July 1979
A door bangs open, the sound echoing relentlessly through James' skull, and he groans.
"Prongs!"
He recognizes that voice, but in a haze, can't quite put a face to it, can't quite figure out who it is or where it's coming from.
He could be imagining it. It wouldn't be the first time he'd heard voices coming from nowhere, entirely existing inside his own hallucinations.
"Prongs, fucking hell."
A bright light seeps into the dark bedroom, and James cracks an eye open, trying to make sense of what the hell is going on. He squints into the light and can barely make out a shape of a person. There's still glitter in the corners of his vision, a residual effect of the pill he'd been given by the brunette he'd been dancing with. He hadn't thought twice about swallowing it, taking a shot of tequila as a chaser, waiting for it to have some sort of impact on him.
Apparently all it had been good for was making everything in his vision sparkle. Which was altogether disappointing, though it did make the sex interesting.
He finally recognises the person standing at his bedroom doorway, and feels an acute sense of shame that he couldn't identify him based on his voice. God, he's heard Sirius's voice enough over the years that it shouldn't be that easy to forget.
Then again, he's already starting to forget what his parents sound like. Clearly, his memory can't be trusted with even the most important of things.
"Shit, you have company," Sirius continues, apparently completely unphased by James' lack of response. "Er, hi - I'm sure you're lovely, but I have a few extremely important things to talk about with the bloke whose bed you're in, so if you wouldn't mind leaving…"
"If you wouldn't mind shutting the door so I can get dressed, I'd be happy to," an icy voice replies, and James suddenly remembers the other person in bed with him.
He's become rather skilled at the art of picking up girls in clubs, although truthfully, it's not like he has to try all that hard. The side effect of ending up at the top of every rising Quidditch star list is that he's made a name for himself, made himself recognisable to even the most casual of Quidditch fans. He doesn't have to put in any effort to woo anyone, his looks and celebrity doing most of the charming for him.
It helps that he doesn't really have much of a type either - he's not exactly picky in his selections, and is all too content to bring home the first girl that asks him to fuck her.
Except redheads. He has a categorical rule against redheads.
The door shuts, and he rolls over to face her just as she's pulling her dress back on.
"Do you normally have people breaking into your flat first thing in the morning?" she asks, her voice a little less cold to him than it was to Sirius. Which he supposes makes sense - if he were in her shoes, he'd also be incredibly pissed off at a random intruder appearing and essentially telling him to make himself scarce.
"Can't say it's something I've experienced before," he replies, his voice rough and scratching. It hardly even sounds like him.
"Well tell them not to do it again." She slides her heels on and grabs her purse from where it'd been dropped by the bedroom door. "Spare the next girl at least."
She doesn't say goodbye before leaving, and he's honestly a bit grateful for that. He can't even remember her name, if he'd even bothered asking for it in the first place - something he ought to be ashamed of.
He's got all too many things to be ashamed of.
He surveys the space around him and grabs the first two clothing items he can - a pair of pyjama pants and a T-shirt, both of which are probably dirty but at least don't smell that bad, putting them on before walking out into the living room.
Sitting on his couch - amidst a complete mess of clothes, empty bottles, food containers, and Merlin knows what else - are Sirius, Remus, and Peter, their expressions grim, concerned, and startled, respectively.
"What are you doing here?" he asks, trying far too hard to act casual, like they haven't just forced their way into his flat, like he's not clearly a mess and clearly very hungover, like they aren't just sitting in the midst of the wreckage that's become his life.
Sirius is the one who answers. "Saving you from yourself."
January 1979
He'd always fantasised about what his first professional game would feel like. Hogwarts games have no shortage of fanfare, but it's nothing, nothing compared to this.
He mounts his broom just before his name is announced, taking flight around the pitch behind his two fellow Chasers, letting the screaming fans and pure electric energy of the crowd soak in through his pores.
He could drown in this, could let it swallow him up, and be totally content with that. The stadium is full, a sea of Portree purple and Cannons orange, the constant camera flashes all around him making it look like a dream.
It's even better than he could have ever imagined, even more perfect than his wildest fantasies.
The cameras zoom in on him for a moment as the teams start to take their starting positions, and he doesn't miss a beat. He looks directly at the camera in question, finding it easily, and winks.
There's an even louder cheer at that than when he first flew out onto the pitch, and he feels a swell of satisfaction in his chest. He's had it figured out since he was in school - everybody loves cool. Everybody loves that effortlessly suave, self-confident celebrity.
He intends to be exactly that.
But he's also got a Quidditch game to play (and win), so when the Quaffle enters the sky, his focus zeroes in, no longer paying any attention to anything else around him. Underneath any and all dreams of chasing fortune and fame, there's still the main reason he's here: he fucking loves this sport.
It's his first love and his forever lifeline, and he'll be damned if he lets himself forget that.
If there was ever any question about Portree bumping James Potter to the main roster as a rookie player, those concerns are effectively silenced by the end of the match. James isn't sure he's ever heard this many people screaming his name, and he's almost shocked when he hears his own match stats.
The reports from that first match call him lucky.
The reports from every match thereafter realise it's not luck at all.
March 1979
He's out with his teammates after a match when the owl arrives.
They're all laughing, and Aziz is in the middle of reenacting James' final shot of the game, and he feels like he's floating. This is the dream. He's literally living the dream.
And then a barn owl flies into the room and leaves a note in front of James.
The message is short and simple, written sloppily and quickly. Sirius is taking your parents to Mungo's. You need to come. - Remus
Those two little sentences pop the balloon of excitement instantly, all his joy immediately fizzling to nothingness.
He makes his excuses to leave, his half-consumed firewhiskey left sitting on the table, and immediately Apparates to the wizarding hospital. He's got no idea where he's meant to be going, no idea what's happened to his mum and dad - he only knows he needs to find them.
They'd been fine when he saw them a few days ago. They were going to be at his match today, like they have been every match so far, cheering him on from their own private box, but he didn't look for them specifically in the crowd today. He'd been too busy preening on the attention from the entire stadium instead, soaking up the cheers from countless strangers, cheers that had only gotten louder over the past few weeks as it'd been made clear that James Potter was Portree's rising star.
Maybe, if he'd thought to look for them, he would've known something was wrong earlier, could've been with them as Sirius brought them here, wouldn't be having to ask some random Healer to help him track down his parents.
He doesn't know, so James has to ask two more Healers before he finally finds someone with an answer, and she guides him to the second floor, down a long and seemingly never-ending hallway until they finally reach a room at the very end.
If the few sips of whiskey he'd taken at the bar had done anything to him, they're purged from his system now, the sight of his parents in their respective hospital beds ensuring that he's stone-cold sober.
His parents, who had both seemed so full of life and cheerful and energetic just a few days prior, now ashen, covered in the telltale marks of dragon pox.
"I - " James looks at Sirius and Remus in the corner, the latter's arm tightly wrapped around his boyfriend, and finds that he's unable to get any words out.
"They were supposed to meet me before your match today - we were going to get there together," Sirius says. His voice is empty, devoid of any of its usual lively inflection. "When they didn't show, I figured something was wrong. They'd never miss your matches. When I got there… they were like this. The Healers think the illness must've set in for both of them just a few days ago, but it… it worked fast. And dragon pox is - it's fine when you get it as a kid, you know, but Mum and Dad - "
Sirius trails off, and James is left desperately trying to fill in the end of his sentence with anything other than what he knows the rest of it was meant to be. His parents are older; dragon pox is increasingly dangerous - and increasingly fatal - with age.
"Did they say - " James' question trails off, and for good reason. He's not really sure what he's asking.
"They're doing everything they can," Remus supplies.
There's a second part that Remus doesn't say, but that James knows in his heart as he looks at his parents, both asleep but clearly still in pain.
They're doing everything they can, but it's not going to be enough.
April 1979
The funeral is planned around James' Quidditch schedule. He feels guilty about that, about the fact that something so monumental as the honoring of his parents' lives has to be accommodated to fit his job's demands, but Sirius shrugs it off as nothing.
It feels cruel, that the world keeps turning after the loss of two of the people he loved the most in it. What once felt easy, the mere act of getting out of bed in the morning, of getting through the day in one piece, suddenly feels like an endlessly burdensome task.
His whole world has shifted, and yet, to the rest of the world, nothing has changed at all.
His parents appear in the obituary section of the Prophet, a short collection of sentences honoring their lives and their contributions. And then that's it.
Meanwhile, James finds himself on the cover of Quidditch Quarterly, the action shots of him in his Portree uniform paired alongside a multi-page spread about his rise to fame and his impressive first year stats.
His mum would've hung it on the wall.
People keep telling him how good he's got it, how lucky he is to have made this sort of name for himself so early on in his career. He doesn't feel lucky at all, but he doesn't feel like he's got a choice anymore.
When he flies out onto the pitch at the start of each game now, he doesn't care about the cheers. He keeps up the charisma out of habit, because his 'signature cheek' has become yet another thing that's expected of him, but he doesn't feel that same thrill anymore. He doesn't care who's in the crowd screaming his name, because the only people he truly wants in that crowd screaming his name aren't there anymore. Can't ever be there anymore.
Something in him feels broken, but he doesn't quite know how to put it back together again.
So he throws himself into the only thing he can, surviving in the only way he knows how. Quidditch has always been his lifeline, but never quite so literally. When he's on a broom, playing the sport he knows so well, he feels alive again. He feels whole again.
It's only temporary though - the moment his feet hit the ground again, the moment a practice or a match comes to an end, it's like tumbling back down to reality. Shattering all over again.
Portree gives him a bonus, starts producing more jerseys with his name on them, turns him into their shining poster child. His own face stares back at him from every promotional material, a clip of his now-infamous wink from that first game projected on repeat as audience members pour into the stadium.
He got everything he wanted. So why then, does he feel so hollow? It no longer feels like he's living in a dream; instead, he's trapped a nightmare. He doesn't feel anything like what he'd expected he'd feel after making all that fortune and fame a reality.
He doesn't feel beloved. He just feels used.
July 1979
He instantly feels defensive. He knows part of it is because he's humiliated that his friends are seeing him in this state, but the reasoning is irrelevant.
"You didn't need to break into my bloody flat."
Remus raises a challenging eyebrow. "Didn't we? You haven't responded to a single letter in over a week. I've heard more from the Prophet about you lately than I have from you."
James lets his eyes fall on a stack of letters on the coffee table, all unopened. He'd been telling himself he'd get to them later each time he added a new one to the stack. Eyeing them now, there's one in the mix that looks fairly official, that he probably shouldn't have ignored like the rest.
But every time he's thought about opening a letter, about communicating with anyone who's not making him forget his own name somehow (he's found he doesn't particularly care what vice brings about that forgetfulness, he'll take whatever's offered to him), he's immediately thought better of it.
It's a hell of a lot easier not having to think about anything all too deeply.
"I've been busy," he tells them, crossing his arms, hoping it'll make him look at least a little bit threatening but knowing deep down that his friends can see straight through his bravado.
"Damn right you have been," Sirius snaps, and it's clear that he's not taking any of James' shit today. "Would you like to read what the latest Witch Weekly has to say about you, or would you like me to do the honours?"
In any other setting, James would undoubtedly make a joke about why the hell his friend was perusing a gossip rag, but the look on Sirius' face makes it crystal clear that this isn't a time for jokes.
Sirius is properly pissed off at him - a side of his best friend that he very rarely ever sees. He can really only think of one other time - last September - that he'd stormed in like this, clearly disappointed in James' actions and likewise demanding an explanation for them.
His explanation is decidedly less valid this time.
"I - " James falters.
"Pete has a copy, if you'd like to read it," Sirius supplies, and their friend promptly pulls a glossy magazine out of his pocket. It's probably his girlfriend's.
James gets the feeling that, if he doesn't take the magazine from Peter, he will end up subjected to Sirius reading it aloud to the room, and he's not sure he can tolerate that sort of embarrassment right now.
He'd love nothing more than to feel no shame for the life he's been living as of late, but it seems every effort to stamp out his conscience has done fuck all to actually minimize it.
He crosses the room to where his friends are seated - having to make a pointed effort not to trip on a mostly-empty firewhiskey bottle - and takes the magazine from Peter's outstretched hand.
Staring back at him, on the cover of the most notorious gossip magazine of wizarding England, is his own face. Has Quidditch's rising star let newfound fame go to his head?
He flips the magazine open, going directly to the page promising all the 'juicy details' of his life. He skims the page, and it's like an out-of-body experience. Seeing himself appear in Quidditch magazines, seeing his plays and stats discussed as a matter of course in the sports section of the Prophet is one thing… having all his secrets splashed out on the front page is another entirely.
The story this reporter has strung together, using a series of increasingly incriminating pictures of James and a few 'eyewitness' reports, isn't quite right - there's no mention of his parents' deaths, which are truthfully an all-too-central part in the narrative of his first season and its recent aftermath, but it still feels incredibly invasive to have the intimate details of his life, things he'd thought only happened in dark corners of nightclubs with no one else to witness, shared with the world in this way.
It's helpful that there's a chair right behind him, because his knees practically give out on him, and he suddenly finds himself sitting down, still staring at words on a page that purports to tell his whole sordid life story.
A life story that no longer feels like his own. A life story that's suddenly become public property.
"I - " Yet again, James is at a loss for words this morning. He doesn't even know if it's the hangover at this point, or just the fact that he's finally facing a reality he's been fleeing from for weeks now.
"What happened, Prongs?" Remus' voice is softer now, gentler. "This isn't like you."
"What if it is like me now?" James retorts, his defensive side taking hold again.
Peter's nose crinkles. "Bullshit."
"When I - " James doesn't miss the flash of discomfort on Sirius' face before he continues, "when I sent Snape after Moony that one time, and I got so close to accidentally fucking up everything, you told me that you knew that wasn't like me. That there was something causing me pain, and I was trying to deal with it in all the wrong ways. And guess what? You were right."
"You've played mother hen to every single one of us at least once," Remus adds. "Now it's our turn to return the favor. Talk to us. Please."
The last of James' defensive walls comes crumbling down, and he drops his head into his hands, running both of his hands through his hair at once.
"I don't understand how I'm supposed to pretend that I'm okay anymore." The words ring soundly of defeat, his voice cracking in the middle as he finally comes face-to-face with the feelings he's been avoiding for so long. "I'm supposed to be living my fucking dream, and instead I just feel like I'm dying inside more and more every day. Like part of me died with them."
There's a long silence, then there's a hand on his shoulder, a warm and comforting weight, the type of human contact he wasn't aware he'd been missing. "I miss them too," Sirius says. "They weren't even my real parents, and I miss them like hell every single damn day."
There's a long silence as his words hit their mark. That simple acknowledgement somehow feels like everything to him, a reminder that maybe he's not completely alone.
"But you've got to recognise that this isn't what they'd want for you," he continues, some of the initial softness in his voice tempered with what is very clearly some tough love. "Prongs, they - god, you were everything to them. You should've seen the way they talked about you at every match. They were so proud of you, of everything you'd become. Said they were thrilled because they'd always known how incredibly fucking talented you were, and now the rest of the world got to see it too, and it was about fucking time."
"I get the feeling they didn't use the word 'fucking' though," James replies, surprising even himself with the first glimpse of genuine humour he's managed in weeks.
"That might've been some personal embellishment," Sirius admits.
Swearing embellishments and jokes aside though, James has to admit that his best friend makes a point. This is the exact opposite of what his parents would want for him. They'd want him to be happy.
He's still not sure how he's meant to manage that, but he does know that he sure as hell won't find it doing lines of dragonflame given to him by random strangers and avoiding the people who care about him enough to physically break down his front door to reach him.
"I don't - I don't know what to do," he eventually manages. He sounds just about as broken as he feels.
"Well, in that case, it's good that you've got three best friends who are more than willing to help you figure it out."
"Starting with the state of this flat," Peter chimes in, and James doesn't even have to lift his head to know that he's wrinkling his nose again. For someone who literally takes the form of a rat in his animal transformation, he cannot stand messiness.
James finally lifts his head from his hands, looks at the three people in the room who he's walked through fire for before, who have made it clear they're more than willing to do the same in return, and for the first time in a long time, he feels some of the broken pieces in him start to mend. Not the way they did when he blocked everything out playing Quidditch, not the way they did when he took shot after shot until the numbness started to sink in - but really, truly, permanently mending.
He's not sure what it'll look like if - no, when - he manages to put himself together again. He gets the feeling some cracks won't ever fully heal; he'll never be the same carefree boy who only cared how many people were screaming his name on the Quidditch pitch. There's a nasty article circulating about him, spilling far too many details about his personal life in a way that he's not sure he'll ever be able to erase. His life is much farther out of his control than he'd ever expected it would be; nothing is as simple as it was when he was seventeen.
But at the very least, right now, watching Peter grumbling about the stack of dishes in James' sink and Sirius attempting to build a tower out of all the empty cups and bottles he finds lying around while Remus loudly announces he will not be responsible for fixing any broken glass, he feels a little less hollow.
And it's not much, but it's a start.