Falling is Quiet
James Potter didn’t fall loudly this time.
He didn’t fall with teasing words or big gestures or grand announcements. He fell with silence.
It began with small shifts.
Like the way he’d find himself drifting toward the Ravenclaw table during breakfast just to see if she smiled when the pumpkin juice overflowed. Or how he lingered longer in the music room — not because he liked the dusty old harpsichord, but because sometimes, if he waited long enough, he’d hear her footsteps echo down the corridor.
He didn’t speak to her. Not yet.
He wasn’t sure he’d know what to say that wouldn’t sound foolish. She was too different, too still, like a page in a spellbook written in ink that shimmered only when the reader truly understood it.
He watched her from a distance — not in the creepy way Sirius teased him about when he caught him zoning out in Transfiguration — but in the way a person watches the moon. Quietly. Reverently.
There was the time she fixed Remus’s enchanted quill without being asked, murmuring a soft charm that made the nib write smoother than ever. Remus thanked her, flustered. Wren just smiled and returned to her book as if it was nothing.
There was the way she spoke to Sirius — not with awe, not with fear, but with honesty. She once told him, “You laugh like you’re trying to bury something. Don’t let it rot.” Sirius had blinked at her, then laughed again — quieter that time.
She moved through Hogwarts like a secret melody.
She didn’t belong to any one crowd, any one place.
But somehow, she made every room feel a little more alive.
And then there was that day in Charms.
Professor Flitwick had asked them to practice resonance spells — delicate, sound-based magic — and only Wren had managed to make her charm sing back in harmony. It wasn’t just correct. It was beautiful.
James had stared at her the entire time. She hadn’t noticed.
Or maybe she had — because when she walked past him after class, she had murmured, “Magic listens, if you learn to speak softly.”
He’d nearly dropped his wand.
Later, in the Gryffindor common room, Sirius flopped beside him on the couch and nudged his ribs.
“You’ve got it bad, mate.”
James didn’t deny it.