Chapter Text
The human mind is complex and self-deceptive, especially the minds of teenagers. A young mind often sees the world through a lens of self-righteousness, usually seeing everything in black or white. Truly, most teenagers believe the world revolves around them and that they are always right. It is only after growing out of that phase that a person truly begins the journey into adulthood.
That happened to James Potter during the First Wizarding War. Any war would mature a 20-year-old at an indescribable speed. He was married at 20 after only dating the "love of his life," as he described her, for 2 years and was already a father. An age his late father would only describe as a child having a child, as Fleamont was in his late 40s when he had him. Honestly, most of the time, he had no idea what he was doing. And with the looming presence of the war and fleeing from a madman who wanted to kill his son, he often found himself thinking about what he could have changed in his life, having been in this world for a mere 21 years.
Those thoughts often brought him to deep, deep black eyes and a single drop of tears that made huge trails on dry skin. A teardrop that spoke more than the random hexes and insults he was accustomed to for many years. A single teardrop that had kept him sleepless even after 5 years. He usually shoved it to the back of his mind with the duties of his work and the Order's work, but being confined to a house to hide from a madman for the last few weeks made him ponder, making him think over and over again until he finally saw the situation as a bystander, from a third person's perspective. And the result was damning: he was a schoolyard bully, and maybe just maybe the one who pushed the owner of those teardrops he couldn't stop thinking about to his maker.
But what could he do now? Other than swearing to himself that when he came out of this hideout, he would say sorry to his school-time rival. He could only hope he would come out of this alive...