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The common room is too warm. Too loud. Too full of people who smile too easily when you're happy and edge away just as quickly when your mouth turns down, when your voice pitches up and your laughter slices too sharp. Their smiles are brittle, their glances fleeting. You can almost see the way they weigh your moods in their palms like something fragile, ready to shatter.
James doesn't do that. Never has. Not once in all the years of tangled conversations and messy moments and split-second spirals. He stays. He always stays.
He's across the room now, perched half-on, half-off an armchair that looks ready to collapse beneath the weight of him and Sirius both, their limbs tangled in the way only boys who've never been afraid to take up space can manage. Remus leans on the edge of the hearth, smiling softly at something James says. It's a simple scene, ordinary even, but it burns in your chest. The way James tosses his head back when he laughs. The way people seem to lean toward him without meaning to. Like he's a sun.
Your gaze is glued to him like ivy—desperate, clinging, poisonous in the way you've been told love shouldn't be. The words of past therapists echo in your skull like a curse: emotional dysregulation, unstable relationships, identity disturbance. But he's yours.
That thought buzzes like static under your skin, too loud, too fast. Your fingers twitch with it. You watch a girl—Evelyn or Emma or something E-ish—touch his arm when she laughs, her body angled toward him in that too-familiar way. Something primal and dark twists through you, wrapping around your ribs, pulling tight like a corset of panic and rage. You rise before you can think.
You cross the room, each step fuelled by a thunderous rhythm inside your skull: he's mine he's mine he's mine.
James turns like he feels you coming, like your presence tugs at something invisible inside him. His face softens instantly. "Hey, sweetheart."
You don't respond. You step into his space, fingers curling into the coarse wool of his jumper, and tug him toward you with a force that borders on urgent. He catches you, of course he does, arms sliding around you like armour, one hand smoothing over the back of your head as though you're glass with a fresh fracture.
"Alright, love?"
You shake your head into his chest. You don't want alright. You want more. You want everything. You want to unzip his skin and crawl inside. You want to be fused to him so completely that no one—not the E-named girl or the entire bloody world—could unpick you.
You lift your face, your voice a whisper meant only for him. "Kiss me."
He hesitates—not out of reluctance, but awareness. The eyes. The murmurs. But then his hand finds your cheek, thumb brushing across it reverently, and he kisses you like you're a question he already knows the answer to.
It's not soft. It's hungry. Desperate. Messy. Your fingers dig into his back like claws, pulling him tighter until your breath leaves in one sharp exhale. Someone coughs. A muttered "bloody hell" rises from the corner. You don't care. You don't hear them, not really. There's only the thrum of his pulse under your hand and the taste of peppermint and parchment and Quidditch sweat and James.
When he finally pulls away, it's slow, reluctant. His forehead leans into yours. "You okay?"
You shake your head again. Words escape you. Your mind's a swirling vortex of shame and fear and want, all tangled up until you can't find the start or end of anything. You don't know how to say: I'm scared you'll wake up one day and realise this is all too much. That I'm too much. That loving me is like trying to hold water in your hands.
James reads it anyway. He always does. His arms tighten.
"You're in your head again."
"I saw her touch you."
He doesn't roll his eyes or dismiss it. Doesn't say you're being ridiculous even though you are. He leans in, lips pressing under your eye, the place where tears like to bloom. "I didn't even notice."
"I did."
"Yeah. I know, love."
The confession unfurls inside you, heavy and raw. Your hands tremble where they clutch his jumper. You feel flayed open, like everyone can see the chaos inside. Like the walls have eyes.
He brushes your hair back behind your ear, gentle as anything. "What do you need?"
"Can we go?"
No hesitation. No sighs. He just nods, laces his fingers with yours, and leads you upstairs. Away from the stares, the whispers, the judgment. Into his dorm. Into quiet and shadow and the soft sigh of a door closing behind you.
You climb into his bed immediately, curling small, the way you did when you were younger and hoped that shrinking might make you safer. James settles beside you, not touching until your hand finds his. It always does. You hate that about yourself, how you need contact like it's a drug.
"Do you ever get tired of me being like this?"
He doesn't flinch. Doesn't even blink. He just turns to you, brown eyes soft, voice like velvet. "I get tired for you. But not of you. Never of you."
Your chest cracks open. You press your hand to his shirt like you're checking for proof, for heartbeat, for permanence. And he lets you. He always lets you.
You cry, just a little. Not the violent, frantic sobs that rip out of you some nights when the fear gets too big. Just quiet tears that soak into cotton. James doesn't shush you or ask what's wrong. He strokes your back, slow and steady, drawing shapes you'll never see but always feel.
Time becomes water, slow and strange. Eventually, he whispers, "You know, people don't have to understand us."
You let out a short, trembling laugh. "They think I'm too much."
He smiles, tired but unwavering. "You are a lot," he says, and it should sting, but it doesn't. Because when he says it, it sounds like a blessing. He cups your cheek again, thumb swiping away the remnants of your tears. Then a kiss to your forehead—slow, grounding. "But I've got a lot of room."
You breathe. For the first time in hours, maybe longer, you breathe.
And maybe it's not neat. Maybe it's stormy and strange and overwhelming. But in the soft warmth of James Potter's bed, in the quiet cadence of his breathing and the weight of his arms around you, you believe—for now—that it's enough.
That you're enough.
Even like this. Especially like this.