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Okay, look. James knows he goes too hard. He knows that. Sometimes, when he steps back and really imagines what it would be like to be on the receiving end of all the shit he doles out, he imagines the kind of humiliation he’d feel and is just horrified with himself for being able to do that to other people again and again and again.
It’s not just about Snape, of course. James has a nasty habit of tormenting anybody who gets in his way, anybody he thinks it’d be funny to put in their place, anybody who draws attention to the fact that James isn’t normal and is playing a part—putting on a front. Nobody knows the real James, not even Sirius or Remus or Peter, but anybody who stumbles anywhere close to the truth is a threat. If James has learned anything in his four years at Hogwarts, it’s how to deal with threats: swiftly, cruelly, and with a laugh that says he doesn’t care.
But James does care. If anything, James cares way, way too much.
He tries to make up for his sins the only way he knows how: by devoting himself to the people who are actually his friends. This, at least, James knows how to do; he’s not so far gone that he doesn’t know how to be loyal to anyone. He slides beads along the abacus in his brain: for every hex he aims at Snape or a first year or a random passerby in the corridors, he’ll take Sirius in over the holiday to get him away from his mum for a while, spend an hour doing Animagus research for Remus in the library, defend Peter one more time from the Slytherin bullies who like to call him a fag.
Peter asked James about that once—why James went so far out of his way to defend Peter’s honor before they were even friends, before James even had a reason to care. James can’t blame him for asking. Peter was the last boy to join James’s friend group, and it made sense why: he wasn’t cool like Sirius or clever like Remus, wasn’t anything, really, or at least anything that James has ever valued. James bullshitted his answer to avoid giving Peter the real one: that James identifies a little too much with anybody who has to walk around the school terrified of being accused of being anything less than straight. James may be a monster, but at least his internalized homophobia doesn’t run so deep that he’d pick on people for being rumored to be gay like he is.
No: it only runs deep enough that he’d pick on boys he’s not allowed to fancy.
Speaking of things he knows, James also knows how catastrophic it would be if anybody were ever to find out the way he really feels about Snape. He’s made his name for himself on the back of his torment of Snape, and if someone knew that it was all an act, that name could disappear faster than you could say “Evanesco.”
It doesn’t even make sense, not really. Snape is greasy and slimy and clumsy, the opposite of cool, and more than that, he’s weird. He’s a gross loner whose obsession with Lily Evans is frankly a little creepy, and he likes curses better than people, and James would never be caught dead wanting anything for him but that he get laughed right out of James’s life. It’s just—he carries himself with a sort of quiet confidence James respects and even envies, like he doesn’t care what people think of him: like the only problem is that they won’t leave him bloody well alone. James can only dream of not caring what other people think of him.
He loathes himself sometimes for how scared he’s probably made Snape feel of him because he knows—he knows—there’s a part of him that wants the exact opposite. But he’s dug this hole deep enough, and the only option James has left for himself is to keep digging it.
So he digs, and he denies, and he waits for someone to catch him in a lie. No one ever does.