Hallway
They’d given Sirius the room furthest from the stairs. James could reason that this served multiple purposes: less foot traffic made for less noise, less cause for paranoia on both ends; it gave him more time to realize his surroundings before encountering other people.
So, logically, he shouldn’t resent the distance. He knew that. Of course he knew that.
Pointer.
The hallway was long and cold, the air sparse and seemingly repelled by James’s lips. All he had to do was go down the hallway, turn, and open the door.
Middle.
James took a step. The door to his room stood ajar, the fireplace crackling. He forced himself to push it out of his peripherals, and take three steps so that it was behind him and he couldn’t long for it.
He’d been trying to go to Sirius for a week and two days. On the first day, he’d given into the suffocating comfort of his sheets, freshly washed but never any less stained with guilt.
On the second day, he’d learned that three mindless steps was enough to convince himself he was trying.
On the fifth day, he’d tried to be James Potter. He’d shoved his hands into his pockets and sauntered right up to the hallway. It was late at night, and the only light in the hallway was flickering under Sirius’s doorway. He began to shake, but he managed to get to the door before he touched his fingers, and then they flew. Pinkie, ring, middle, pointer, middle, ring, pinkie, ringmiddlepointermiddle-
No. Sirius was probably trying to sleep. It was 9 pm. Even though he’d never been in bed before 10 in all the time James has known him, he could very well be in bed.
James dashed back to his room and promised the thickening air that he’d try again tomorrow.
Oddly, his mother had only brought it up once, and really not even directly. She’d handed him two mugs and gave him a strange look, saying to bring one to Sirius. James had shaken out an excuse, something about being just about to leave for Pete’s, and slammed into the doorway in his haste, slamming open the front door, the snow seeping through his socks, leaving his blood running somehow colder than it had since the fireplace delivered the broken, jagged shards of a maimed Sirius.
With his breath clouding and his heaving sobs insulated by the snow so that they could never escape his throat, he fell to his knees in the snow and cried. He cried for his friend, for what he’d lost, for how he’d been starved, for the horrors he would never again have to endure but would never stop enduring. He cried for his helplessness, and for his guilt, and the visions of blood and bone that sat between his iris and the end of the night. He cried for the week and 14 hours he’d let his selfishness and fear leave Sirius alone, and he cried for his own loneliness, for how isolating it was to be insufficient.
And when he couldn’t feel his toes or his tears freezing anymore, when all that filled the crisp dusk air was hiccups and the soft snow settling over the cries of his soul begging for reprieve, he stood shakily, walked into the house silently, ran a warm bath for himself, and sat.
He felt empty. Like the tears had taken everything from him, good or bad or anything between. And when he rose from the bath, his limbs warm enough to move, his eyes and his head were clear of saltwater agitation. And there was only path, one place to go.
His cotton pajamas were soft on his skin, whispering as he slid his shirt over his head as if to assure the thought.
He didn’t need a deep breath, didn’t need a mantra, didn’t need any precedent. His fingers were still. He didn’t care if he was asleep. It was as if something had been woken when he’d lost everything. Not in the snow, no; when Sirius had laid on the living room carpet, blood staining carpet and naivety, something had been pushed up his throat to sit on the backs of James’s teeth like plaque he could never scrape away.
He knew now. He knew. And he was nauseated to think that all this time, Sirius had known. It had pumped through his veins as if he breathed it in as vitally as oxygen, yet James had blinked away the stinging acidity of it as if he didn’t stare it right in the face like a wide-eyed child.
Everything came with its price. Tangible or not, the earth had a visceral debt that everything born from it had to pay. Blood and teeth and tears, you payed.
And stepping through the doorway to Sirius, James knew. There was no James or James Potter. There was nobody better than anyone else, no exception from the payment. There was just people who knew how to be better than the abhorrent things that lurked in the loss of blissful ignorance, and those that succumbed to it.
And James would not let it consume him any longer.
So, stepping through the doorway to Sirius, James let all parts of himself come back to him and fill the gaps that had been left by the things that went down the drain with his bath water.
And though he didn’t know yet, he would let the light of his love guide him to be better.