I'VE NEVER BEEN SATISFIED

Send me, “Well, this is awkward…” and I’ll generate a random number [1-30] to see what my muse’s reaction is to your muse catching them… —        - [Will reroll if NSFW option is rolled but not desired.]

There was not a lot you could say when you literally walked right into a Carrow, especially when you were James Potter. Not that he ever remembered Alecto being of a particularly cruel disposition, but she didn’t seem to mind people who were, and that alone disturbed him.

Still, he half-smiled in the confident way he always did when facing down people who’d probably prefer looking at his face if he had a black eye. “ Accidents happen, ” he said amiably, surprised at all that she had said ‘excuse me’ first. “ Your shoulder alright? ”

✗ 18 years old ✗ Pureblood ✗ Member of The Order ✗ Code 4

BIOGRAPHY

If James Potter were to tell you this story, you would likely only hear half of it or less. Not because he’s secretive (he’s not), but because he’s a selective storyteller, and he only likes to tell stories that make people laugh. It was just the kind of household he grew up in. Euphemia and Fleamont Potter thought of James as their miracle baby - the baby that came to them at the last possible moment, the baby that had eluded them for years and came out more perfect than they ever could have imagined. They loved him and they wanted him to know just how much they did. Some people called him spoiled rotten, and they only agreed to a point. Maybe he was spoiled, but he wasn’t rotten. He had never been rotten. He was a kind boy who picked up snails from the sidewalk and put them back in the grass so nobody would step on them. How could anybody call a boy like that spoiled rotten?

When he was very small, before Hogwarts, James had a stutter. It wasn’t so bad, most of the time; when he was at home he hardly stuttered at all, but in social situations, when he felt the need to be impressive and live up to his wealthy and impressive parents and all the wonderful things they said about him, it got so bad that he started to avoid speaking altogether. He’d nod sheepishly and he’d smile and he’d pretend not to hear people when they asked him questions, or respond with a simple “uh-huh” or “nuh-uh”. People assumed he was just shy, and that tended to be easier to handle because they’d laugh kindly and say, “he’ll grow out of it and find his crowd” and move on. He could imagine all the names that someone might come up for a boy like him - Korean, stuttering, scrawny. Not that his parents would ever stand for it, but they couldn’t be there all the time. They couldn’t protect him everywhere.

His parents loved him and his stutter - in fact James suspected (and still suspects) that they loved him all the more for it. Pampered, he was, reminded all the time how he was perfect despite what anyone might say. It didn’t matter that he didn’t talk like the other boys, or even look like the other boys. They told him this every day, twice - even four times when he came home in tears after being called Puh-Puh-Potter through laughter by some Muggle boys.

And then he was ten, and in a year he’d be off to Hogwarts and he started to panic. How could he go to Hogwarts the way he was? With parents who were wealthy and brave and smart and everything anyone would want to be, how could he go to Hogwarts as scrawny as he was, as friendless as he was, the way he stuttered, the way he looked different from amost everyone else at school. He decided he was going to fix what he could and he begged his parents for a speech therapist - someone, anyone who could help him overcome the stutter that followed him everywhere, that made him quiet and shy. He begged them to help him so he would no longer have to be Puh-Puh-Potter.

After a long talk about self-acceptance, Euphemia and Fleamont finally agreed, and they let him see a speech therapist, and he saw his speech therapist every single day for the whole year and the summer before Hogwarts. She was clever, and she took him to shops and book stores; they practiced and then they went into social situations so they could practice some more. She focused on getting him to school confidently and making him feel comfortable and more excited about social environments. She was successful, and James felt like a new person. He decided he was going to start new at Hogwarts, and he was more focused than ever on not letting anything stand his way. Not his stutter, and certainly not racist prejudice.

All of his parents’ love and affection pulled through when he started Hogwarts. Some people would argue that it got to his head, but that wasn’t the case at all. He felt like he was making up for lost time, and finally living up to everything that he wanted to be and everything his parents believed he could be. He felt like it was finally his chance to be the son that they loved.

Maybe he didn’t do it in all the right ways. Maybe he let the confidence go too far, maybe he came off as arrogant. But he felt passionately, loved fiercely - that’s how the Marauders came about. They were not just his first friends - they were his closest friends, the first family he ever had outside of his parents. He got glasses in his third year and he embarrassingly felt a pit in his stomach like it was something that would drag him back to his quiet childhood, but the marauders made it easy. When he met up with them for the first time with a pair of wonky, wire-rimmed glasses, he waited for the friendly snickers, but they never came. The others took turns trying them on and made an afternoon of it, laughing because they looked so small on Peter but so big on Remus. By the time they were back at Hogwarts James didn’t think twice about it, and perhaps it was because of the way he strutted down the halls, his head held high surrounded by people he would die for, nobody else said anything, either.

And then, of course, there was Lily. Lovely Lily. Beautiful Lily. Smart Lily, funny Lily, clever Lily, the Lily. Lily who made him laugh when she wasn’t even trying, Lily who made him speechless just by smiling, Lily who could fluster him so quickly he’d fall back into his old stutter when he tried to talk about all the things he loved about her. He decided that she was the most perfect person to grace his life when he was only eleven, and he spent his nights, after Sirius and Remus and Peter went to sleep, wondering how he could tell her. There were definitely better ways to tell her, of course, but he did the only thing that had worked for him since starting school, and everything he didn’t feel like he could do before school: he approached it with more confidence than anyone on Earth should have. He came off as arrogant, jerkish - he did things that Lily had no business forgiving him for doing. That made him love her even more.

He learned, and he humbled. Every now and then he’d catch a slip of the mouth, a little hint of the stutter he’d tried to leave behind, and he’d bite it back. He cleaned up his act, apologized to the people who deserved an apology. Even Snape, despite the fact that the boy and his racist friends made his toes curl. He started to become real - he’s started to become a more real portrait of James Potter, not the shy boy who was afraid to speak or the over-confident boy who didn’t know when to stop.