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Judging by their cozy Godric’s Hollow cottage, you’d never guess that the Potters are fabulously wealthy. James used to complain about it sometimes when he was a little kid and was jealous of the sizes of the big old manors that all his parents’ friends’ kids got to live in, but his dad always just smiled and shook his head and told James he would understand when he was older. They were a family of three, he said; they didn’t need to space themselves out across so many rooms that they lost track of each other, and anyway, just because they had money didn’t mean they needed to spoil themselves with it.
Like most of the things anybody has ever tried to tell James to do, the lesson must have gotten lost in translation as it passed through James’s ears because he never really took it to heart—like now, for instance, as he’s drumming his fingers on his nightstand waiting for Mum to just leave him to his own devices already. He’s not thrilled with being stuck in this room daydreaming about Quidditch while Mum prattles on about the dress robes she’s bought James for the debutante ball she’s going to make him go to next week. If they actually had room to stretch out, maybe she’d leave him alone, and James could stake out his own space in the house where he could talk to Sirius on his mirror or look at porn or dream up pranks to enact after the very, very long break from school he’s stuck with every summer.
It’s not that he loves school so much: it’s all rubbish he could learn in his sleep, and most of it is a waste of his time. It’s everything else that comes with school—playing pranks, Marauding around the castle after hours, and gallivanting in the Forbidden Forest on full moons—that James can’t stand to part with. Up at Hogwarts, James rules the place, but here at home? All he’s got for company are Mum and Dad, and as much as he loves them, he doesn’t exactly love to be around them.
The thing about Mum and Dad is that they’re just as stuffy as every other pureblood sucker who’s determined to make their kids’ lives miserable with balls and arranged marriages and the rigid social order that doesn’t allow anybody room to even be friends with Muggle-borns, let alone sleep with them. In any case, you’d think that two people so determined to raise James to be a good little wealthy pureblood would at least allow him to have an upbringing with a manor and a house-elf and some goddamn bloody privacy, but no: that would be too much to ask for.
It occasionally occurs to James that his parents probably see him as a total fuckup, between all the detentions he gets and the way he flirts with anybody but the good pureblood girl they want him to marry. Well, they can’t have it both ways: they can’t expect him to be humble and demure, yet also haughty enough to navigate pureblood society. For his part, James picks being haughty over being obedient. His brand of it just—isn’t what Mum and Dad had in mind for him when they told him to be a leader.
The mirror goes off at that moment, interrupting Mum in the middle of a tangent about bloody Dorcas Meadowes and her and James’s bloody betrothal, the one he tries not to think about when he can help it. “Gotta go, Mum,” says James quickly, hopping off his bed and fishing around in his trunk for the thing. “That’ll be Sirius.”
“But Jamie—”
James ignores her. “Sirius Black,” he mutters, and Sirius’s face appears in the glass.
But—something is wrong. Sirius isn’t grinning or smirking or greeting James with a joke; his face is pale, too pale, and his eyes are frantic, and he’s raking an anxious hand through his hair over and over. “Sirius? Hey. What’s the matter?”
“Are you home right now?” Sirius’s voice is raspy, like he’s been screaming or something.
James’s eyes flick back to Mum, who’s frowning as her hands curl around the mug of pumpkin juice she brought in here. “Yeah. I was just talking to my mum. What’s going on?”
“Can you ask her for me—”
“What? What do you need her for?”
Sirius doesn’t even bother rolling his eyes; this more than anything alarms James. “Can you just—go and ask her if I can crash with you tonight? I’ll explain everything when I get to you, I swear, but—I just—I need somewhere to go.”
He glances at Mum again and raises his eyebrows. Sirius and Mum have only met a couple of times in passing at King’s Cross, but James knows she thinks highly of him. As far as Mum is concerned (and Dad, too, for that matter), Sirius is pretty much the perfect pureblood: he’s more politically correct than his batshit crazy family, but he’s still afraid enough of them that his rebellion is quiet, restricted to Gryffindor banners hanging in his bedroom. What Mum and Dad don’t know is that Sirius only keeps his trap shut around his family because his mum will Cruciate the shit out of him if he disobeys her openly—and even, sometimes, if he doesn’t, although obeying their commends improves his odds, anyway.
Plus, James’s mum and dad don’t know about all the detentions Sirius has landed himself by virtue of being best mates with James. He’s pretty sure their opinion of Sirius would drop considerably if they knew he’s not really the good influence on James that they think he is.
It only takes a moment for Mum to agree. Sirius evidently hears her because he calls a little more loudly, “Thank you so much. You—you don’t know what this means to me. I’m going to fly to you, okay? It’ll probably take me a couple of hours to get there.”
“Sirius—”
But in an instant, the only thing the mirror is showing is James’s own face, caramel skin and messy hair and glasses obscuring snide eyes. He stows it away quickly. If there’s one thing James hates, it’s self-reflection.
xx
Actually seeing Sirius distraught out of his mind sort of puts a damper on James’s enthusiasm to have him here for the night. “Got in a fight with my parents,” Sirius explains when he first comes through the door and leans his broomstick against the wall of James’s living room. His legs are shaking. “Mr. Potter—Mrs. Potter—I’m so sorry to impose on you on short notice like this. I just—”
“There’s no need to apologize,” says Dad, giving Sirius a concerned sort of smile. “We want you to know that you’re always welcome here.”
“A fight with your parents?” Mum adds. “I know they’re both… politically extreme, but I thought you got along with them, for the most part.”
“Yeah, well, not this time,” Sirius mutters.
Quickly, James takes Sirius by the hand and starts to pull him in the direction of James’s bedroom, figuring that defending any rebellion against his parents must be the last thing Sirius wants to talk about right now. “Come on. You can tell me all about it, okay?”
In James’s room, Sirius is shaking all over by the time he sits on the bed. It pains James—he doesn’t like seeing Sirius hurt, especially not where his parents are concerned—but even that isn’t enough to squash the fluttering of his heart at the fact that Sirius is here, with James, when normally Sirius can’t get away from Grimmauld Place for more than an hour once or twice all summer long.
“Pads…”
“It’s Regulus. I mean, it’s Mum and Dad, too, but—he wants to join up. With the Death Eaters.”
James feels a hot flush of shame. What’s important right now isn’t James’s desperate desire to be in Sirius’s company at all times: he’s got to suck up his selfish arse and be there for his friend. This, of course, is easier said than done. James is awfully selfish, after all.
“I’m so sorry. Did he… I mean, has he already…?”
“Joined?” Sirius scoffs. “No. No, nothing’s happened yet, but—I think he’s going to. Mum and Dad were just so proud of him, you know, and I just—I had to get out of there. I can deal with Mum being an abusive shit, but I can’t deal with my brother being a murderer.”
James has got no idea what to say to this that wouldn’t make it worse. He settles for contorting his lips and eyes into something sympathetic and resting a hand on Sirius’s knee.
“It’s not like I should be shocked,” Sirius continues. “I’ve been miserable there for years. I don’t know if I ever was happy there. I stuck around for Regulus’s sake, but now… I mean, murdering innocent Muggles and Muggle-borns is worse than what Mum does to us, right? It makes me sick knowing I’ve been trying to protect someone who all this time was capable of…”
“Sirius—”
“But he’s my brother. I know him, and I know he’s better than this. I just can’t believe… you didn’t hear him. He was absolutely adamant in his belief that he’s doing the right thing. I can’t live in a house with people who think…”
With equal parts excitement and dread, James says, “So—you’re not going back? You’re never going back?”
“How can I go back?” mutters Sirius. “But, at the same time, how can I not? They’ve got custody of me. They could put the Ministry on my arse so fast…”
“Hey. Let’s just—take it one day at a time, okay? You can stay here for tonight and worry about the rest tomorrow.”
“You don’t happen to have a toothbrush I can use, do you? All my stuff is still over there. I just—grabbed my broomstick and left as fast as I could.”
James smiles. “I’ll be right back. One toothbrush coming right up.”
Regrettably, he pulls his hand back from Sirius’s knee so he can get up. Out in the living room, Mum and Dad are both looking at him with raised eyebrows. “Mum, do we have any spare toothbrushes anywhere? Sirius didn’t bring anything with him to get him through the night.”
“In the cabinet under the bathroom sink,” says Mum absently. “Is he quite all right? He seems pretty shaken up, the poor boy.”
“It’s just… war stuff.” James isn’t sure how much detail Sirius would be comfortable with him going into here, so he errs on the vague side. “His family supports the Death Eaters, and he doesn’t. It just—hit a breaking point.”
Mum clicks her tongue. “Well, he’s welcome to stay here as long as he’d like. I never understood how such a backwards family could turn out such a sweet and polite boy.” Mum, of course, has never seen the way Sirius behaves outside the Blacks’ watchful eyes at school, but James doesn’t bother setting her straight: it’ll be easier to keep her cooperative if he allows her to believe Sirius is who she thinks he is.
It only takes him a minute to rummage for a spare toothbrush; he brings it with him back into the bedroom and thrusts it into Sirius’s hand. “Here. There’s toothpaste and floss for you on the counter in the bathroom. I’ll show you where it is when you’re ready, not that I think you’re going to get lost on your way there—this isn’t a big house like Grimmauld Place is—but—”
“Thanks.”
“And—my mum says you can stay however long you want. Our home is your home.”
Some of the tension goes out of Sirius’s shoulders. “Thanks,” he repeats in a mutter. “I just…”
“One day at a time,” James reminds him.
“Yeah. One day at a time.”
It occurs to James that they’re sitting awfully close together on James’s bed. He’s casually leaning back on his hands; one of them is splayed just millimeters away from Sirius’s hip, and James is suddenly, acutely aware that if he just inched his fingers a little to the left—the heat of Sirius’s skin is bleeding through his robes, and James’s hands start to sweat. His pulse picks up. His eyes follow Sirius’s fingertips as they comb the hair out of Sirius’s face and settle in his lap, twisting around themselves, and James is seized with an urge to grab them and—
—what? And what? What does James want, anyway, that he doesn’t already have? His best friend is here for the night, maybe longer, and it’s all he ever could have dreamed of having this summer. Besides, he doesn’t want to do anything to spook Sirius, who’s clearly still—to call him “rattled” would be an understatement. He’s totally sucked up in his own drama right now, and with good reason; he doesn’t need James to suck all the oxygen out of the room like he usually does, especially when James doesn’t even know what he wants.
(Does he know what he wants? He thinks he does, buried somewhere deep inside where his conscious mind can’t reach, but he pushes this thought out of his head the instant it occurs to him. It’s not real if James doesn’t give it the time of day, and some things are better left in the night.)