James Potter didn’t mean to fall in love like an idiot. Not at first.

It had started, like most of his worst (read: best) decisions, with impulse—a grin too wide, a comment too cheeky, a glance held too long. He hadn’t thought much of it, not beyond the thrum of flirtation that lived just beneath his skin in those last golden months at Hogwarts. You were… captivating. Not in the way most people were. Not someone to chase like a snitch, but something slower. A gravity. A warm pull.

So when you’d laughed—really laughed—at something ridiculous he’d said in Charms, he’d taken it as a sign. He’d kissed you behind the tapestry by the old Arithmancy classroom three days later. You let him. That was all the permission he needed to go off like a firework.

It was supposed to be casual. Friends with benefits, you’d said. James had nodded, said “Right, of course,” and then promptly behaved like your Victorian husband.

He didn’t really get it, the casual part. Not deep down. He tried to—Merlin, he tried to play it cool. He’d called it a thing, your thing, whenever Sirius raised an eyebrow. He’d shrugged when Lily had asked if you were together and said something like, “Dunno. We shag and share chocolate frogs. Seems solid to me.”

But he couldn’t stop himself. Not when you were in the room. Not when you looked at him like that.

He’d bring you coffee from Hogsmeade with your initials spelled out in frothy wandwork. He enchanted parchment to float love poems into your bag during Herbology. For your birthday, he made a Marauder-style scavenger hunt that led you across the castle to a hidden box of your favorite things—and a note signed, From your number-one fan, Potter, King of Overdoing It.

You told him, gently, that this wasn’t what friends with benefits were.

He told you, earnestly, that he didn’t care. That he liked doing this for you.

Because how else was he supposed to show it? That he was utterly, stupidly gone for you.

When he turned up to your movie night—a Muggle thing he adored purely because you adored it—with pastries still warm from the kitchens and that wide, bashful grin like he was offering you his whole bloody heart, you looked at him for a long time. Said nothing. And then kissed him slow, like maybe you were starting not to understand the rules anymore either.

After that, things blurred. You stopped correcting people when they called you his partner. You wore his scarf in the courtyard. You let him rest his head on your shoulder in the library, let him kiss you like he meant it, let him hold your hand beneath the table in the Great Hall.

He never asked for more. He didn’t want to scare you off. But bloody hell, did he hope.

And so, on the anniversary of the first time you rolled your eyes at him (which he’d marked in his calendar with a little gold star), James planned.

Nothing subtle, obviously—he wasn’t built for subtlety. He wasn’t the type to slip a note into your bag and pray you found it. No, James Potter planned a confession like it was a Quidditch match: full force, all heart, a little too loud.

He borrowed Remus’s nicest quill. He dragged Sirius into the kitchens at midnight to perfect your favorite dessert. He spent a week enchanting the Astronomy Tower to flicker with starlight even in the rain, layering it with soft music and charmed candles that refused to blow out.

Because if he was going to say it, really say it—“I love you. And I know I’m probably not doing this right, but I want to. I want to do this right for you.”—then he was going to do it in a way that left no room for doubt.

James Potter had spent his whole life loving loudly.

It was only fair, he thought, that he got to be loved back the same way.