotten very far with it, had they? His father had been found in bed with another woman (though James is the only one in the world who knows that his father is still desperately in love with his ex-wife). His mother had called for divorce. And if there was anything in the world James Potter hated most, it was his parents' act of tearing his family apart.

James wonders if he took the perseverance thing too far. If the asking her out week after week was a turn-off for Lily.

He is scared of rejection from her this time, which he promises will be his last. There are no other chances for James Potter. This, something he has never had to be used to, scares him. He might mess it up, he realizes. And if he does, he will give up.

This is why Lily Evans scares him: because he needs her to feel good about himself. He has never needed anyone before like he needs her. And rejection from this particular woman would rip his heart to pieces.

He doesn't know anymore if he wants her to really know him. At least now he can contrast her rejections with the security that if she did know him she would love him. But if she knew him, knew him and still hated him…for the first time in his life, James Potter would hate himself as well. He hates that he depends on her, because that makes him weak, he knows. He hates it that a woman has made him weak.

His father's beaming face, filled with pride, greets James at the staircase. He holds out the letter, and James takes it, and sees the badge. Though he isn't sure he is exactly the kind of person Hogwarts wants to hold the badge, he knows by the madly happy look on his father's face that the title will earn him respect.

Lily Evans would never date the arrogant prick of a boy, Potter. But could she love the man, Head Boy?

With an increasing inferiority complex, Peter Pettigrew sits on a stone in his parents' garden. Not even here does he belong. So far he has not belonged anywhere. His friends may have tried to boost his self-esteem, but have obviously failed, his self-image having been formed at the beginning of first year by a hat. Now he cannot stop thinking about that hat, the way it defined him, and the way it forced him to define himself.

A hard-hearted world, the hat lives in, judging people at age eleven. For some it had worked well. For Peter it had not. He does not know which house he should have been in. Perhaps he shouldn't have been at Hogwarts at all.

He is not a Gryffindor. He is a coward, and the opposite of proud.

His house should obviously not be Ravenclaw; Peter has always been far from intelligent.

He wants his match to be Hufflepuff, but the hat had said, the length you would go to defend your friends is a bit murky. Yet he desperately wants to be loyal and honest.

Peter does not want to have a character that allows him to be a potential Slytherin. James and Sirius say Slytherins are ugly and mean. But the hat has told him he has ambition and cunning. You can be cunning and tricky when you want to be.

Peter wants to abolish the Slytherin qualities from himself and send them all to the end of the earth. He wants to replace them with Hufflepuff qualities. He wants to be what he is not, and wants to kill what he is. He does not want to allow Gryffindor to let him try something new, as the hat told him to want. He wants to fit in…somewhere. He cannot know where, because he has never known the feeling.

So Peter's new goal is to be wanted. More than anything in the world he wants someone to need him and needs someone to want him. And Peter will take the first offer he has to fit in.

Each night this summer he has remembered Potter's flashing eyes. Potter loved Black, Serverus Snape knows, and he probably always will. But that hadn't stopped him from saving Snape's life.

"You are indebted to him, Mr. Snape," Dumbledore had told him. Serverus doesn't want to be indebted to James Potter – a boy who has everything Serverus has always wanted.

This is why he despises James Potter. Because he is smart without having to work for it, because his family loves him, because he has money, honor, courage and dignity, because he is handsome, charismatic, funny and charming. Because Lily Evans, though she has yet to discover this as well, is in love with him.

But Serverus would rather die than admit that he is jealous of James Potter. He will never admit that James Potter is better than him. It's no wonder Lily Evans loves him. Lily Evans will never love Serverus, he knows, because Serverus is not nearly as good as James Potter.

So why did Serverus have to think about James Potter? Only because now he is sure the Gryffindor is better than him. Serverus had never saved anyone's life, and it would kill him inside if he had to save Potter's. Perhaps he'll die before I can save him, Serverus thinks, hopefully, then returns to reality. I will still be indebted to him. I will have to find some other way.

Serverus feels his forearm burn, looks down to the brightly-colored dark mark, and apparates to the Dark Lord's side. He hates that he is a death eater, because it is pointless. There is no intellect involved – only vengeance and racism. Serverus hates it because it makes him weak. And because, yet again, it proves that James Potter is better than Serverus.

Author's Note: Please, please, please review. Although adding me as an alert or favorite means a lot to me, reviewing means so much more. Wherever you are on the loved it/hated it spectrum, please TELL ME, AND TELL ME WHY!!