Prologue

Disclaimer: I am not JK Rowling. You have been misled. Go back and find a mind. No, seriously, this fic is what I like to think of as a combination of all the good parts of all the good fics. Therefore, my compliments go out to: drowning goldfish, Eihwaz and Lourdaise, duva (fictionalley . com), and xKonstantinex (despite the fact that you drive me crazy with your lack of updates). Please do not take offense if you see the same themes in here. Take is as a compliment and don't sue!

I lived for one reason only – Lily Evans.

I hadn't always been in love with her. When we first met, in first year, I wasn't interested in girls yet. Besides, we never talked. Around fourth year, however, I came to the startling revelation that she was the most beautiful girl alive. She had this blinding red hair, astonishingly bright green eyes, full red lips, a great figure (though her school uniform did nothing to compliment it), and perfectly flawless skin. A bit superficial, I know, but you're reading into it wrong. That's not when I fell in love with her. By this time I had gone out with enough pretty, but dumb and boring, girls that I knew to be cautious. So I set myself to finding out more about her – her likes, dislikes, hopes, fears, loves, hates, and of course, her personality. Naturally, it helped that I was on the quidditch team with one of her best friends and that she was a prefect with one of my best friends. Plus my skills at eavesdropping and observation really came in handy.

So I started to get a grasp on what she was like. She was always there to help someone out with their charms, and never stereotyped anyone, not even Slytherins! She stood up for people, was nice to everyone, and, surprisingly enough, actually made me work for my grades sometimes. Above all, it was her kindness towards others and the way her temper flared at injustice that drew me to her. And after all this, I realized not only was she drop-dead gorgeous, but she also had the best personality I had ever seen in a girl. Obviously, she was the girl for me.

Unfortunately there was the little problem of how she didn't seem to know I existed. Obviously I had to do something to get her to notice me. Honestly, here I was, quidditch star, prankster extraordinaire, with any girl in school willing to ask me out, and she wasn't begging me for a chance? I was fourteen – what was I supposed to have done?

So in the early part of fifth year I asked her out. ...And she turned me down.

My mind reeled, and I think that sudden act of independence coming from her is what threw me over from schoolboy crush to full-blown love. This just didn't happen to James Potter. I mean, I was James Potter – pureblood, from a rich family, sure to get the quidditch captainship, one of the most popular guys at Hogwarts, with girls all over me.

So naturally I had to pick the one that wasn't.

But then I realized that all I had to do was make her want me. And so I did was any other hot-blooded fifteen-year-old wizard would've done. I got her to notice me. My friends and I pulled even more exuberant stunts and pranks. I brought attention to myself in any way I possibly could, and fed off my popularity as a chaser of the Gryffindor quidditch team. Really, there was no way that she couldn't have noticed me. But apparently I wasn't what she wanted, because when I kept asking, she kept saying no. And usually, these rejections were accompanied by an insult or two.

I can admit she was right about a few things. Okay, she was right about most things. I was immature, egotistical, spoiled, and I was a bit harsh on the Slytherins. But I didn't attack the helpless for my own amusement, I wasn't promiscuous, and I wasn't that big of a git. Not that she made these distinctions.

After spending the entire year asking her out and failing, embarrassing myself a whole lot in the process, I realized something was wrong. At first I thought it was her – everyone else in the school seemed to like me, right? But they all seemed to like Lily too – and for more appealing reasons than they did me. I leveled with myself and considered that maybe it was me. Maybe I was all those things she claimed I was (well, most of them anyway). Mainly I figured it was my approach. Clearly making a big deal about myself to enrapture her attention was not the way to go – she seemed to think it made me full of myself. So it became obvious that new tactics had to be used. I would have to get her to see the good in me. She would have to come to me. Above all, I had to stop asking her out.

I was coming up on sixth year and, besides, we all have to mature someday, right?

Then during the summer, I got a huge jolt of maturity hitting me all at once. The dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, had been attacking all over wizarding Britain. The extent of this didn't really hit me until halfway through the summer – when he and his followers, the Death Eaters, murdered my aunt, uncle, and cousin Riona in cold blood. Riona was probably the closest person to me, apart from my friends. I now saw that there were bigger things out there than whether or not Lily Evans would go out with me. Voldemort was no longer some tragedy happening to other people. I knew that I had to concentrate on doing something with my life in order to be ready to deal with Voldemort if he ever got it into his twisted head to come after me. It was then that I decided that I wanted to be an Auror, just like my parents. It was time for me to grow up.

These revelations were by no means shared amongst my freedom-and-prank-loving friends. In fact, I'd wager they were met with extreme resistance. Speaking of which...

My friends and I were part of an elite group of pranksters, self-dubbed The Marauders. I suppose I could be considered the leader, but only if Sirius could be considered my co-leader.

Sirius Black was my best friend, and had been since our first time on the Hogwarts Express. We were the original marauders, and we always were the ones taking the most risks, and doing the most obtrusive and noteworthy jobs. He was the eldest son of a notorious pureblood family, known for its enthusiasm for the dark arts and disdain for those with muggle origins. Sirius (along with his cousin Andromeda) was the only ones in the family who didn't abide by this code. To say the least, he wasn't on very good terms with his parents or his brother, Regulus. In fact, during the summer Sirius showed up on our doorstep on a fiercely rainy day, dragging his trunk and what looked like most of his belongings and mumbling something about a family spat. He refused to go home, and eventually my mum gave in and let him stay with us. We were as close as brothers as it was anyway.

Sirius was just as popular as I was, maybe even more so in the female department. He was a beater on the quidditch team, and had more charm and shorter relationships than I. Whenever he walked into the room the girls all swooned, and don't think for a second he wasn't aware of it. He had this haircut that made him all at once look laid back and alluring (which is to say, that's what I've been told), dark eyes, and an all around handsome air that I could never hope to achieve. Sirius was, above all else, an extremely complex person. He was hilarious at times, extremely angry and moody at others. He has always been there for me and I have never met anyone more loyal, though at times he can get caught up in his emotions and be a bit irrational. In short, Sirius is the kind of guy that you love or hate. And most people loved him.

Peter Pettigrew was another of my friends, and he was like a little brother to Sirius and me. He was short and rather pudgy, with brown hair and watery-looking eyes. He wasn't up to the level in classes that the rest of the marauders were, so I was often helping him. It wasn't that he was dumb or anything – he just had trouble getting the concepts at first, but once he knew it he knew it for life. I suppose next to Sirius and me he seemed much dimmer, but we always set straight anyone who dared to say it within our hearing range. As far as pranks went, he seemed to have an affiliation for the sneaky, sly, undercover jobs, which suited the rest of us just fine. Peter was fiercely loyal to us, which never was a cause for me to complain.

Last but not least was Remus Lupin. Remus was a little shorter than me, with sandy brown hair and deep brown eyes. He was the planner of our pranks, though many times he went with us to oversee that we executed his painstakingly wrought plans correctly. Somehow the teachers and Dumbledore thought he didn't take part in our pranks, and made him a prefect. I can only assume that it was meant to cause him to be a good influence on us, and he did tell us off when we went too far with our Slytherin baiting. He was extremely shy, formal, and polite to people, which stood out at odds with Sirius and me. Even still, while many were a bit wary of him, he managed to still be extremely popular, and could've had as many girlfriends as Sirius and I, if only he wasn't a romantic who was in for the long haul. He didn't usually get close to people, which brings up the most interesting part of not only Remus, but also the entire marauder group.

Remus was a werewolf. He'd gotten bitten when he was really young, and when we became friends he worked hard to hide it from us. However, in second year we finally worked out that he wasn't leaving during the full moon to visit his sick mother and, rather than abandon him like he thought we would, we decided to help him. So we did the only conceivable thing to do in a situation like that: we became Animagi. It took us until the beginning of fifth year to do it, but we finally managed it. We even had nicknames for each other. I, a stag, was "Prongs," Sirius, a dog, was "Padfoot," Peter, a rat, was "Wormtail," and Remus was "Moony." During this same time, we made our greatest creation to date: the marauders map. Not only did it map out all our knowledge of the school, but also every person in the school. That, coupled with my invisibility cloak, made our pranks virtually unstoppable, and the four of us inseparable.

As I stood there on Platform 9 ¾, only half-listening to Sirius ramble on about this girl and that one, I thought about how much I had changed since I last was here. This was going to be my year - I could feel it. The pranks would be better, but I wasn't going to lose myself in them. I had a new perspective on life, and a new way to approach a certain unapproachable redhead. It was all going to work out. I'd have the girl, friends, fun, and I'd be on the right track in life.

I was startled out of my reverie by Sirius shouting that he'd seen Remus and Peter, and my mind focused on the present as I was thrust into the bustling crowd, faintly hoping to see a flash of red hair. Another year, and this was going to be the one when it all finally worked out for me.

A/N: Thanks to: my beta, Meliara (Cassondra L), for helping me with organizing all my thoughts and checking over this chapter (hopefully you won't anonymously review that my "story is stupid as all hell" AGAIN), and to Jackie, for her skill with synonyms and grammar.