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The first time it happened, James genuinely thought something was wrong with him.
They were in the Great Hall around lunch time. Severus had Potions on Tuesday mornings and always arrived to lunch looking slightly singed and quietly furious about it, and today was no different — he dropped into the seat across from James, stole a bread roll without asking, and launched immediately into a detailed critique of everything Slughorn had gotten wrong about today's lesson, which was apparently a lot.
James listened. Or he tried to.
The thing was, Severus had a stain on his jaw. A small smudge, just below his ear, that he clearly didn’t know was there. And he was gesturing with the bread roll, and his hair was escaping whatever he’d done to it that morning, and there was this one piece that kept falling across his cheek that he kept blowing out of the way without pausing his sentence, and James was —
James wanted to bite him.
Not — he didn’t know. It wasn’t a thought exactly, more like a pull. A sudden, sourceless, overwhelming want that arrived fully formed in the middle of his chest and sat there, completely inexplicable, while Severus talked about cauldron temperatures and James smiled and nodded and thought what is wrong with me.
He didn’t do it. Obviously. He ate his lunch. He asked a follow-up question about Slughorn. He was normal.
But it stayed with him, strange and warm, like something he’d swallowed wrong.
The second time, he was at least in a more defensible position.
It was late. The common room had emptied out around them over the course of an hour, and Severus — who had been granted conditional access to Gryffindor territory after extended negotiation and one very pointed look at Sirius — had gone quiet in the way he did when he was truly absorbed, the kind of quiet that meant he’d forgotten James was there entirely.
And then he’d fallen asleep.
He slowly did become soft and clingy. Like the way a cat decides to trust you. His breathing slowed, his book tilted at an increasingly alarming angle, and eventually his head found James’s shoulder and stayed there. James had caught the book twice. He hadn’t moved. He’d barely breathed.
Severus’s ear was right there.
James looked at it. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at it again.
There was no reason for it. That was the maddening part. It wasn’t — he didn’t want to hurt him, it wasn’t anything like that, it was more like. Like when you see something small and perfect and your hands just ache. Like when you’re so fond of something you don’t know what to do with your body, it makes the end of your front teeth tingle in the strangest way possible.
He sat on his hands, which helped slightly
He watched Severus sleep, which did not help at all.
The third time, James started conducting an actual internal investigation.
Why, he thought, very sincerely, while Severus argued with Remus about something James had already lost the thread of. Why do I want to do that. What is that about. That’s so strange. I’m so strange.
Severus made a sharp, dismissive gesture and Remus threw his hands up and James watched Severus’s face do the thing where he almost smiled but didn’t quite let himself, and the feeling rose up in James’s chest so suddenly it was almost dizzying.
He wanted to bite his cheek. That specific place. He had a whole vision of it — leaning over, the warmth of Severus’s skin, Severus going still and affronted and then slowly, slowly turning to look at him.
He pressed his fist to his mouth and looked at the wall.
“You alright?” Remus asked him.
“Fine,” James said, muffled.
Severus glanced at him briefly, suspicious, and James smiled, and Severus’s eyes narrowed, and James thought I need to talk to someone and then immediately thought I absolutely cannot talk to anyone about this.
He decided to owl his mum.
He kept it vague. He said: sometimes when you really like someone, do you ever just — and he’d stared at the parchment for a full minute before writing — feel like doing something weird about it.
His mum wrote back in four minutes flat, which meant she’d been waiting by the owl post.
Oh sweetheart, she wrote. Your father bit me on the nose the third time we went out. I nearly hexed him. We’ve been married twenty years. Does that answer your question?
James read the letter three times.
He thought about his dad. He remembered about being nine years old in Diagon Alley and his dad biting his ear, enormous and gentle and completely unprompted, and James squirming away absolutely mortified. He thought about how he’d asked his dad to stop and his dad had gone a bit quiet and said it’s just how I love you, mate and James had said you could just say it just like me. Like this: I love you Dad and his dad had said yeah I can buddy, but if you don't like it I'll stop since I love you alot and had stopped.
He remembered about how much he’d missed it after that day until he forgot.
James thought about how it had taken him years to understand that love had shapes. That sometimes it didn’t come out in words, that sometimes it arrived as something stupid and embarrassing and physical, some helpless expression of you pressed into the other person’s skin.
He folded his mum’s letter and put it in his pocket.
Then went to find Severus.
He was in the library. Of course he was. Bent over a Potions essay, quill tapping an irregular rhythm against the desk, forehead creased in concentration. He was wearing James’s jumper — still, from three days ago, hadn’t mentioned it once, probably never would.
James sat down across from him.
He looked at him for a long moment. All of him. The ink on his fingers and the furrow between his brows and the careful, deliberate way he existed, like someone who had learned early to take up very little space and hadn’t yet unlearned it.
The feeling rose up.
It wasn’t strange anymore. It wasn’t bewildering since he understood what it is now. It was just — there, the same way Severus was present infront of him, and James understood it now with a clarity that was almost funny in how simple it was.
He leaned over and pressed his teeth, very gently, against the curve of Severus’s neck.
Severus went completely still.
Quill suspended mid-word. Shoulders up. Not pulling away — just. Arrested. Stopped?. Like something had short-circuited.
Silence.
“…Potter.”
“Mm.”
“You just bit me.”
“Yeah.”
Severus set the quill down with enormous care. Turned to look at him, and his expression was —not outrage. Something far less defended than that.
“Why,” he said, slowly. Asked but said not quite like a question.
James looked at him and thought about all the times he felt this way. Just like the Great Hall and the common room and sitting on his hands like a man fighting a losing battle.
“I just had the urge to do it,” James said. “I've been wanting to do it for days and had to think of why. It drove me crazy until my mum sent me a letter and remembered a memory.
My dad used to do it to me and my mum. Just — out of nowhere. When he can’t help it.”
He paused. “I used to hate it. Told him it was embarrassing. So he stopped.”
Severus watched him steadily.
“I missed it for years before I understood what it was,” James said quietly. “It’s just — how it comes out of him. When he loves something too much to just say it normally. You just have an urge to bite”
The library was very quiet around them.
“And you,” Severus said, carefully, “cannot just say it normally.”
James looked at him. This person who had spent so long expecting the worst and kept being surprised. This person in his jumper with stains on his fingers who had fallen asleep on his shoulder and pretended in the morning that he hadn’t.
“Apparently not,” James said.
Something moved across Severus’s face. Complicated and very quickly hidden, but James had been watching him for months and he caught it — the way his breath shifted, the way his jaw worked once before he got himself back under control.
Severus picked up his quill. Turned back to his essay.
“Your father,” he said, after a moment that stretched like taffy, “sounds like a good man.”
James put his head down on Severus’s shoulder, and Severus let him, and outside the windows the sun was going down gold over the lake, and James thought that he hadn’t known, at nine years old, that his dad was teaching him something.
He thought maybe that was how it always worked.
Three weeks later, in the middle of the common room, Severus bit him on the ear.
James made a noise that he would never, ever be repeating. Sirius fell off the sofa. Peter made a sound like a stepped-on cat.
Severus turned a page in his book. His ears were pink. He did not look up no matter how much his name was called.
James pressed his fingers to his ear. He felt something so large and warm he genuinely didn’t have a name for it.
He didn’t say anything or commented about it. He didn’t have to. Severus already knew — had known, James suspected, since the library, since he’d turned back to his essay and let James stay. He understood quicker than James ever did.
Love comes in all forms.
It makes you do the strangest things. No matter how embarrassed you are after.
Love always shows on someone's face.
In a way anyone could tell someone's importance to another.
Love had shapes.
Sometimes the shape was embarrassing. Even in a shape of a bite mark.
But to James, it was the best shape he’d ever known.
END OF CHAPTER