A/N: hey everyone! Thanx for all the awesome reviews, they really made me feel better about this fic. I'm all ready to go now, and I have the next couple of chapters planned, so I'll try to update more quickly. But, school just started again, and I only have six weeks of assessment, so I'm going to have heaps of assignments (teachers are so cruel). So sorry if it slows down (even more) now, but I'll be pretty busy. )

Just a note to everyone, this fic does not follow canon! A lot of people have been confused about why James hates Lily when in the fifth book, JKR said he loved her and stuff. Well, basically, I like that, but I'm a huge fan of love/hate relationships (probably because that's the only type of relationship I'll ever have )) and so I decided to ignore canon and be a little creative with this fic. My other fics don't follow canon either.

Hope you enjoy this one.

Chapter Seven

First Year Fun

"You hugged him."

"Yes," Lily nodded, dropping her head into her hands and willing the world away.

Matthew stared at her with open mouth.

"Are you serious?" he asked.

They were sitting at the breakfast table on Monday morning, the day after the game, and Lily was feeling pretty mortified over the whole hugging triangle with her, James, and the broomstick. She spent six years trying to ignore the guy and then she decides to HUG him over a QUIDDITCH match. Who does that?

"You hugged James Potter?' Matthew asked again, slowly and deliberately. Lily nodded. "So what?"

She glared at him.

"'So what?' What do you mean, 'so what'?" she snapped rather incredulously.

"I mean, so what if you hugged him? That's what people do occasionally. It's not the end of the world. I think you over analyze," he continued, completely immune to her disbelief.

Lily sighed, and reminded herself to get some girlfriends. Maybe she would talk to Gretel and Maria. They were both in seventh year, so they shared a dorm with her. Alice was in sixth year, however. Lily was quite good friends with Sasha Iverson as well, another seventh year girl who was her roommate. But Sasha was no where to be seen, and Lily was stuck with her best friends, who, for all their charisma, had no idea how to do girl talk.

"Forget it," she muttered to Matthew. "I mean, you're probably right. So what if I hugged Potter? He probably doesn't even remember it. And it totally wasn't a big deal. Was it?"

Lily looked up to see Matthew shaking his head and mouthing something. Frowning in suspicion, she turned around slowly…to see James Potter staring at her, looking mildly alarmed.

Lily groaned and let her head sink back into her hands. Typical. He just had to be standing right behind her when she was obsessing about hugging him.

James cleared his throat awkwardly.

"Uh, hi," he greeted the back of her head.

Lily, in a very 'Lilyish' way, realized that there was only one way to deal with the embarrassment.

"What, Potter?" she snapped, rolling her eyes in an act of impatience.

James, reacting in the way he always did when he and Lily were interacting, glared at her, and snapped back.

"Leave your manners in bed, Evans?" he snarled. "Or were you born like that?"

"No Potter, this side of me only seems to appear when you're around. Could be the shroud of all things evil you carry around with you infecting my mind," Lily retorted, wincing at the rather lengthy (and obscure) call.

"Let's just get to the point, shall we? I'd rather not spend too much time around you," James said, his eyes darkening slightly, as they always did when he was angry. "Do we have a session with the first years tonight?"

"Yes." Lily stated, and then turned her back on him.

James counted to three slowly, and took a deep breath. God, she was infuriating.

"When, and where," he said through gritted teeth.

"Six o'clock, library. Art today."

"Fine," James spat and he strode away angrily.

Lily rolled her eyes, even though her heart was going crazy, beating frantically against her ribcage. Talking to James seemed to be having a strange effect on her these days. Geez. One day she was hugging him, the next she was biting his head off. She shuddered and shook her head suddenly to clear her thoughts. Right. She would just have to be really professional today while they were working with the first years. Act like she didn't care. How hard could it be?

Sasha Iverson had seen Lily angry at James on many an occasion; she could name at least twenty off the top of her head. Like the time he had put a frog in their room that wouldn't stop croaking. Or the time when he had turned her head into a chin length rainbow do that had causes her to scream for about an hour when she saw her reflection. But never had Sasha seen Lily actually nervous about seeing James Potter.

She watched as her red-head friend anxiously flipped through her Head Girl notebook for the tenth time. Lily then stood up from where she had been sitting in an armchair in the common room, and began to pace nervously, all the while reading a page in her notebook.

"Art…I think we have the paint and brushes…what about impasto? Nobody will want that, right?...nah…"

Sasha knew Lily well enough to realise that whatever she was anxious about, it certainly wasn't whether they had impasto for the first years or not. Lily often distracted herself when she was nervous or excited about something, and this was evidently one of those times.

"Lils. Relax. He'll be here in a moment," she said, trying to calm her friend down. Sasha brushed her brown hair away form her face, mildly peeved at the fact that she had cut her fringe too short and it now hung in her eyes constantly. This was even more irritating, because the one thing Sasha liked about her looks was her hazel eyes, and now they were barely visible.

"As if I care," Lily muttered, but a slight tremor in her voice betrayed her nonchalant attitude.

Sasha personally suspected that Lily had a thing for James, but it wasn't likely she would ever admit it. Seriously, though, she thought to herself, who didn't have a thing for Potter? He was hot stuff….and he had just walked into the room, red faced and looking as anxious as Lily.

"Oh." He said, stopping as he saw the fiery head girl in front of him. "I thought we were meeting at the library…?"

Lily's head snapped up to stare at him in shock. She hadn't noticed him arrive.

"Potter! Uh, yeah. Well, someone had to bring the first years up."

James' face grew dark.

"Are you implying that I don't pull my weight?" he started, but Lily rolled her eyes and pushed past him.

"Get over it," she muttered, as she approached the first years and began to lead them out of the room. James followed, glowering darkly.

Sasha rolled her eyes as they left. Those two were so transparent. They kept up this façade of hating each other, but their face slit up instantly when they spotted each other.

She wondered how they could possibly think that the other hated them when their feelings were so obvious.

What was that saying again? Oh yeah. Love is blind.

Lily was trying her very best to stay mad at James. He was a pain in the ass, and he deserved no sympathy or kindness from her. But when he was being all nice with the kids and swinging the tiny first year boys over his shoulder while they giggled like crazy…well, it was hard to be angry at that. Although it did kind of piss her off that he would probably make a good father too. Great. Was there anything he couldn't do?

He must have noticed her glaring, because-

"Can I help you, Evans?" he asked icily, although the coldness didn't reach his eyes.

"What? Oh. No." Lily stuttered, felling like a moron, but blushing all the same.

James raised an eyebrow at the back of her head, but didn't say anything. He had accepted with only minor difficulty that Lily was a strange, strange girl. He turned away, and continued chatting with a tiny first year, Joseph Andrews, who was so scrawny, even his glasses wobbled on his nose.

James would never admit it, but he actually kind of liked the idea of having children, particularly a son. He loved the thought of being like a role model, teaching someone everything he knew, calling them his own. He lifted his eyes to watch as Lily directed the kids into the library, laughing with a girl and then placing her hand on a boy's shoulder to guide him through the door, following him in.

James scowled. Typical. She just had to be good with children too. Was there anything she wasn't good at? It annoyed him that Lily would make the ideal wife. She was smart, pretty, good with kids and interesting to be around.

James shook his head, suddenly, realizing what he had just thought. Lily, a good wife? What the hell was wrong with him?

Who would have thought that teaching first years art would be such a challenge? Not only were they incapable of painting without turning themselves into moving pieces of contemporary art, but they also never wanted to express themselves individually. Lily was beginning to think that they needed step-by-step, written instructions for every little thing.

One corner of the library had been turned into an art studio, with paper covering the tables, and a portable sink conjured into a corner for them to wash up in.

"Lily?" Hayden, a tiny girl with brown hair and big green eyes tugged at her sleeve. "How do I wash my paintbrush?"

Lily sighed.

"Just run it under the tap and use your fingers to get the paint out," she said tiredly. As Hayden nodded vigorously and wandered away to the sink, Lily turned and looked for James.

He was sitting in the corner of the area, alone with a sketchbook. She glanced over at him to find him staring at her. Their eyes caught, and for some reason, Lily felt a strange jolt in the vicinity of her stomach. Why did she keep getting those around James?

James, to her pleasure, began to blush, and so, suppressing a grin, she made her way over to him.

"We should probably start packing up soon," she said, while discreetly trying to catch a glimpse of his sketchpad. What she saw was startling. "Hey! Is that…me?"

James snatched the book away, and shut it hastily.

"What? No. as if," he said, rather unconvincingly.

"Potter," Lily said, her eyes narrowing dangerously. "Give me a look."

"No," James said, standing up and backing away warily. "I have a right to my privacy."

"James, I think we have trust issues," Lily said, pulling out a line that James had already used on her several times that term, just to annoy her. "I need to know that you trust me."

James snorted. "Whatever."

He stalked away, clutching the sketchbook tightly, and started helping the first years pack up.

Lily watched him go, frowning in annoyance. She was sure that that was a sketch of her she had seen, and it had been a damn good one at that.

"You can't hold on to that book forever, Potter," she muttered under her breath.

The first years were a little better at the cleaning than they were at the actually art bit, but it still took them well over and hour to get everything cleared. Finally, they escorted the kids back to their houses, and both head Boy and Girl headed back to their own common room.

James slumped into a couch and shut his eyes, groaning at the way his back muscles tightened painfully. Lily sat down as well, only she watched as he placed his sketchbook down on the table in front of him so he could rub his eyes.

"Well," he said, his voice muffled slightly. "I think I'll go to bed."

"Ok," Lily said, hoping against hope that he'd forget his book when eh left. "Good night."

"Night," James mumbled as he staggered to his feet and then away to the dorms, forgetting his book completely.

Lily could hardly contain her excitement. She was rather vindictively happy, actually. The incredible James Potter had a crud memory.

Snatching the book up, she greedily turned the pages to the most recent entry, and…

Lily gasped. It was beautiful. It was her, alright, but her in a way she had never seen before. The girl's face was turned slightly away, hair fell into her eyes, and her lips were parted slightly. A tiny smile seemed to hide at the corner of her mouth, but her eyes were serious. They were all Lily's features, but more pronounced and delicate.

James was an amazing artist, and somehow he had managed to make Lily look more beautiful than she could ever hope to be.

A smile suddenly danced across Lily's face. Squealing in sudden delight, she clutched the book to her chest and grinned.

And from the stairwell to the boy's dormitory, James Potter smiled a whimsical smile, and then retreated back to his room.

A/N: aw, how cute. Well, I really wanted to get that out by the end of this week, so the end might be a little rushed.

Review, please?

Thanks again to everyone who reviewed )

-Jaizar