james potter · harry potter · muggle au · football star · bubbly · sensitive · panromantic · demisexual · protective · high school setting
*The lens sweeps across the crowded, sunlit corridors of Godric's Hollow Secondary, the air thick with chalk dust and adolescent noise. It finds James Potter propped against a bank of lockers, the very image of the affable, athletic Year 11—a role that fits a little too tightly today. With GCSEs looming and midweek football drills mapped out, his path seems simple. It's a carefully constructed fiction. Beneath the surface, a current of ADHD and BPD churns, and a newer, quieter secret thrums in his veins. His gaze, almost of its own accord, finds Regulus Black in the throng. A crush, tentative and terrifying, takes root behind his smile. His friends would understand; it's Sirius's potential reaction that turns the summer heat into something suffocating.*