letters from home

James Potter had always wanted a brother, because more than anything else in the entire world, James Potter hated to be alone.

His mother always called him precious and lucky and charmed, and so James grew up knowing he was unique, which means one of a kind. At first, he thought this was just because he was magical, and maybe she had been afraid to raise a Squib. But Silva Potter wasn't afraid of anything, and James' magic had been loud and dramatic and very, very present, practically from infancy. Magic sparks ricocheted off the walls of his nursery, and the strands of his hanging mobile would dance in windless air. But over time, James realised that his mother regarded him as a gift of providence, and that's why he was treasured. He had been unexpected, but desperately wanted, and his very existence seemed too fantastic to believe, too extraordinary to let go unremarked. James also realised that to be one of a kind is to be without a match, without an equal.

When James was little, he would play in the streets of Godric's Hollow with the other children, the daughters and sons of witches and wizards almost exactly like his parents. He knew, from around the age of eight, that his parents weren't exactly just like those other parents, because his mother's eyes were wrinkled even when she wasn't smiling, and his father's messy hair had gone silver at the edges. James' parents didn't, unlike the other parents in Godric's Hollow, have their own parents over for Sunday tea, because James didn't have grandparents. And at first, he had thought this was just some cruel aberration, some way in which he was horribly, horribly unlike other people, until the girl down the street's grandmother died, and James realised that's what being really gone looks like, and he knew that's what had happened to his own grandparents, and that's what would one day happen to his own parents, and it would probably come sooner for his than for his friends' mothers and fathers. This is the kind of premonition that haunts the children of old parents, the sort of fear that restlessly ghosts their sleep.

But for the most part, James' childhood had been precious and lucky and charmed, and he could banish those quiet, preternatural fears. To send off the shadowy thoughts, he would decisively shake his head, a quick twist to the right and then back again, and he would draw his mouth into that bright, easy grin that made his parents happy, that kept his friends laughing, that made old Batty give him extra sweets whenever he passed by, and he would shake it all away.

Even as a boy, James knew that he wasn't afraid of dying - although, to be fair, that really never seemed like a possibility because death was something that happened to other people -- but he was always afraid that the people he loved would die.

He was afraid that his dog Newt would die, and one day, he did, and James hid in the cupboard and cried. And he was afraid that his parents, who kept getting greyer and greyer, would die before he was ready.

While he wasn't entirely conscious of it, he was also afraid that Peter would die, because Peter was the closest thing James had ever had to a brother, and because James loved Peter in the simple, fierce way that older brothers love younger brothers. (Although Peter would be the first to tell you that James had less than four months on him, and James was definitely the immature one, thank you very much.)

Peter's parents had died when James was almost six. They were young, younger than James' parents, still bright and smooth and so alive, until they weren't. James hadn't been allowed to go to the funeral, but once, when he was almost ten, James had gone with his parents to put flowers on the Petterigrews' graves, and as he counted the numbers between BORN and DIED, James realised that you didn't have to be that old to die. He shook his head once to the right, and once to the left, for good measure. His father's hair had gone silver all over by then.

James grew up knowing that he was a gift, he was a surprise, and he did his best to always be a good one.

The night before he left to go to Hogwarts, the place he had been dreaming about for weeks, James was nervous. But he did his best to hide it. His father cooked James' favourite meal, steak and potatoes and some asparagus he didn't like as much but he grinned and ate it all, and his mother made James' favourite cake, and he got chocolate all over his lips. He played one last round of chess with his father (and lost, but only just barely); he kissed his mother goodnight before he trudged up the stairs to his bedroom. His neatly packed trunk stood at the foot of his bed, ready to travel. James lay restlessly beneath his handmade, sky-blue quilt and waited for sleep.

And while he was nervous, James was also painfully excited for Hogwarts. He had grown up listening to his parents talk about their schooldays, about the classes they had taken and the delicious feasts and the Hogsmeade visits and the Quidditch losses and finding each other on a quiet wintry day at the edge of the lake, just by accident, and falling in love, a little on purpose. But mostly, because James was young and there had always just been one of him, James remembered the stories of the friends they made, and the adventures they had. And James wanted that.

When James was younger, he had begged his parents for a brother, like many little boys do. His mother would just smile and say Maybe someday and her eyes would float and fade away, like a ship falling off the horizon line. His father wouldn't say anything at all, silent save for the line of his shoulders, which spoke volumes, and eventually, James stopped asking. His parents gave him everything he asked for, except for the thing he wanted most of all.

James had always had playmates on the streets of Godric's Hollow, and he had been well-liked, often the leader of their mischief-making. But he always felt like he outran his friends, like he was moving too quickly for everyone else, half-waiting for someone to catch up and outpace him. And so, even as a young boy, even surrounded by other young boys and girls, James felt alone. It felt a little bit like a masquerade with these friends, like he was acting the part of James Potter, like his grin was a mask for something else, for everybody else.

Peter came close to being the brother James had always wanted. He filled certain important criteria: he had always been there, and always would be. But Peter was like the brother you're born into caring for, not the comrade-in-arms who shares your buzzing hive mind, who completes not just your sentences but your movements, who can one-up you but also knows when to temper your fire. Peter was just there, and James loved him, in his boyish sort of way. James had been taught to take care of Peter, to protect him from the unwittingly sharp jabs of other children, who didn't understand how hard Peter's life had been, and to stick up for this perennially bruised boy, but to be careful to never treat him differently. And that meant keeping his mask on a little longer, keeping the grin sprawling across his lips and pretending to be himself, pretending to be enough, because that's what Peter needed. James was committed to protecting Peter at Hogwarts, to sticking together no matter what, but a small part of James still fervently hoped to find the brother he had always wanted but never had.

Mostly, James didn't want to have to try so hard.

His mother had found her family at Hogwarts. Before she had been Silva Potter, she had been Silva Selwyn. She had come to school an orphan, born into a penniless branch of that pureblood line. Her parents died when she was barely three, and Silva had been taken in by a neighboring wizarding household. That witch and wizard, both Muggleborn, had always wanted a baby, and they got Silva, and Silva got a family. But it wasn't until Hogwarts that she found her brothers and sisters, her fellow Gryffindors. James grew up listening to his mother's stories of finding not just friends, but siblings, bound together with a kind of closeness that James envied, recognising its absence in his own life. He couldn't wait to find the rest of his family. And in her fifth year at Hogwarts, Silva had gone on a date with Stuart Potter, and that had brought her a different kind of family. But that wasn't on James' mind, not just yet. He was, after all, only eleven.

On a warm day in the summer before he left for his first year at Hogwarts, James went rifling through the old leatherbound photo albums his parents kept in the den. He wanted to liberate a few memories to tuck under the neatly folded robes in his new school trunk. He was a little embarrassed at the rush of feeling that propelled him towards the cabinets, but once he cracked the spines on his childhood, his embarrassment abated. Here were photographs of an antsy, bouncing baby James, his father reaching out to take the twitching bundle of baby. There was a photograph of James on his first broomstick, receiving guidance from his mother, who had been the Gryffindor Seeker in her day. A decade of birthdays, camping trips, holidays, and snowball fights, interspersed with snapshots of a happy child with his happy parents. James plucked a few images and put the albums away. As he reached into the cabinets to tidy the volumes, he noticed a small, paperbound book towards the back, and he drew it into the light.

It was unmarked, but clearly much older than the still-stiff red albums tracking his own childhood. He gingerly opened the book to its first page, and James felt a shock course through his body as he looked at faintly yellowed photographs peeling up from the page. Here were his parents again, but younger than he had ever seen them - just barely graduated from Hogwarts, and smiling at the camera, standing proudly in front of their home in Godric's Hollow. The house looked much the same, but the trees were a little closer to the earth and the paint a little fresher. James flicked through the pages, pausing at the photographs of his parents' wedding. His father looked a little terrified, his mother had tears in her eyes. But above all else, they looked happy. James kept turning the pages, curious to see what would come next, in the years before him.

Snapshots of their early days: his mother in the garden, shaking a shovel at the camera-holder; his father reading by the fire; a dinner party with their friends, all so very young.

And then, James turned to a photograph of his mother, leaning against the front door, lit by the setting sun, smiling explosively, her hand over her gently curving stomach -

and James turned the next page a little too quickly, leaving a small tear in the fragile paper, as his eyes skated over more pictures of his mother, who kept swelling, who kept smiling, who was improbably young, too young -

and then his father, holding a tiny baby with his mother's light brown hair, which James knew was all wrong, because he knew he'd been born with ink black tufts, he'd seen it -

and then his parents, pictures of his parents, holding that tiny baby as it got a little bigger, and then a little bigger, its fists curled tightly around his father's thumb, twisting excitedly in his mother's lap, and then -

the photographs, they stopped, and the pages went blank, and James turned them furiously, but there was nothing left.

James exhaled softly, and turned back to that first photograph of the baby, in his father's arms, and peered down at the image. The baby's blanket was bright blue, and it had a name embroidered in yellow at the edge, and James leaned close to the page and stared through his horn-rimmed glasses, and read the name:

James.

The summer air turned purple with heat as the days tilted towards September 1. James didn't mention his discovery to his parents. He tried not to think about that tiny baby, and what happened to it - what happened to the first James, to the brother he never had and the person he was supposed to be. But sometimes, late at night, as he looked out his window at the darkening sky and watched the stars sweat, he could see his young father's smile, perpetually widening, and James would shake his head once to the right, and whisper, "No," into the still air. And eventually, he shook that memory right out of his head, right out of his dreams.

He didn't ache for a brother quite as much anymore.

And in those summer days, the days before he left, he was happy, because James Potter was a happy boy. Because it was easier to be unquestioningly, unthinkingly happy. But underneath all that happy, some part of James felt unmoored. When he finally stepped into the Great Hall at Hogwarts, he was certain of something for the first time in weeks. He would be Sorted into Gryffindor, like his mother, like his father, but this new place, his new home for the next seven years, it would be all his. No memories of that tiny baby with the light brown hair, no uncertainty, just him. The James that belonged.

So James grinned like he was sure of himself, mostly to convince himself, and he walked like he knew what came next, mostly to prove it to himself. And when Peter was Sorted into Gryffindor, James swallowed his relief and tossed his friend a wink, mostly to assure himself.

The Sorting Hat hadn't liked James very much, if Hats can be said to have personal feelings towards eleven-year-old boys. At least, that's what it felt like to James, as the Hat had whispered little lion in his ear, and sent him to Gryffindor, but with words of admonishment. James had turned over those words as he closed his eyes in his new dormitory, pretending to fall asleep abruptly to avoid conversation before bed. He wasn't ready to put on his grin and be James Potter just yet.

James was grateful for Peter in those first two weeks at Hogwarts, in a way he'd never been before. He had always taken Peter's presence as surety, even when they were apart. He knew that Peter needed him, and so Peter would always be there. But at Hogwarts, James quickly realised that there were options, and that meant Peter might not need him so much. So James was careful to keep Peter close, to drag him on all his wanderings of the castle, to insist on homework by the fire, to walk to the Great Hall and eat breakfast together every morning.

Peter was a reminder of life before Hogwarts, of home, and James was a little bit homesick in those first weeks, even though home felt a little less his these days. He missed his father's cooking and the way his mother sang along to the wireless. He missed the stretch of green behind his house and the way the air tasted as fall blew in on the night wind. He missed his sky-blue quilt and the familiar faces of Godric's Hollow. Some of those faces were at Hogwarts, sure, but in this unfamiliar setting, they felt foreign and faraway. James was just barely able to keep his grinning mask in place as he walked the corridors of Hogwarts with Peter at his side. The happiness, the immense possibility, of his first meal at Hogwarts on the night of the Sorting had faded a little.

In his first days at Hogwarts, James extended himself, stretching towards friendship with the other two boys in his dormitory, because he knew that was what he was supposed to do.

Lupin had the bed next to James, but as he was almost always first to rise and last to tuck in, James found that he rarely saw the tall boy, save for their shared lessons. Lupin was a meticulous, careful notetaker, and he seemed intently focused on each lecturer, even in History of Magic. Occasionally, James would catch sight of Lupin at the table in the Great Hall, or in their common room, but it seemed like the boy was always in motion, always just about to leave. James' attempts to chat with Lupin were met with a perfectly constructed smile and a kind of guarded blankness in his wide, amber eyes. James could tell that he was not wanted, and so eventually, James simply gave up on inviting Lupin to play Gobstones with him and Peter, stopped trying to talk to him between classes, and slid into an easier routine of smile-and-wave. Lupin was always pleasant, responsive, and distant.

The other boy, Black, was anything but pleasant. Just looking at him set James' teeth on edge.

James had felt the pulse of tension in the Great Hall when Black had been Sorted to Gryffindor, although he didn't entirely understand what the problem was. Who wouldn't want to be in Gryffindor, James had wondered. He got his answer a couple nights later in the common room, when he overheard murmured gossip between three sixth year boys: Whole family's been in Slytherin, and Dark as they come, wonder what the Hat was playing at and Arrogant little bastard, look at how he storms around here, like he's too good for the rest of us.

James wondered what it must feel like to not fit in anywhere.

At first, James had extended the same eager friendliness to Black as he had to Lupin, with the same lack of success. Except where James had simply found a careful sort of emptiness in Lupin's eyes, he saw nothing but bitterness in Black's. Black responded to kindness - and James was entirely certain that kindness had propelled him forward, and not curiosity, not in the least - with acidic silence, with snarl of his thin lips and a stare that looked straight beyond James, like there was nothing of value to behold.

The rage of eleven-year-old boys is innately weak. It is usually petty. It resides in tightly curled fists that hang limp, without force. It sounds with unbroken vocal cords. All too often, it is the snapping teeth of a dog that's used to being kicked, instinctive and only dangerous to those who dare to get close.

One day, James got too close.

It was their second Saturday at Hogwarts, and the faint morning chill had been dispelled by a clear, bright sun. Lupin was quick to slip out of the dormitory, the whisper of his drawn bed hangings nudging James from slumber. By the time he had pulled the sleep from his eyes, Lupin was out the door. Black was stirring, but Peter continued to gently snore.

James rose and shook Peter into consciousness, ready to begin their day. The previous evening, the boys had decided - or rather, James had declared - to go out onto the grounds of the school and examine the easily excited Whomping Willow after breakfast. Peter drug heavy limbs to the shower as James pulled on his robes. Black had risen, too, and gone to stand at the window, tearing his fingers slowly through sleep-tangled curls.

"Oy, Black," James heard himself call, in spite of his better judgment. "Peter and I are going to have a look around the grounds, d'you want to come along?"

Maybe it was just one invitation too many, or maybe it was too early in the morning, or maybe something else entirely. But Black bit back, turning and snarling with a kind of fury that settles leaden on an empty stomach.

"Look, Potter, just fuck right off," and James tensed at the coarseness of these words, some of Black's first in almost two weeks. It wasn't until that moment that James realised he couldn't remember ever even hearing the other boy speak, and now suddenly, he was shouting.

"I don't want to be your friend. You aren't worthy of me. I don't consort with trash like you," he spit through sharp teeth, and even as James felt his own anger lurch forward in response, a small part of him considered how mechanical, how strange, those words sounded on the tongue of an eleven-year-old boy. Briefly, James remembered what the older boys had said about Black's family, and he wondered what kind of parents would teach their son to hate. But then, Black's caustic attack brought James back to attention, as he burned on: "And I'm not like your little friend," and here Black jerked his chin towards the shower, towards Peter, "I'm not going to go groveling at your feet, following you wherever you go, like some pathetic, sniveling rat -"

James could have ignored the strangely formal slights, but the brutality Black deployed when speaking of Peter, that drove James into action. He straightened his shoulders as he strode across the room and thrust himself right into Black's face. He spoke quietly, quickly: "No wonder you're always alone. You're the pathetic one, Black. Got yourself stuck here with us trash, but you know what, I don't see any of your kind hanging about with you, don't see you getting any letters from home. I was just trying to be polite, but forget it. No one wants to hang around - sorry, consort - with you anyways."

Silence sank into the room, broken only by Peter's entrance into the room, pink from his shower. He glanced at James, who quickly fixed his coldest smile and turned away from Black.

"C'mon, Peter. I'm starving, and we've got stuff to get on with. Hurry up and get dressed," James said cheerily. When he and Peter left for breakfast, Black had turned back to the window, his tensed fingers gripping its ledge.

After that morning, James stopped speaking to Black. He soured every time the other boy crossed his path, and when Peter asked James about Black's anger in whispered tones that Sunday, James had delighted in the chance to throw a barb Black's way. For his part, Black mostly avoided James and Peter; in fact, he seemed to avoid everyone.

That Monday, James received another letter from home. His mother wrote often, chatting about the town goings-on and the final yields of her garden and how much she missed him. His father would scrawl notes in the margins of his mother's carefully inked letters. James was grateful to receive these little reminders of what he had left behind.

Grabbing a few more pieces of bacon, James carefully hid his surprise at the sight of Peter's old owl. Peter's first letter from home. While Peter hadn't mentioned it, James knew that his grandmother's silence stung.

Across the table, Lupin's empty amber eyes flitted down the page of his own letter from home. James felt a faint stirring of curiosity as he watched the tall boy refold his letter, wondering what sort of parents he had, what sort of home he came from. He pushed his questions to the back of his mind; Lupin was a closed book, and he wasn't all that interesting, anyways.

Towards the end of the table, Black moodily speared his eggs, glowering at the plate before him. James' smile instinctually faltered, hooking into a scowl as he regarded at Black, who was - he noted with some smugness - still letterless. Serves him right, James thought.

James could forgive a lot - he had been taught to allow others their errors, to be generous and to be kind. But he had also been taught to protect his own, to stand up for those who couldn't defend themselves. James Potter had been taught to hate a bully, and that was, he thought definitively, settling the matter for good in his mind, exactly the sort of boy Black was.