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James stared at the little stick while sat on the toilet cover. He shook it as if that would change the result glaring up at him, as if it would change anything.
Positive.
Someone knocked on the door and James jumped in surprise. “You alright in there?” Sirius asked, sounding worried.
James got up and opened the door, the test still in his hand. “I- erm.”
Sirius saw the test and craned his neck. “I’m- er guessing that’s positive?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I can- er go get you another, just to make sure and--”
“This is my third one,” James said, fingers whitening from his hold on the plastic as he brought it to his chest.
“Oh. Okay.” He wrenched James into a hug. “It’s gonna be okay. It- it’s gonna be okay.”
“How? We’re still in school, Mum and Dad don’t know we’re together, I’m not even of age!”
“Hey,” Sirius said, moving back to cup James’s face. “Take some time, think about it.”
“How the hell is thinking about it going to solve any of that?” He’d been thinking about it, and nothing he thought of was making him feel better.
“I meant abortion, James.”
James reared back. “What?”
“Just. Think about it okay? If you decide that that’s what you want, then the rest of it doesn’t matter. Right?” He waited for James to nod. “So, take a couple days to let it sink in. If you decide to keep it, then we can deal with everything then. Alright?” James nodded again. “Alright.” He pulled James into another hug and kissed his head.
Two days later, as they were alone in the dormitory, James said, “I want to keep it.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.
“Okay.” He sighed, leaning back on his hands. “I guess the first thing to do is tell your parents. Get the whole lecture out of the way. And then they’ll help us with everything else. Making an appointment, keeping you healthy, talking to Dumbledore… It’s a good thing your parents are good people, otherwise we’d be buggered.”
James snorted. “Glad to see you looking on the bright side.”
“It’s only the bright side until they kick me out.”
“They wouldn’t kick you out,” James said with a frown.
Sirius stared at him flatly.
“You just said they’re good people!”
“Yeah but I’m the bloke that knocked up their son. That’s not the same as being their son’s irresponsible best mate. If I were them, I wouldn’t want to keep me around.”
James rolled his eyes. “They’re not going to kick you out anymore than they would kick me out.”
“I know, it’s just-” he sighed. “I don’t know. They’re not going to look at me the same way anymore, you know?”
“They won’t look at me the same way either.”
They sat in silence for a minute before Sirius went over to him. “Love you,” he said with a large smile.
James huffed out a laugh. “Love you too,” he said, but it felt… not like a lie. Just. Less true than it normally was. He ignored the feeling. If he didn’t think about it, it would get better, he was sure of it.
The Potter parents had taken the news pretty well, and proven Sirius’s fears (no matter how small) of being kicked out completely unfounded. James and Sirius had also managed to avoid any sort of lecture by virtue of them using protection while having sex like good teens. They didn’t get angry or disappointed or any of the things they’d worried about.
James just… felt so wholly off-kilter. He didn’t think it was something he could blame fully on the pregnancy, but bugger if he wasn’t going to try. Sirius called him on it the second time he tried though.
“You don’t get to shut me out, James. You couldn’t do it when we were friends, you couldn’t do it when we got together, and you sure as hell don’t get to do it now.”
“I’m not trying to shut you out. I’m not!” he insisted when Sirius gave him a doubtful look.
“Then tell me what’s wrong. And if you say it’s nothing or the pregnancy, I swear to Merlin I am walking out.”
“It’s not anything.”
Sirius didn’t waste a second. Just left, the door closing forcefully behind him. James’s hands fisted on either side of him, but he didn’t follow. Sirius stormed back in ten minutes later, far angrier than when he’d left. “What is going on with you? Yeah, you’re pregnant, yeah, you’re dealing with a lot of shit right now, but that is no excuse to push me away! I love you, James, I’m here to help you!”
“You won’t always be,” James said, finally voicing what had been eating at him ever since he’d had that initial suspicion.
“What?”
“You won’t always be around,” he repeated.
“Yes I will.”
“No you won’t. You’ll find someone else” someone better “and then you won’t have time for me or our sprog and it’ll be some shite thing where we only see you on weekends.”
Sirius sneered at him. “Nice to know you think so well of me,” he said, and made to leave again.
“You’re always leaving!” James yelled, startling Sirius into freezing. “You say you’ll be around, but any time we fight, any time things get tough, you leave.”
“Fine,” Sirius growled, wrenching his hand from the doorknob. “You want me to stay? I’m staying.” He stalked back towards James. “When I leave, it’s because I don’t want to hurt you. But you want to know what I’m thinking? What I do when I leave? I think about how much better you could do. I go and read sodding parenting books and hope to every power that exists that I won’t fuck up our kid too badly when they come round. I think about how I’ve let you down before anything’s happened because you won’t talk to me and there’s nothing I can do about it. I think about how you’re not going to dump me if you want because we’ll have a kid together and you’ll force yourself to stay and be miserable. I think about how you’re already miserable because you’re pregnant and you don’t trust me to love you like nothing’s changed.
“So yeah I’m always leaving. You still want me to stay now, sweetheart?” he spat the endearment like a curse, sneering at James, daring him to prove him wrong.
James didn’t say anything, his jaw clenched.
“That’s what I thought.”
James avoided Sirius for a few days, not that it was difficult. Sirius wasn’t avoiding him in kind per se, but he was waiting for James to do something, and he just wasn’t.
After a week, Sirius caved. He went to James while he was sat in the library, looking positively miserable as he walked over. He sat across from him and watched as James tensed at the action. “Are you ever going to talk to me or are we just going to raise a kid together without saying a single word to each other?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” James said, not looking up from his parchment.
Sirius blinked. “What?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t raise a kid together. I’ve been thinking about dropping out. Mum and Dad will help me raise them, I wouldn’t really need you.” James didn’t know why he said it. He was hurting, he didn’t mean it. It’s like the words were coming out without filtering through his brain first. His parents would help him, no question, but he didn’t want to leave school and he sure as hell didn’t want to leave Sirius. He didn’t mean it, but he still said it.
Sirius stood up to leave, body wound tight with hurt. James closed his eyes; he didn’t want to watch this. But Sirius dropped back into the seat, hands clenched in his lap. “I don’t think you need me, James. I don’t want to be with you because you need me.”
“Then why do you,” James questioned flatly, unable to believe that Sirius wanted to be with him at all for some reason.
“Because I love you. And I thought you loved me. If you don’t… just. Just tell me now and I’ll drop it. We can go back to being friends.”
James shook his head.
“I’m- er, going to need more words than that, Jamie.”
“I--” he choked on the words. It used to be so easy to tell Sirius that he loved him, and he hated that he couldn’t say it now. “Stay,” was what he settled on. “I didn’t mean it. Don’t- don’t go.”
Sirius nodded slowly. “Okay. Are we… are we good?”
“I’m trying,” he said quietly. He loved Sirius, he didn’t want this to mess anything up, but the fact was that this was huge and unavoidable in changing their relationship. A large, irrational part of him blamed Sirius for the situation, and he thanked Merlin that he never said that to him.
Sirius took a deep breath. “I can’t say that I understand, but I know that this is hard on you. Okay, James? I know that this is hard. But you can’t shut me out and expect me to fix everything between us.”
James swallowed past a lump in his throat. “Alright. I’ll. I’ll do better.”
Sirius moved to sit next to him and pulled him into a hug. “I love you.”
James nodded. “You too.” And that was easier. It wasn’t perfect, but- he was trying.