DISCLAIMER: I'm not anywhere near cool enough to own this. It's all JK Rowling's – I just play with it when I'm bored.

Year One

He first saw her that day on the train. With Snivellus. Stupid greasy git. He thought she was cute but that she could use better taste in friends. Apparently she disagreed when he made her mad and she stormed off with Snape. It irked him, but he ignored it.

She was sorted into Gryffindor to his delight and Snape's horror. He tried to get her to sit with him and his friends, but she still seemed to be angry at him, so she stuck her nose in the air and sat with some other girls. He still thought she was pretty.

First year really flew by – literally sometimes. He spent a lot of time flying when he could. Since first years weren't allowed their own brooms he flew on one of the school brooms, mostly wishing next year would hurry up and come so he could bring his Nimbus 1000 to school. Sometimes Sirius came with him, sometimes he flew by himself. He was lucky he was never caught, but he was also determined to make the House Quidditch team next year. He wished he could make it this year, but he knew McGonagall would never change the rules.

He and Evans had most of their classes together. He saw her a lot, but she always either had her nose in a book or she was with Snape, who apparently was her best friend. He still thought she was cute, but she always acted like he was something on the bottom of her shoe that she would really like to scrape off on a particularly sharp edge of the castle.

Sirius teased him endlessly about his crush on Evans, but James just reciprocated by teasing him about the Ravenclaw third year that Sirius had a thing for. He shut up after that...well, for the most part.

He did pick on her sometimes. And Snape a lot. But all of his friends agreed that Snape deserved it.

Evans dropped from his radar for a few months following Remus's revelation. Sirius had figured it out by noticing that he went missing for a few days every month. They could never find him in the hospital wing, and he always made up some excuse about visiting an ill relative or something of the sort. But all three of them knew him well enough by now to know when he was lying. Finally, one day in November, they cornered him in the boys dormitory when their other roommate Andrew was gone.

It took a bit of doing but he finally admitted that he was a werewolf. He had thought that if he told them they would start avoiding him and he would lose the only real friends he had ever had. James had looked at the other three boys and seen his shock mirrored on each of their faces.

"Remus, how – how can you think that? We are your best friends!" Sirius exclaimed indignantly. Remus muttered something in response.

"What did you say?" James demanded. Remus sighed.

"I said 'that doesn't matter'," he said dejectedly.

"Why doesn't it matter?" Peter squeaked from behind Sirius.

"Because…nobody wants to be friends with a werewolf. Even if we have been hanging round each other for a few months. This is how it always is. Someone finds out, then they say it's fine, but I start getting avoided, until finally my friends," he spat out the word, "stop speaking to me altogether. And I'm right back where I started. So please, make it easier for me and just walk out right now so we can skip the gradual avoidance steps."

He was completely thrown when James, followed by Sirius and Peter, grabbed him and hugged him tight.

After that, they had made absolutely sure that Remus was never excluded from their group. James hadn't really ever known what it was like to not have friends, but he knew that Remus did, and he didn't want him to feel that way ever again. James and the others spent so much time together that he even stopped annoying Evans and Snivellus so much. Not totally – a boy only had so much self-restraint – but enough to stop her and Snape reaching for their wands whenever they saw him.

He and his friends had decided to call themselves the Marauders. They became obsessed with playing pranks on people – mostly Snape, but mostly harmless – but they were never caught. They were talented wizards, even for first-years but nobody knew that. They didn't really want anyone to know it. If their talent was suspected, then the pranks would be pinned on them. None of them were that idiotic.

Even though James refrained from picking on Evans as much, he still watched her whenever the opportunity presented itself. He sat slightly behind her Charms, but not so far back that he couldn't see her face. She was very good at Charms, and he enjoyed watching her face screw up in concentration. Her nose got really wrinkled. When she was distracted at dinner, she just pushed her food around her plate. She hated pumpkin juice and loved treacle tart. He never saw her touch a bite of her food during exam time before Christmas break.

She still annoyed him so much though. He could be sitting there, minding his own business in the common room – or so he told himself – and she would come along and make some rude remark and provoke him. She still had a horrible habit of defending Snape. Evans seemed proud of the fact that he was her best friend, although none of the Marauders could understand why. He was a slimy, greasy, oily-haired git whose favorite way to pass time was looking up curses. Most of the curses he looked up were used against the Marauders. He picked on Peter to get a rise out of James and Sirius and occasionally Remus.

Evans stayed at Hogwarts over Christmas, same as him and Sirius. Snivellus left, to their relief, but James noticed that after the other students had left she seemed a bit dejected. He had tried to approach her and see if she was okay, but she just snapped at him and told him to leave her alone. And then she had turned and flounced up the stairs to the girls dormitory. He had watched her hair bounce, the light from the fire reflecting off it, making it shine an even brighter red. Unfortunately, Sirius had come into the common room at the time and seen him staring at Evans's hair. James didn't hear the end of it for at least a week.

She ignored him over break for the most part; he wasn't really surprised, but part of him had hoped that maybe without Snape around she would loosen up around him. No such luck.

The second half of the school year flew by even faster than the first half had. Snowball fights in January, Valentine's in February – he had sent Evans a small little heart, hoping it wouldn't be obvious it was from him. Again, no such luck. She had promptly thrown it into the fireplace and thrown him a scathing look across the room before turning and marching back up the stairs.

March brought slightly warmer weather and he and Sirius returned to flying. They both got a month's detention from McGonagall after bewitching Snape to sing in opera rather than speaking for two days. In April James went flying every day. He went back to annoying Evans whenever the mood struck him. May went by even quicker than the rest of the year and before he knew it, it was June and he and the Marauders were packing their trunks and taking the Hogwarts Express back to London.

James stood off to the side of the platform with the other Marauders. He wanted to introduce Remus and Peter to his mum and dad – they already knew Sirius. He watched Evans run off the train and into her mother's arms. Her father was there too, with another little girl who looked around at everything like it was disgusting. She wrinkled up her nose like Evans did, but this girl clearly did it in distaste. He saw Snivellus hug Evans good-bye and he was disappointed that she still despised him so much.

But, he thought to himself, there were six more years of Hogwarts left, and she was stuck with him for all of them. That thought brightened his day considerably.

A/N: I am still figuring out how to post and edit and everything, so bear with me please! Anyway, this is chapter one, I hope you like – please review! I'm going to use some of what JKR originally had in the books but other than that it's me and my overactive imagination at work!