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I.
The first time James Potter saw it happen, he thought it was a fluke.
He'd been crossing the courtyard with Sirius — an increasingly common occurrence now that the war had quietly reshuffled everyone's priorities, and the Black brothers had reached some fragile, tender armistice that neither of them talked about directly, because they were both, James had come to understand, constitutionally incapable of talking about things directly — when Evan Rosier, mid-conversation and not even looking, lobbed a book over his shoulder at Regulus.
Regulus didn't look up from his parchment.
His hand just... rose. Snatched the book out of the air with a soft, clean smack of leather against palm. Set it on the bench beside him. Kept writing.
James stopped walking.
Sirius walked three more steps before he noticed and turned around.
"What?" Sirius said.
"He just—" James pointed. "He didn't even look."
Sirius glanced back at his brother with the expression of a man who has long since made his peace with something. "Oh, yeah. He does that."
"He does that?"
"Has done since he was about nine. I used to throw things at him constantly to try and catch him off guard." A pause, weighted with old fraternal frustration. "Couldn't."
James looked at Regulus, who had not acknowledged any of this. Who was, in fact, still writing, the retrieved book now open and propped against his knee. Rosier was talking at him and Regulus was responding in the spare, economical way he had, like words were a resource he'd budgeted carefully for the month.
"That's not normal," James said.
"No," Sirius agreed, tugging him onward by the sleeve. "He's a Seeker. They're all a bit like that. He's just—" he made a gesture that seemed to mean more so, or possibly worse, or possibly both.
James let himself be tugged. But he looked back once.
Regulus, as if aware of this — which was, James would come to learn, entirely possible — did not look up.
II.
The thing about Gryffindors and Slytherins sharing a study table was that it had happened gradually enough that no one had been forced to formally agree to it, and therefore no one could formally object to it either. This was, James suspected, entirely by Sirius's design, executed with the particular genius his best friend reserved for social engineering and absolutely nothing academic.
It had started with Sirius needing to see Regulus about something James wasn't privy to. Then Remus needing the Slytherin section of the library for a Potions reference. Then Pandora, who was strange and luminous and apparently had no house loyalty whatsoever, simply sitting down next to Lily one afternoon and beginning to talk to her about Divination with such genuine delight that Lily, who thought Divination was largely nonsense, had been entirely charmed.
And then, somehow, there were eight of them around the same table on Thursday evenings, passing references back and forth with the studied casualness of people pretending this was completely normal and had always been this way.
James enjoyed it, which surprised him slightly. He'd expected it to be awkward in a way that required active management. Instead it was just — loud, and occasionally argumentative, and there was always someone nicking someone else's ink, and Barty Crouch Junior said things that made James sincerely uncertain whether he was joking, and Regulus sat at the end of the table and annotated things with a focus so complete it was almost rude.
Almost. There was something about it that James couldn't quite call rude. It was more like — Regulus had decided the parchment in front of him warranted his full attention, and he was honoring that commitment, and he couldn't really be blamed for being thorough.
James was not looking at him an unusual amount. He was simply observant. He was a Quidditch captain. Spatial awareness was professionally relevant.
Sirius, unfortunately, was also very observant.
"You've got ink on your notes," Sirius said pleasantly, one Thursday, not looking up from his Transfiguration essay.
James looked down. He did not have ink on his notes. His notes were pristine. James was an excellent note-taker, a fact that surprised most people and that he had long since stopped trying to reconcile with his reputation.
He looked back up at Sirius, who was smiling at his parchment.
"Your point?" James said.
"No point. Just thought you should know." A pause. "Since you weren't looking at them."
"I was thinking."
"Mhm."
"About the Hufflepuff match."
"Of course."
"Their Keeper has a weak left side that I've been—"
"James," Sirius said, in the fond, tired voice he used when he wanted James to know he wasn't fooled. "I've been covering for you since we were eleven. You don't have to perform for me."
James said nothing. He looked very intently at his Transfiguration notes.
Across the table and down three seats, Regulus turned a page.
III.
The second time James saw it happen, he was paying closer attention.
Barty — unhinged in ways James was choosing not to examine, because examining them would require doing something about them, and that felt beyond the scope of a Thursday study session — had apparently decided that testing Regulus's reflexes was a personal hobby. A sporting event. Something he did to pass the time when the academic content failed to hold his interest, which was, based on James's observations, roughly every fifteen minutes.
He lobbed a glass ink bottle across the table.
Regulus was facing the window. Had been for the past five minutes, doing the thing where he stared at something middle-distant and you couldn't tell if he was thinking very hard or had simply left.
The ink bottle arced through the air.
Regulus's hand came up — not fast, exactly, just early, like he'd already done the math on where it was going to be — and caught it. Behind his shoulder. Without turning. Without, James was almost completely certain, seeing it at all.
He set it on the table beside him and kept staring out the window.
"—which is precisely why the Falcons' formation is going to collapse in the second half of the season," he said, apparently resuming a conversation that James hadn't realized was still happening. "You can't build a defensive strategy around a Keeper's wingspan alone. It's lazy thinking."
"You're insufferable," Barty said, with great warmth.
"You threw an ink bottle at my head."
"As an experiment."
"The experiment has the same results every time."
"I keep hoping."
Regulus finally turned from the window. His eyes moved around the table in the efficient, cataloguing way they sometimes did, and James, who had been staring, looked immediately down at his notes.
He was fairly sure he wasn't fast enough.
He was correct. When he glanced back up, Regulus had already looked away, but there was something — a quality of almost-expression, something that might have been amusement — at the corner of his mouth.
James looked back at his notes and wrote Hufflepuff — left Keeper side — WEAK in letters larger than necessary.
IV.
He started paying attention to the Seeking, after that.
Not in a way he could easily explain. More like — once he'd seen the reflexes, he wanted to understand where they came from, and understanding where they came from meant watching Regulus on the pitch in a more analytical capacity than James had previously allowed himself.
(Previously he had watched Regulus on the pitch in an entirely different capacity that he was not examining.)
The thing about Regulus as a Seeker was that he was not flashy. James had played against flashy Seekers — the ones who performed their talent, who dove with unnecessary drama, who seemed to understand that the crowd was watching and adjusted accordingly. They weren't bad. Sometimes they were very good.
Regulus was not like that.
Regulus made finding the Snitch look almost incidental. Like he'd been going that direction anyway and the Snitch had simply had the poor judgment to be there. He moved on his broom the way he moved everywhere — economically, without waste — and when he dove it was because he was already certain, and the certainty was the thing that was difficult to look away from.
James had always relied on instinct. Fast, reactive, glorious instinct. He'd trusted it and it had worked and he'd built an entire Quidditch identity around the willingness to go, to commit, to throw himself after the Snitch with the confidence that his body would sort out the details.
Regulus, watching from the stands one day while James practiced, had apparently found this interesting.
"You overcorrect," he said, when James landed. Not a greeting. Not a preamble. Just the observation, offered cleanly.
James pulled off his goggles. "Sorry?"
Regulus was sitting on the bottom of the stands, a book open in his lap that he'd clearly been ignoring. He looked up. "When you change direction. You overcorrect by about ten degrees and then compensate. It costs you approximately a quarter second on tight turns."
James stared at him.
"I'm not criticizing," Regulus added, which James wasn't sure was true. "You're fast enough that it doesn't matter in most cases. I'm just—" a small pause, something briefly uncertain in it "—noting it."
"Why?"
The uncertainty resolved back into composure. "I watch how people fly. It's a habit."
James climbed off his broom. He was sweaty and his hair was worse than usual, which was saying something, and he was irritatingly aware of both of these facts. "And what does how I fly tell you?"
Regulus considered this with more seriousness than it probably warranted.
"That you trust yourself," he said finally. "Sometimes more than the evidence supports. But it works often enough that you haven't had to learn otherwise."
It should have been an insult. Technically the content was insulting. James turned it over and couldn't quite make it land that way.
"What does your flying tell people?" James asked.
Regulus looked at him for a moment. Then he looked back at his book.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't watch myself."
V.
The pencil case incident happened on a wet Wednesday in November, when everyone at the table was tired and behind on things and the library felt smaller than usual, all fogged windows and radiating damp wool.
Pandora reached across Regulus to grab her quill and caught the edge of her pencil case with her elbow.
It was a full pencil case. Catastrophically full. It hit the edge of the table and detonated.
James counted afterward: four quills, an ink eraser, a small ruler, what appeared to be a Muggle mechanical pencil that Pandora had charmed to write in three colors, two loose coins, a folded piece of parchment, and a die.
They went in approximately nine different directions.
Regulus caught five of them.
Left hand moving for the ruler and two quills simultaneously — which shouldn't have been possible but the hands had apparently not been informed — same hand reversing to snag the ink eraser on the backswing. Right hand dropping below the table for one of the coins without his eyes following the movement, which meant he'd tracked it on the way down and calculated without looking.
The whole thing took perhaps two seconds.
He missed the die, which rolled under the shelf. He missed the Muggle pencil, which Lily caught. He missed one quill, which hit Barty in the shoulder.
"Devastating," Barty said solemnly, regarding the quill.
"Oh, shut up—" Regulus was already sideways, reaching under the shelf for the die, and the movement pulled his robes across his shoulders and James looked at the ceiling.
He looked at it for what he felt was a reasonable amount of time.
Then he looked back down.
Regulus had straightened, die in hand, and was watching him.
Not with anything James could name precisely. It wasn't amusement, exactly. It wasn't accusation. It was more like — assessment. The same look he'd given James on the Quidditch pitch, the one that felt like being read.
"You're staring," Regulus said.
"You caught five things," James said. "Simultaneously. Without looking at two of them."
"The coin had a predictable trajectory."
"The coin had a predictable trajectory," James repeated, to no one in particular.
"Trajectories are mostly just math," Regulus said, with the faint air of someone who found this obvious. "Moving objects follow rules. If you know the rules—"
"Regulus," Evan Rosier said, "not everyone wants a physics lecture."
"I do," Pandora said, at the same moment. "Please continue."
Regulus looked between them, made the pragmatic calculation, and closed his mouth.
James was still watching him. He'd stopped trying to do this less obviously somewhere around minute three of the study session, and had drifted into doing it openly, which was a problem he'd address later.
"Sirius told me," James said, "that he used to throw things at you when you were children."
Something shifted in Regulus's face at the mention of Sirius — not badly, just moved, like water when you drop something in it. "He did."
"He said he couldn't catch you off guard."
"He couldn't."
"He said it was his greatest failure."
The water-movement again, and this time it settled into something that was almost fond. Almost. Regulus was sparing with the almost-fond expression, James had noticed. It appeared rarely and without announcement. "Of course he said that."
"Is he right?"
"Yes," Regulus said. Then, after a moment: "It used to drive him mad. Which was partly why I kept doing it."
"Kept what? Not getting caught off guard?"
"Kept practicing." He set Pandora's recovered items on the table between them, neatly arranged, which James suspected was automatic. "It was the only arena in which I reliably won."
James thought about that. He thought about two Black brothers in a large house, working out the terms of their relationship in the only language available to twelve-year-olds: competition and proximity and the occasional thrown object.
He thought about the way Sirius's face did when he mentioned Regulus now. Careful and aching and trying not to be either.
"You should tell him that," James said. "The winning thing. I think he'd — I think it would mean something to him."
Regulus looked at him steadily. "Do you always do that?"
"Do what?"
"Manage people toward each other." Not unkind. Genuinely curious. "You do it constantly. You did it with—" he stopped, recalibrated. "You did it with Lupin and Pettigrew in second year. You've been doing it with Sirius and me for months. I don't think you're even aware you're doing it."
James opened his mouth. Closed it.
"It's not a criticism," Regulus said. Then, as if the symmetry was deliberate: "I'm just noting it."
James recognized those words. He felt something shift in his chest, something that had been in a particular configuration for several months begin to move into a different one.
"I was aware," he said. "For what it's worth."
Regulus held his gaze for a moment longer than was strictly conversational.
Then he picked up his quill.
"Good," he said, and looked back at his parchment.
VI.
The problem — if James was being accurate, and he was trying to be, because Remus had told him once that his relationship to accuracy in matters that inconvenienced him was "creative at best" — was that it wasn't just the reflexes.
The reflexes were the thing that had started it, the initial oh that had happened in James's chest in the courtyard and hadn't entirely resolved. But they'd become a door, and James had walked through the door, and what was on the other side wasn't just — a neat trick. Impressive Quidditch inheritance. Wasn't just the thing he could look at and explain.
It was Regulus knowing exactly where Sirius was in any room he entered. James had noticed it over months — the slight, unconscious orientation, like a compass that had other ideas about North. Regulus had spent years learning to track his brother's location the way his hands tracked moving objects. By math. By trajectory. By the rules that moving things followed.
The tragedy of it, James thought, was that Sirius had never noticed he was doing it.
It was Regulus's handwriting, which was architectural and deliberate and which became slightly less so when he was actually interested in something, the letters loosening, opening up. James had learned to tell what Regulus found genuinely engaging by the quality of his annotations.
It was the way he argued — not to win, James had gradually realized. He argued to find the thing, the actual shape of the truth underneath the debate, and he'd concede a point with such clean simplicity when you'd managed to demonstrate it that James kept wanting to make better arguments just for the pleasure of watching that happen.
It was the coin, dropping below the table, caught without a glance.
It was the remark on the Quidditch pitch — you trust yourself, sometimes more than the evidence supports — and the way James had turned it over for two weeks and found it more precise each time.
It was the almost-fond expression that appeared rarely and without announcement.
Sirius found him staring at the wall of the Gryffindor common room one Sunday evening and said, with fraternal resignation: "Just tell me where you're at with this."
"I don't know what you're referring to."
"James."
"Prongs, even, if you want to be—"
"James."
James dropped his head back against the armchair. The fire was very bright and required looking at. "It's complicated."
"What's complicated about it? You're fond of him."
"He's your brother."
"Yes, I know, I've been dealing with that for eighteen years." Sirius sat on the arm of the chair, which he'd been told repeatedly not to do and would never stop doing. "I'm not — I don't have a problem with it, James. I want to be clear about that."
"You don't."
"I don't. I have approximately nine thousand other feelings about it that I'm working through, but that's not one of them." A pause. "He's — I know him. In a way most people don't get to. He's worth being fond of."
James looked at the fire.
"I know that," he said.
It came out quieter than intended. Sirius didn't say anything, which was generous. Sirius was occasionally capable of great generosity in the moments that required it.
"It's also," James said, "very possible that he's not — that it would be — I don't know what he—"
"I know," Sirius said.
"I don't want to—"
"I know." He put his hand briefly on James's shoulder. "For what it's worth. He does this thing."
"What thing."
Sirius's mouth curved. "When someone says your name. He — it's very small. But I was looking for it."
James looked at him.
"You were looking for it?"
"I told you I was covering for you since we were eleven. I have a system." He stood up, stretched. "Talk to him, James. Or throw something at him. He seems to like it when people throw things at him." He paused. "Well. When you throw things at him."
"That is — what?"
"Goodnight," Sirius said, and went to bed with the serene expression of a man who had done a good thing and knew it.
VII.
James thought about it for two weeks.
He was, he recognized, thinking about it for longer than was strictly necessary. He was an act-first-recalibrate-later person by nature and by reputation; the hesitation was unfamiliar. It sat in him like a change in weather, the kind where the pressure shifts before you can name what's coming.
The thing was — Regulus was careful. That was the word James kept landing on. He was careful in the way of someone who had learned to be, which was different from someone who was careful by temperament. There was a distinction there that mattered. Regulus's carefulness was a considered choice, renewed constantly, and James found himself unwilling to be careless with something that had cost Regulus work to build.
And then he thought: but he also catches things thrown at him without looking.
He thought about that a lot too.
It was a Tuesday. Not a significant Tuesday, no particular ambient drama, just the gray late-November kind with frost on the windows and everyone's patience worn thin by the approach of exams.
James was cutting across the courtyard and Regulus was there, alone — which was unusual, Regulus almost always had Rosier or Avery trailing him, or had been installed somewhere by Barty and abandoned — sitting on a bench with parchment and the focused expression that meant the parchment had been deemed worthy.
James stopped.
He had a partially eaten apple.
He looked at the apple.
He looked at Regulus's back.
He thought about it for — honestly, given the preceding two weeks of thinking about it, not that long.
He threw the apple at the back of Regulus's head.
Regulus's hand came up. Caught it. Did not turn around.
The courtyard was quiet.
"Potter," Regulus said.
"Black," James said.
A pause. "Was that a test?"
James walked around the bench, because there was no good reason to have this conversation with someone's back, and sat down on the other end. He left a reasonable amount of space. "I wanted to see if you'd actually do it."
Regulus looked at him with the reading expression. "You've seen me do it multiple times."
"I know."
"So the test had a known expected outcome."
"Yes."
"Then why—" Regulus stopped. He looked at the apple in his hand. "You wanted to do it," he said, without inflection. "Not to see if I'd catch it. You just wanted to throw it."
James said nothing, which was, he recognized, an answer.
The quality of Regulus's stillness shifted slightly. James had learned to read the stillnesses. This one was the thinking kind, the underneath-kind, the kind that meant something was being turned over carefully before being put down.
"Sirius used to throw things at me," Regulus said, finally, "because he wanted me to fail at it."
"I know."
"This was different."
"Yes."
"Why?"
James looked at the courtyard. The frost on the stones. A first-year crossing at the far end, robes too long, trailing a scarf. He thought about accuracy and carefulness and the particular precision of someone who had learned that moving objects followed rules.
"Because I wasn't hoping you'd miss," James said.
The silence after that was different from the ones that came before. It had a quality of attention to it, charged the way the air gets before something breaks.
Regulus held the apple out to him.
James took it, their fingers not quite touching — nearly, just nearly, just the proximity.
"I looked up your Quidditch record," Regulus said, conversationally. "Your first year."
James blinked. "What?"
"You were the youngest Seeker in a century. Before you moved to Chasing." He paused. "You were very good."
"I know."
"You gave it up."
"I wanted to be a Chaser."
"You wanted to choose," Regulus said. "You were excellent at the thing everyone expected you to be, and you put it down and chose something else." He looked at the parchment in his lap, not quite reading it. "I found that interesting."
James was not sure what to do with this information — that Regulus had looked up his record, that Regulus had found this particular thing worth thinking about. He turned it over.
"Seeking felt like waiting," James said. "Chasing is — it's collaborative. I wanted to play with people, not around them."
"Mm." A pause. "I don't mind the waiting."
"I know."
"It's where the math happens. The trajectory." He glanced sideways, the almost-expression materializing. "Most people find it boring."
"I don't," James said, "for what it's worth."
Regulus held his gaze.
"It's worth something," he said.
VIII.
They didn't do anything else that day. Regulus went back to his parchment and James sat on the other end of the bench and ate the rest of his apple and then, because he'd finished his immediate excuse for being there, got out his own work and did some of it.
This was not the conclusion James would have written for the scene in advance. He'd have expected something more dramatic. More conclusive.
But the bench was not uncomfortable, and the silence between them had resolved into something that felt — inhabited. Like they'd both moved something in, nothing large, nothing that couldn't be moved back, but something.
When Regulus stood to go, he collected his parchment and said, without looking at James: "Same time Thursday."
James looked up. "What?"
"Study session." Regulus tucked the parchment under his arm. "Same time Thursday."
He walked away before James could answer, which was, James was beginning to understand, characteristic. Regulus said what he meant and then left the space for you to do what you wanted with it. He didn't wait around pressing for responses. He trusted you to know what you thought.
"Yeah," James said, to his retreating back. "Same time Thursday."
He wasn't sure Regulus heard him.
He came, on Thursday, and Regulus was already there, and there was a space at the table that was not specifically saved but was specifically available, and James sat in it, and that was all, and it was somehow enough.
IX.
The thing that finally happened was not dramatic either. James was starting to understand that things with Regulus were rarely dramatic in the ways he expected, only in the ways he didn't.
It was December by then, genuinely cold, the castle drafty and everyone combusting slightly from exam pressure and the encroaching holidays and, underneath it, the war that none of them were talking about adequately.
They'd taken to — not walks, exactly, that seemed too formal, too courtship-novel. But Regulus sometimes left the library heading the same direction as James, and they walked together, and talked about Quidditch or argued about something or occasionally said nothing at all, and this felt like a form of honesty that James valued more than he would have expected.
That evening they'd argued about Seeker tactics for forty minutes and had somehow arrived at a corridor outside the Charms classroom without resolving anything, and were standing there in the residue of the argument, which had the specific quality of debates with Regulus that James had come to understand: not angry. Just — unfinished. Always more to find.
"You're wrong about the altitude thing," James said.
"I'm not," Regulus said. "And you know I'm not. You're just committed to the position."
"I'm committed to the position because it's the right—"
"The right position for your Seeking style, which is not the universal—"
"Okay, but—"
"—standard against which all Seeking should be measured, despite what your ego—"
"My ego?"
"—suggests." Regulus's mouth was doing the almost-thing, which James had learned to watch for because it happened briefly and without warning and he wanted to catch it. "You have a very healthy ego, Potter. It's not a criticism."
"I'm noting it," James said.
Regulus stopped.
James had used his words back at him. The Quidditch-pitch words, the words from the very beginning of this, and Regulus had gone still in the way that meant the math was happening, the calculation, the trajectory worked out in advance.
"Yes," Regulus said. Quiet. Precise. "I suppose you are."
The corridor was empty. The draft was coming from somewhere, the stones cold. James's heart was doing something Quidditch-adjacent that he was choosing not to examine in clinical detail.
"I've been noting quite a lot of things," James said. "For a while."
"I know."
"You know."
"You're not subtle."
"People keep telling me that."
"They're right." Regulus paused. "I don't mind it."
"The not-subtle thing."
"You." He met James's eyes. It was direct in the way Regulus was direct when he'd decided something. "I don't mind you."
James almost laughed, because that was — that was Regulus, that was exactly the almost-expression in words, understated past the point of function, and also somehow precisely true.
"I don't mind you either," James said. "Significantly."
"Significantly," Regulus repeated.
"It's been escalating."
"I noticed." A pause. "My trajectories tend to be accurate."
"Is that your way of saying you saw this coming?"
"Months ago," Regulus said, with composure.
"And?"
"And I was waiting," he said, "to see where you'd land."
James thought about that. Thought about the apple in the courtyard, the bench, the space at the table that was not saved but was available. Thought about Regulus watching and not pushing, leaving room, calculating without looking.
"And?" James said.
Regulus looked at him. The almost-expression resolved, finally, entirely, into something that was not almost anything. Just — there. Just present, on his face, which James suspected very few people had seen.
"And you landed," he said. "So."
"So," James agreed.
This time their fingers did touch, when James reached for his hand. Not just nearly. All the way.
(Sirius's assessment, rendered to Remus in the privacy of their dormitory, was that the whole thing had taken approximately four months longer than it needed to. Remus asked if he'd helped. Sirius said he'd thrown a dinner roll at James. Remus asked how that constituted help. Sirius said that some contributions were atmospheric. Remus said that was the most Sirius sentence he'd ever heard. Sirius said thank you. Sirius meant it.)
(Across the castle, in a corridor outside the Charms classroom, Regulus Black permitted himself the small, private smile he'd been conserving since a Tuesday in November. He said nothing about it. He didn't need to. He had excellent reflexes and accurate trajectories and he'd always known, more or less, where this one was going to land.)