You hated him.

Not passively. Not silently. Not like most people who found him annoying but forgivable, irritating in a lovable way, like a loud puppy you couldn’t stay mad at. No—you hated him with intention. With your whole spine. With the kind of sharp-eyed certainty that made James Potter, for once in his life, feel small.

You didn’t roll her eyes when he walked into a room. You narrowed them. You didn’t ignore his jokes—you dissected them with surgical scorn, when you bothered to acknowledge them at all. And when he smiled at you (and he did, often, without meaning to), you didn’t blush or sneer or scoff like girls usually did.

You just looked at him like he was something you’d already scraped off your shoe.

And it gutted him.

Not that he let anyone see it, of course. He still ruffled his hair, still cracked jokes, still walked around with the easy swagger that came with being James Bloody Potter. But every time he saw you—across the courtyard, down the corridor, halfway up the spiral stairs—something twisted deep in his chest like a badly-cast spell.

He didn’t understand it. Not any of it. He knew when he was a git to someone. He wasn’t clueless. Well—not completely. But he’d never teased you, never hexed you, never even really talked to you properly except for those few failed, fumbling attempts.

He’d said hi in fifth year once. You’d stared at him like he’d insulted your family.

He’d asked you a question about their shared Arithmancy class once. You hadn’t answered—just walked away. He’d asked Sirius if he knew what your problem was. Sirius had shrugged and said, “Maybe she has taste.”

And James had laughed. But it didn’t reach his eyes.

Because the truth was—he watched you. Constantly. Obsessively. The way someone watches a fire that won’t go out. He watched you scribble in your notebook in class with a furrow in your brow and your lip caught between your teeth. He watched you pet the library cat like it was a secret you didn’t want anyone to catch. He watched you when you thought no one was looking, like a boy under a curse.

He told himself it was hate. That you’d cast the first blow with your disgust, your disdain, the way you made him feel like he wasn’t funny or clever or charming—just loud. And maybe he hated you back for that. Maybe he needed to.

But then you’d walk past, nose in a book or cloak trailing like stormclouds behind you, and his heart would stutter in his chest like it forgot who it belonged to.

He didn’t even like you. He couldn’t. You were cruel, weren’t you? Cold. Better than him in ways you never said aloud, only carried in the way you didn’t laugh when he wanted her to.

But still… he remembered the time you broke a boy’s nose for mocking a Hufflepuff’s stutter. Still remembered the way your eyes softened, once, at a crying first-year who’d fallen on the stairs. He remembered too much for someone who “hated” you.

Maybe it was hate. Maybe it was envy. Maybe it was just the way your voice could slice the air like glass when you said his name—“Potter.” Flat. Final. And the way he still thought it sounded like poetry.

He’d tell himself it didn’t matter. That he didn’t care. That you weren’t in his head, wasn’t in his bloodstream like a draught he couldn’t stop drinking even as it burned.

But James Potter, for all his noise and fire, was a boy who didn’t know what to do when someone refused to see the good in him.

And you were the one person who never did. Which meant, of course, he couldn’t stop seeing you.