Chapter Text
The house had two floors, a pool, and a backyard large enough for them to improvise a soccer field. At ten years old, James was sure that he would never love anything as much as he loved that place.
A week before his eleventh birthday, they had to move.
He didn't know, he was still at the age where real information was divided until it arrived in small pieces, capable of being digested. They didn't need such a big house — they really didn't — but that had nothing to do with Fleamont losing his job. It had nothing to do with his parents' sleepless nights and the bills on the kitchen table. It definitely had nothing to do with his father, always so fair and brave to James, being too good of a person to have a place in the Ministry. He couldn't know that his kindness had begun to be perceived as weakness.
The house didn't have two floors, a pool, or a backyard. James didn't love it, like he didn't love having to wake up so early in the morning to take two buses with his mother to the new school where she worked, in a ridiculously wealthy area of the city, with houses that had much more than the one he missed so much.
James, with a heart as big as the ego of the worst of men, didn't loved any of that.
Not until his first class at that giant school, when he sat next to a boy with dark hair, light eyes, and a perfect posture for someone so young.
When he met Sirius, even the house he missed so much seemed small. Just like all the love he had kept for it in his ten years and a few months of life.
Like celestial bodies, they began to orbit around the stars for the first time
Everything became easier for him after that. The memories of his old house became more nostalgic than overwhelming, and he waited every day for the bus route, looking anxiously out the window and listening to the rustling of the papers his mother organized for her classes.
They became inseparable from that moment on, as if they had reunited with a long-lost brother. Two peas in a pod. Where there was smoke, there was fire, and surely James Potter and Sirius Black were not far from their focus. That loyalty and that feeling that the absence of their friend is like losing a piece of themselves. A purely childish part of them when they were together.
It was when they started to grow up that James realized the limit of all that innocence. It was something individual. He began to realize that Sirius didn't know it in the same way.
James began to notice how Sirius never seemed to want to go home, and deliberately got into trouble that made him spend more time at school than necessary. He stayed with James and his parents on school celebration days, but he could never visit him on weekends. Not until he was old enough to sneak out and catch the first bus that stopped right on the Potters' street.
Sirius didn't talk much about any of that. His parents, his brother or his big, cold house. But he didn't need to, he never really needed to. James knew, even his parents knew. They loved Sirius, anyone who was so special to their son would be to them as well. Anyone who was like a brother to James would be like a son to them.
So there was never another option when, on a night that had been very ordinary for the Potter family, a few months after James turned sixteen, Sirius showed up at their doorstep.
Nothing had to be said.
They didn't need more than a few hours in the next day to turn Fleamont's office into a guest room, but even so, Sirius spent a week sleeping on a mattress in James's room.
When Sirius officially moved into the room across from him, it was as if once again, the stars had aligned.
James never told this to Sirius, but after he moved in, for at least a month, he would wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that his parents were at the door of his house, ready to take his friend away and extinguish all the stars that brightened his home. When this happened, he would usually leave his room to get a glass of water, and when he returned, James would sometimes notice, thru the cracks in the door, that the light in the room across from his or the one at the end of the hallway, where his parents slept, was also on.
No one ever came to take him.
Sirius was safe, and would continue to be as long as he stayed there, on the other side of the hallway.
Years later, the ten-year-old James wouldn't believe that leaving that house behind could actually be what would bring a home, and not just for him. But now, at twenty, he was sure that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Downtown, with a key to a new apartment in his pocket and Sirius in the room across from his, on the other side of the hallway, with the same key tucked in his jacket pocket.
The anxiety of what could happen now did not weigh on his chest. He knew that it would never be a darkness that would extinguish the glow of the sun and the stars.