#james au

the office is small — it always has been, tucked at the end of a corridor on the third floor like an afterthought, shelves stacked with back issues and ink-stained notebooks and the particular smell of parchment and ambition. you’ve spent half your hogwarts career in this room. you love it. you are currently furious at it.

“it’s shallow,” you say.

“it’s fun.”

“it’s not what i do.”

“it’s what i’m asking you to do,” sora says, still pleasant, still level. “one piece. a proper feature — long form, first person, real observations. you get close to someone, you write about it. how to get the guy.” she pauses. “it’ll be the december issue centrepiece.”

“and if i say no?”

she looks at you. just looks at you. the complaint letters are visible on the corner of her desk from where you’re sitting.

you say, “fine,” in a tone that makes very clear it is not fine, and sora smiles like she knew you’d get there eventually.

“wonderful,” she says. “i was thinking james.”

you’re halfway out of your chair. “sorry?”

“james. hufflepuff captain. seventh year.” she says it like she’s reading off a grocery list. “he’s well-liked, he’s interesting, people have opinions about him. the readers will love it.”

“i know who he is.”

“good. that saves us some time.”

you stand there for a moment, hand on the back of the chair, running through every argument you have left and finding all of them useless against the particular expression on sora’s face — pleasant, immovable, slightly amused. like a door that looks like it should open and simply doesn’t.

“six weeks,” she says. “the article runs the first of december. get close, take notes, write something good. you’re good at this, y/n. that’s why i’m asking you.”

“you’re not asking me.”

“no,” she agrees pleasantly. “i’m not.”

you leave. the door clicks shut behind you with a quiet, decisive sound that feels very on brand for lee sora, and you stand in the corridor for a moment, staring at nothing, before you turn and walk back toward gryffindor tower with the particular energy of someone who has just agreed to something they are absolutely going to regret.

you tell your friends that night.

yoonchae finds out first, purely because she’s there when you walk into the common room and she takes one look at your face and says “what happened” with the focus of someone who has known you long enough to read your expression like a weather forecast.

you sit down on the couch. you explain.

by the end of it, yoonchae is pressing her lips together very hard in the way she does when she’s trying not to laugh and failing. “james,” she says.

“don’t.”

“the james.”

“yoonchae, i swear—”

“okay, okay.” she holds her hands up. but her eyes are doing the thing. you look away.

kazuha hears about it the next morning, over breakfast. she listens to the whole thing without interrupting, which you appreciate, and then she sets her fork down and says, “i don’t think this is a good idea,” which you also appreciate, mostly because it’s exactly what you think and it’s useful to hear it said out loud by someone else.

“i know,” you say.

“does sora understand what she’s asking you to—”

“sora understands exactly what she’s asking me to do. that’s the problem.”

kazuha nods slowly. “what are you going to do?”

“write the article,” you say, because what else is there. “get it over with.”

she looks at you for a moment longer than necessary, in that quiet ravenclaw way she has, like she’s filing something away for later. then she picks her fork back up and says, “okay. do you want help with the approach?”

you do. you say yes.

keonho is harder.

he comes to find you after dinner — you’d owled him, which felt necessary given that james is hufflepuff and keonho is hufflepuff and the world is, apparently, very small. he drops into the seat across from you in the library with his bag over one shoulder and his expression already doing something complicated.

“so,” he says.

“i didn’t choose this,” you say immediately.

“i know you didn’t.” he’s quiet for a second. “i know james. not well. but a bit.”

“i know.”

“he’s not—” keonho stops. starts again. “he seems like a lot on the surface. the captain thing, the confidence, all of that. but he’s not a bad person, y/n.”

“i’m not trying to do anything bad to him. i’m writing an article.”

“i know,” he says again. and then, lighter, almost like he means it as a joke: “just don’t actually fall for him.”

you roll your eyes. “please.”

he smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach. “i mean it.”

“keonho. it’s an assignment.”

he looks at you. you look back. he lets it go, because he knows you, and he knows that you’ve already made up your mind, and he knows there’s nothing left to say right now that you’re going to hear.

“okay,” he says. “buy me a butterbeer at hogsmeade and i’ll help you figure out how to approach him.”

“deal,” you say, and you mean it, and you almost don’t notice the way he glances down at the table for just a second before he looks back up and changes the subject.

you spend three days observing james before you do anything else.

this is, you tell yourself, basic journalistic practice. you wouldn’t write about anything without research. you wouldn’t walk into an interview without knowing your subject. this is just due diligence. it has nothing to do with nerves.

what you learn, in those three days:

he’s never late. to class, to practice, to anything — there’s a precision to him that surprises you, given how easy and unhurried he seems everywhere else. like the confidence isn’t carelessness. like he’s thought about things more than he lets on.

he’s funny. genuinely, quietly funny, in a way that’s easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. he says things deadpan, at low volume, and half the people around him don’t catch it and the other half lose it completely. his friend martin catches it every time. seonghyeon, you notice, usually gets there about three seconds late and then laughs too loud to compensate.

people gravitate toward him. you watch this happen in real time, in the great hall, in the corridor outside charms — people drifting toward him like he’s warm, like standing near him is just slightly more comfortable than standing anywhere else. he doesn’t perform it. he doesn’t seem to notice it.

that, you think, is the most interesting thing about him. not the confidence. not the quidditch. it’s that he’s so used to being the center of things that he’s stopped seeing it. the fish doesn’t notice the water.

you open your notebook. you write:

the first thing you need to understand about a boy like this is that he’s used to being the most interesting person in any room.

you underline it.

don’t let him be.

you engineer the first meeting on a thursday.

the cover is real, at least — the chronicle does a feature on each quidditch team at the start of the season, and hufflepuff’s is overdue. you owl the request to james the night before, professional and brief, and he sends back two lines confirming he can do friday after practice, signed with just his first name, no punctuation.

you meet him by the pitch.

he’s still in his quidditch gear when he finds you — broom over one shoulder, hair still wind-wrecked, looking almost aggressively like someone who knows exactly what they look like and has decided not to do anything about it. he sees you and nods, and you flip open your notebook and remind yourself that you are a journalist. you are a professional. you are completely unaffected by wind-wrecked hair.

“hong y/n,” he says. “the chronicles girl.”

“the chronicles girl,” you repeat.

something flickers at the corner of his mouth. “that bother you?”

“does it bother you that i’m going to call you the quidditch boy for the rest of this conversation?”

he looks at you for a second. “no,” he says, and now he’s almost smiling. “not particularly.”

you ask him your questions. he answers them — easy, practiced, the kind of answers a captain gives when he’s given a hundred interviews, all surface and team spirit and we’re feeling good about the season. you write them down. you do not find them interesting. you do not tell him this.

what you do find interesting, and do not write down, is the way he looks back at the pitch when he thinks you’re not watching. just for a second. like he’s checking something, or like he’s just not quite ready to leave it yet.

you wrap up. you close your notebook. he says “that it?” and you say yes and he nods, easy and unbothered, and turns to go.

he doesn’t ask you anything. not your name — he already knew it — and not anything else. you’re in and out of his afternoon like a footnote.

you walk back to the castle.

you write, later that night, at your desk in the gryffindor tower while yoonchae reads on the bed behind you:

tip one — don’t be impressed. everyone else already is. the moment you are, you become everyone else.

you stare at it for a while.yoonchae says, without looking up from her book, “how’d it go?”

“fine,” you say.

“just fine?”

“just fine.”

she turns a page. “okay.” you look back at your notebook. you think about the way he glanced at the pitch.

the second time you seek him out, you don’t have a reason.

this is, you are aware, a problem. you stand outside the great hall on a tuesday morning telling yourself you do have a reason — research, observation, journalistic necessity — and then you walk in and spot him at the hufflepuff table and think, okay, but what specifically am i going to say.

you don’t have to figure it out. keonho saves you.

he waves you over from across the hall — he’s sitting two seats down from james, which you had not planned but which the universe has apparently decided to arrange for you — and you cross the hall and slide in next to him with your bag and your toast and your completely casual expression.

“morning,” keonho says.

“morning,” you say.

james looks up from whatever he’s reading. he clocks you, and something in his expression does the faint, almost imperceptible thing it did by the pitch — not quite recognition, more like oh, you again. not unfriendly. just noticing.

“chronicle girl,” he says.

“quidditch boy,” you say.

keonho looks between you. “do i want to know?”

“no,” you both say, at the same time, and then you look at each other, and james almost smiles, and you look back at your toast.

it’s nothing. it’s a minute and a half of shared breakfast table and two words of actual conversation and then he’s back to his reading and you’re talking to keonho about something else entirely. but you are aware of him in the way you’re always aware of things you’re studying — that low, constant hum of attention, like keeping something in your peripheral vision without turning your head.

you don’t take notes until you get back to the tower.

he notices things. not obviously — he won’t make a show of it — but he’s paying more attention than he looks like he is. file that away.

it happens gradually, the way most things do when you’re not looking directly at them.

a week passes, and then most of another, and somewhere in the middle of it you stop engineering reasons and start just — showing up. to the great hall in the morning when you know keonho will be there. to the library on thursday evenings, which is when you do your best writing and which, it turns out, is also when james and juhoon apparently work through quidditch strategy in the corner booth by the window. you find this out by accident and then continue to find it out by accident, repeatedly, every thursday for the rest of the month.

you don’t talk every time. sometimes it’s just a nod. sometimes he says something on his way out, low and dry, that makes you bite down on a smile before you’ve decided to.

you’re in the corridor outside transfiguration, leaning against the wall waiting for yoonchae, when james comes around the corner with seonghyeon. seonghyeon sees you and says “y/n, hey,” because seonghyeon is like that — easy and warm, greets everyone like he’s genuinely glad to see them, which you suspect he usually is. you say hey back.

james stops next to him. he looks at you, then at the wall you’re leaning against, then back at you.

“you know that’s the wrong corridor,” he says.

“for what?”

“transfiguration.”

“i know where transfiguration is.”

“you’re facing the wrong direction.”

“i’m waiting for someone.”

“in the wrong corridor.”

you look at him. “are you actually trying to give me directions right now?”

“i’m trying to understand why you’re standing in a corridor that leads to nothing, looking very serious about it.”

“i always look serious. it’s called having a resting thinking face.”

“is that what that is,” he says, and it’s so flat and so perfectly timed that you actually laugh — just once, short, before you catch it — and something crosses his expression that you don’t quite get a name for before it’s gone.

seonghyeon is looking between you both with an expression you don’t examine too closely.

yoonchae appears at the end of the corridor. you push off the wall. “wrong corridor,” you say to james, on your way past. “noted.”

“you’re welcome,” he calls after you, and you don’t turn around, but you hear it — the almost-laugh in his voice — and you think about it, just briefly, before you file it away under research and move on.

there’s a quidditch practice on a friday evening that you tell yourself you’re attending because keonho mentioned it and you need the material and it’s a reasonable thing for a journalist to do, and all of that is true, which makes it very easy to ignore the other reason.

the pitch is cold. you sit in the lower stands with your scarf up around your jaw and your notebook open and you watch.

james runs a good practice. that’s the thing — you’d expected the confidence to curdle into arrogance when it was just his team, no audience, no performance. but it doesn’t. he’s demanding, yes, and he doesn’t pretend something was good when it wasn’t, but there’s nothing mean in it. he runs the same drills as his players. he stays on his broom longer than anyone.

at one point one of the chasers — a fifth year, nervous energy visible from the stands — misses a pass badly and braces like she’s expecting something and james just says, again, and waits, and when she gets it the second time he nods and moves on. no fanfare. just: you did it, next thing.

you write that down. you’re not sure yet which part of the article it belongs to.

practice ends. the team files off the pitch and you’re starting to gather your things when you hear boots on the stand and then james drops into the seat next to yours, still in his gear, broom across his knees, and says nothing for a second.

you say, “good practice.”

“you were watching the whole time?”

“i’m writing about you. observationally speaking.”

“the feature ran last week.”

“i’m thorough.”

he looks at you sideways. there’s a scratch along his jaw you hadn’t noticed before, recent, probably a branch or the wind. “most people don’t actually watch practice,” he says. “they say they will and then they leave after twenty minutes.”

“i stayed the whole time.”

“i know.” a beat. “why?”

you look at him. the honest answer is sitting right there and you step around it neatly. “you’re more interesting to watch than i expected,” you say, which is true, and which reveals nothing, and which makes something in his expression shift in a way that might be curiosity.

he doesn’t say anything for a moment. the pitch is emptying below you. the sun has mostly gone, the sky doing that deep cold purple it does in october, and it’s just the two of you in the stands and the distant sound of the castle.

“hong y/n,” he says eventually, like he’s trying out the weight of it.

“james,” you say back.

he stands. picks up his broom. looks down at you for a second with an expression you can’t fully read, which is new, and slightly annoying. “same time next week,” he says. “if you’re being thorough.”

he walks down the stands and you watch him go and then you look down at your notebook.

you realize you stopped writing about twenty minutes ago.

the thing is, you’re good at keeping things in their correct boxes.

you’ve always been like this — compartments, clear labels, nothing bleeding into anything else. it’s what makes you a good writer. you can look at something, understand it, put it into words, and then set it down. you don’t carry things around longer than they’re useful.

james goes in the box marked subject. it’s a perfectly good box. it has a lid.

you are not thinking about the way he said same time next week.

he finds you in the library on thursday, which is not unusual anymore, except this time juhoon isn’t with him and he sits down across from you without asking, which he hasn’t done before. you look up from your essay. he’s already pulling out what looks like a playbook — actual parchment covered in small, messy diagrams — and spreading it across his half of the table.

you look at the playbook. you look at him.

“i’m not stopping you from sitting there,” you say.

“i know.”

“i’m just noting that you didn’t ask.”

“would you have said no?”

you consider this honestly. “no,” you admit.

“there you go,” he says, and smooths out a corner of the parchment, and that’s it. that’s the whole conversation. you go back to your essay and he goes back to his diagrams and the library is quiet around you and it’s — fine. it’s normal. it doesn’t feel like anything in particular.

you stay until the library closes. so does he.

the saturdays start almost by accident.

the first one: you’re in the courtyard with your notebook, working on something that isn’t the article, and he comes through on his way somewhere and stops and says “you’re always writing,” not like a question.

“you’re always moving,” you say back.

he looks at you for a second. then he sits down on the bench across from yours, drops his bag, and says “i’ve got twenty minutes before i have to be anywhere,” in a tone that somehow makes it your problem.

“i didn’t ask you to sit down.”

“you didn’t tell me not to.”

that, you will come to understand, is just how james operates. he doesn’t ask for space in your life. he just quietly takes up residence in it, and by the time you notice, it already feels normal for him to be there.

those twenty minutes turn into forty. you don’t write much. he doesn’t go wherever he was going. you talk about — nothing, mostly. the kind of nothing that fills time easily, that doesn’t require anything from either of you. he tells you that martin got them all detention last tuesday, something involving a staircase and a fifth year’s lost toad that spiraled. you tell him about the complaint letters without meaning to and he laughs — actually laughs, short and genuine — and says “hufflepuff fifth years are ruthless,” and you say “you’re hufflepuff,” and he says “exactly, i know what they’re capable of,” and you smile before you decide to.

he notices. he doesn’t say anything about it, but he notices.

when he finally leaves he says “see you around, hong,” and you say “see you,” and you sit there for a moment after he’s gone, looking at the very small amount of writing you got done, before you pick your notebook back up.

you don’t write anything about the conversation. not for the article.

you will wonder about that later.

october deepens and so does this — whatever this is. the shape of it becoming familiar in the way that routines do, not because you planned it but because it simply kept happening and at some point stopping would have required more effort than continuing.

thursdays in the library. the occasional saturday. breakfast sometimes, when keonho’s there and the table is crowded and you end up next to each other by the logic of available seats. he starts nodding at you in the corridors, which sounds insignificant and is, except that james doesn’t nod at people he doesn’t know, and now apparently he knows you.

you’re collecting good material. real observations, specific details, the kind of thing that makes a piece feel lived-in rather than reported. you write in your notebook and you write in your draft and you keep them separate because some things are for the article and some things are just — yours. for no reason. just because you noticed them and writing things down is how you process the world.

the draft is good. you can feel it, the way you can always feel when the writing is working. you send sora two paragraphs as a check-in and she replies within the hour: keep going.

you keep going.

the first time it costs you something small, you don’t notice until later.

it’s a thursday, library, the usual. you’re there when he arrives and he sits across from you and you work in the kind of easy quiet you’ve both apparently agreed on without discussing it. at some point he says, without looking up, “can i ask you something?”

“you’re going to regardless,” you say.

“true.” he sets down his quill. “why the chronicle? you could write for actual publications. you’re good enough.”

you look up. “how do you know i’m good enough?”

“i read the quidditch piece,” he says simply.

“that was a standard season feature.”

“it was the best one we’ve gotten in three years. the seeker analysis alone—” he stops. something crosses his face, almost like he hadn’t meant to say that much. he picks his quill back up. “why the chronicle,” he repeats, redirecting.

you look at him for a moment. “because it’s mine,” you say. “everything i write there is mine. i decide what matters, i decide how to say it. no one tells me what the angle is.”

he’s quiet. “sora doesn’t tell you what the angle is?”

the question lands somewhere it shouldn’t. you keep your expression exactly where it is. “within reason,” you say smoothly. “she has opinions. i push back.”

he nods slowly. he’s looking at you in that way he has sometimes — not searching exactly, more like he’s already found something and is deciding what to do with it.

“that makes sense,” he says. “for you.”

“what does that mean?”

“it means it makes sense,” he says. “for you.” and he goes back to his playbook, and you go back to your essay, and you sit with the particular discomfort of someone who has just been seen slightly more clearly than they intended.

you don’t write that part down either.

the first thing you notice is that he remembers things.

not in a deliberate, i-was-paying-attention way. in a worse way — the offhand way, where it's clear he retained something without meaning to, without filing it, just because it stuck. you mention once, briefly, that you write better in the morning and can't draft anything after eight in the evening, and three days later he says something in passing about a chronicle deadline and adds "you've probably already drafted it, it's barely noon" without looking up from what he's doing.

you look at him. he doesn't seem to notice he said it.

you look back at your parchment. you write a sentence. you think, that's nothing, and you believe it, because it is nothing. people remember things. it's not a category.

the second thing is harder to explain.

it's not something he does. it's something that changes in the way he is around you — a kind of ease that you recognize because you feel it too, except when you feel it you have a reason for it and when he feels it you're not sure he does.

he stops performing, is the closest you can get to it. the golden boy thing — the confidence, the slight remove of someone who knows they're well-liked — it doesn't disappear exactly, but it thins. like a coat he forgets to put back on when it's just the two of you.

you notice this on a saturday in the courtyard when he's talking about the upcoming match against slytherin and he goes quiet mid-sentence and says, "i don't know if we're ready," and then looks almost surprised at himself, like the words came out before he approved them.

you don't make a big thing of it. "you've been running them hard," you say. "they'll be ready."

he looks at you. "you've been to two practices."

"i'm observant."

something settles in his expression. "yeah," he says. "you are." and he says it like it's just a fact, like he's simply confirming something he's already decided is true, and goes back to talking about the match, and you go back to listening, and it's fine.

it is fine.

the match is on a sunday.

you go because you always cover the quidditch matches for the chronicle and not for any other reason, and you sit in the gryffindor stands with yoonchae and you watch.

hufflepuff wins. james catches the snitch forty minutes in — you see the exact moment he spots it, the way his whole body shifts before he moves, that half-second of pure stillness and then he's gone, a streak of gold and black against the grey october sky, and the stands erupt and it's — fine. it's good. you're glad for the sake of the coverage.

afterwards there's the usual chaos on the pitch, teammates, celebrations, professor after professor coming down to shake hands. you're scribbling notes in the stands, not going down, that's not necessary, you have what you need—

yoonchae says, "he's looking for someone."

you don't look up. "what?"

"james. he keeps looking up at the stands." a pause. "oh. it's you."

you look up.

he's standing in the middle of the pitch chaos, broom in hand, and he's not looking at you anymore — he's turned back to his teammates, laughing at something martin's said — but yoonchae is right, in that way she sometimes is, where you can't prove it but you feel the truth of it anyway.

"he knows people in the stands," you say.

"seonghyeon is right there next to me," yoonchae says pleasantly. "he didn't look at seonghyeon."

you close your notebook. "i'm going to write up the match report."

"sure," she says.

you go.

it's martin who makes it impossible to ignore.

you're in the great hall, a week after the match, and you're sitting with keonho and kazuha and half-listening to the table behind you, which happens to be the hufflepuff table, which happens to be where james and his friends are sitting.

you're not listening on purpose. you're just — in proximity. journalistic habit.

martin is saying something about a girl in sixth year, some ongoing situation that you gather has been going on since september, and james says something back that you don't catch, and then martin says, loudly, with the energy of someone who has been waiting to say it: "you literally haven't looked at anyone in two months, what's going on with you."

silence from james.

"i'm just saying," martin continues, in the tone of someone who is enjoying himself. "usually by now you'd at least—"

"martin."

"i'm making an observation—"

"make it quieter."

keonho, next to you, has gone very still in the way he does when he's trying not to react to something. you become very interested in your food.

kazuha, across from you, is looking at you with an expression she has the decency to make very small.

"what," you say quietly.

"nothing," she says, equally quietly.

you eat your food. you do not think about what martin said. you are a professional. you have a job to do and a column to write and compartments with lids on them that are functioning perfectly fine.

later, when you're back in the tower, you open your notebook to the article draft.

you stare at it for a while.

you close it again.

the moment that gets you — the one you'll think about later, when you're trying to trace back exactly where the lid came off — happens on a thursday in november.

it's raining. the library is quieter than usual, the windows grey and streaked, the kind of evening that makes the castle feel smaller and warmer than it is. you're there before him. he comes in ten minutes late, which he never is, and drops into the seat across from yours and he looks — tired. not physically. the other kind.

you don't ask. that's not — you don't do that.

but you push your extra pot of ink across the table toward him because his is running low and you noticed last week and brought two tonight without really deciding to, and he looks at it and then looks at you, and something in his face does something you don't have words for yet.

"thanks," he says. quiet.

"you were almost out last week," you say. practical. informational.

"i know." a pause. "you noticed."

"i notice things. it's a whole—"

"personality trait," he finishes. "yeah." he almost smiles. it doesn't quite make it but it's close. he picks up his quill and doesn't say anything else and neither do you, and the rain comes down outside, and you sit there across from each other in the warm quiet of the library and something between you is different than it was an hour ago, you can feel it, you just can't name it yet.

you don't want to name it yet.

you're not oblivious.

that's the thing people might assume, later, if they were being uncharitable — that you didn't see it because you didn't want to. but that's not true. you see it. you've been trained, practically since birth, to notice the small things, the tells, the details that people don't know they're giving away. it's what makes you good at what you do.

so you notice.

you notice that he saves you a seat now. not obviously — not this seat is for you — just that when you arrive somewhere he's already at, there is somehow always space next to him. naturally. coincidentally. every time.

you notice that when you say something in a group and it doesn't land — when the conversation moves on before anyone responds — james will come back to it. five minutes later, ten, like he was turning it over while everything else was happening. what you said earlier, he'll start, and then finish the thought you'd abandoned, and you'll feel the strange, unsettling sensation of being heard by someone who wasn't even looking at you when you spoke.

you notice the way he angles toward you. physically — it's subtle, the kind of thing you'd miss if you weren't paying the kind of attention you're paid to pay. in the courtyard, in the library, at the breakfast table. a degree or two, no more. like a plant that doesn't know it's doing it.

you notice all of it. you catalogue it. you put it in the article, where it belongs.

and then one thursday, sitting across from him in the library with rain on the windows and his quill scratching steadily and his face soft in a way it isn't when other people are watching, you notice something else.

you notice that you've stopped wanting to write it down.

this is the part where you are very firm with yourself.

you are hong y/n. you are a writer. you were given an assignment — one you didn't ask for, one you tried to get out of, one that is nonetheless yours now and has a deadline and a word count and lee sora's name attached to it, which means it will absolutely be happening. you have five weeks of material. you have good material, real material, the kind that only comes from proximity and patience and actually doing the work.

you are not catching feelings for your subject. that would be embarrassing. that would be, frankly, the most cliché thing that has ever happened to anyone.

you are simply — warm. it's november. the castle is cold. he's easy to be around, and you've been spending a lot of time with him, and that's a normal human response to proximity, not a symptom of anything.

you repeat this to yourself on the walk back from the library, in the rain, which has moved from the windows to the actual outdoors where you are currently standing in it because you forgot your umbrella charm and james offered to walk with you under his and you said no, i'm fine, very quickly, and left.

you are fine.

you are standing in the rain.

yoonchae is asleep when you get back. kazuha answers your owl within twenty minutes, which is both impressive and a sign that she was already awake reading something, because she always is.

her reply is four words.

how bad is it.

you stare at the parchment for a long time. then you write back:

it's nothing. i'm handling it.

she writes: okay. i'm here if nothing gets worse.

you fold the letter. you sit at your desk. you open your article draft and you read through everything you've written in the past month, all the tips and the observations and the careful, precise language you've used to describe him, and somewhere around the third page you realize your hand has stopped moving.

you close the draft.

you open your personal notebook instead — the one that's not for sora, not for the chronicle, not for anyone — and you write, in small letters at the bottom of a page:

i'm handling it.

you underline it once. then you close that too, and you go to bed, and you are absolutely fine.

the draft, as it stands at the end of week five, looks like this:

how to get the guy — working draft, hong y/n

for: castle chronicles december issue

status: in progress

the first thing you need to understand about a boy like this is that he's used to being the most interesting person in any room.

[x don't try to be more interesting. you won't be, and he'll know you're trying. x]

don't let him be. not because you need to compete — you don't — but because the moment you're impressed, you become everyone else. and everyone else, he already knows how to handle.

tip one: don't perform.

he'll see through it. not because he's perceptive in any dramatic way — it's subtler than that. he's simply been around enough people being something for him that he knows the texture of it. the girl who laughs too readily, who agrees too easily, who makes herself smaller or larger depending on what she thinks he wants. he's polite about it. he's polite about everything.

[x he's actually quite good at making people feel comfortable. that's the danger, i think — he's so easy to be around that you stop noticing when you've started being honest. x]

just be yourself. i know that sounds like nothing advice. i mean it technically — just be the actual version of yourself, the one that exists when no one's watching. he'll notice the difference. he notices most things.

tip two: show up.

not in a desperate way. not in a god he's going to think i planned this way. just — be present. consistently. let yourself become a fixture in his landscape before you become a question in it. there's a version of familiarity that reads as comfort, and comfort, for someone who spends most of his time being looked at, is rarer than you'd think.

he moves through the world like it's easy. most of the time it is. [x what he doesn't say is that easy gets lonely in its own way. x] what he responds to, underneath all of it, is someone who just stays.

tip three: pay attention to the right things.

everyone pays attention to him. the quidditch, the captaincy, the easy confidence that fills a room. that's not attention, that's just — looking. [x real attention is noticing that he checks on his youngest teammate after every hard practice. that he reads the sports section and then the opinion column and then goes back to the sports section. that he brought his own copy of the chronicle to the library three thursdays in a row before he admitted he read it regularly. that he said it like it was a casual thing. it wasn't a casual thing. x]

notice the things he doesn't perform. those are the real ones.

tip four: don't make it easy.

this one he won't tell you himself, but i'm telling you. he's had easy his whole life — easy wins, easy company, easy mornings. he doesn't need you to be another easy thing. push back. disagree. let a silence sit. he finds it interesting when you do.

[x he finds you interesting when you do. i've watched it happen. i've watched him go still in the way he does when something has his actual attention, not the surface version, and it is. x ]

[section incomplete]

tip five: let him in slowly.

this is the one that matters most, i think, and the hardest one to explain. there's a version of openness that's performance — here is my personality, here are my charming flaws, look how human i am. he doesn't want that. [x or maybe he does, at first, and then he starts wanting something else, and by the time you realize he's switched what he's looking for it's too late to go back and start again. x]

just — let things happen in the order they happen. don't rush it. don't let yourself think too hard about the fact that somewhere in the past five weeks the line between research and reality has become extremely difficult to locate.

i think i

[section incomplete]

notes to self:

— the ending isn't there yet

— [x stop crossing things out, sora's going to think you've lost it. x]

— you have not lost it

— finish the piece

— it was just an assignment

— it was just an assignment.

you close the draft.

you sit at your desk in the quiet of the gryffindor tower, quill in hand, and you look out the window at the november dark, and you think very carefully about nothing in particular.

then you open a fresh piece of parchment and write, at the top:

week six.

week six starts on a monday, and james does something he's never done before.

he waits for you.

not in the library, not in the courtyard — outside the castle chronicles office, on the third floor, at half past eight in the morning, leaning against the wall with his bag over one shoulder like he has absolutely no reason to be on this corridor and hasn't noticed that yet. you turn the corner and stop.

"what are you doing here?"

"keonho said you had an early meeting with sora."

"keonho was right."

"i know." he pushes off the wall. falls into step beside you, which means he's walking with you, which means he waited on a corridor that leads nowhere specifically to walk with you to the great hall. "how'd it go?"

"fine," you say. "routine check-in."

"she giving you a hard time about the december piece?"

"sora gives everyone a hard time about everything. it's her primary personality trait."

"harsh."

"accurate."

he makes a sound that's almost a laugh. you walk down the stairs side by side and you are very carefully not thinking about the fact that he waited for you, specifically, on a corridor that requires a deliberate detour from anywhere he would normally be at half past eight on a monday.

you are not thinking about it.

you are thinking about it a little bit.

the thing about james, you've come to understand, is that he has two speeds.

there's the one everyone sees — easy, confident, slightly untouchable. the one that fills corridors and wins quidditch matches and makes people want to be near him without quite knowing why. that version of him is real. you're not saying it isn't.

and then there's the one that shows up when it's just you.

it's not dramatically different. that's almost the point — it's the same person, same dry humor, same unhurried way of moving through the world. but the remove is gone. the slight performance of it. like he's set something down because carrying it got tiring, and you happen to be the person he sets it down around.

you don't know when that started. you suspect it was gradual, the way everything between you has been gradual — incremental and unremarkable until suddenly it isn't.

on tuesday he finds you in the library and sits down and says, without preamble, "can i tell you something," and you say yes, and he says: "i don't think we're going to win the cup this year."

you look up. "you won the match against slytherin."

"i know. but ravenclaw's team this year is—" he stops. "i haven't told my team that. i haven't told anyone that."

"okay," you say carefully.

"i'm not — i'm not spiraling. i just." he turns his quill over in his hand, once. "it's seventh year. last shot. and i'm looking at the roster and i know what we are and i know what ravenclaw is and the math isn't—" he stops again.

you're quiet for a moment. "do you want me to say something reassuring or do you want me to just hear it?"

he looks at you. something shifts in his face. "the second one," he says, a little quietly.

"okay," you say. and you go back to your essay, and he goes back to his playbook, and you sit with it for him — the worry, the weight of it — and you don't try to fix it, and twenty minutes later he exhales slowly and says "thanks" to his parchment, and you say "mhm" to yours, and that's it.

that's all it is.

but on the walk back to the tower that night you think about the way he said i haven't told anyone that, and the particular way he looked at you after you gave him the choice, and you feel the lid on the box flex, very slightly, and you press it back down with both hands.

wednesday is when it becomes a problem.

you're in the courtyard, bundled against the november cold, and you're with yoonchae and keonho and it's the three of you on a bench being collectively miserable about the weather when james and seonghyeon come through. seonghyeon immediately inserts himself next to yoonchae, because that's just what seonghyeon does, and james stops in front of the bench and looks at the available space — the small available space, next to you — and sits down.

he's warm. that's the first thing. it's freezing and he's just — warm, the way people are when they run hot, and your arm is pressed against his from shoulder to elbow because the bench is not large and there's nowhere else to be and it's fine. it's nothing.

keonho is looking at the middle distance with an expression of great diplomacy.

"you're always cold," james says, to you, not a question.

"it's november."

"you've got three layers on."

"i run cold."

he looks at you sideways. then, without making anything of it, he shifts his weight slightly so he's — closer, barely, just enough — and says "better?" so quietly that only you can hear it and you feel your brain go completely offline for approximately three seconds.

"i was fine before," you say.

"sure," he says.

you look straight ahead. yoonchae, on your other side, has found something very interesting to look at on the opposite end of the courtyard. keonho has not moved. you cannot see his face and you are grateful for that.

james doesn't move either.

you sit there in the cold, his arm warm against yours, and the conversation continues around you — seonghyeon saying something, yoonchae laughing, keonho asking about the weekend — and you participate in it and you are normal about it and you are absolutely not aware of every single point of contact between your arm and his for the entire twenty minutes you sit there.

when he gets up to leave he says "later, hong," and you say "later," and you watch him cross the courtyard with seonghyeon and disappear around the corner.

keonho says, very quietly, to no one in particular: "oh no."

"don't," you say.

"i didn't say anything."

"keonho."

he looks at you. his expression is not unkind. it is, however, extremely knowing, which is almost worse. "y/n," he says, gently.

"i'm handling it," you say.

he nods slowly. "okay," he says. and he doesn't push, because he's keonho and he knows when you've hit a wall, but he reaches over and squeezes your hand once, brief and quiet, and you look away because if you look at him right now you'll say something true.

thursday comes and you go to the library and he's already there, which hasn't happened before — usually you arrive first. he's got two cups of something from the kitchens sitting on the table and he pushes one toward you when you sit down without looking up from his parchment, and you look at the cup and then at him.

"how did you know i was coming?" you ask.

"you always come thursdays."

"you're usually not here when i arrive."

"i was early today." a pause. "it's tea. the kind you had at breakfast last week. i asked the house elves."

you stare at him.

he is very focused on his parchment.

he asked the house elves. he was early, specifically, and he asked the house elves, specifically, about tea you had at breakfast a week ago that he apparently noticed and remembered and then acted on, and he's sitting there like that's a completely normal and unremarkable thing to have done.

"james," you say.

"it's just tea," he says, to his parchment.

it is not just tea. you both know it is not just tea. but you wrap your hands around the cup and it's warm and it tastes exactly right and you say "thank you" and he says "mhm" and you open your notebook and you stare at the page and you think, very clearly, with great precision:

i am in trouble.

and then you think, equally clearly: the article runs in eight days.

and you pick up your quill, and you write, and you do not look up for the rest of the evening, and when he says goodnight and leaves you sit there alone in the library for a while after, cup of tea cooling in your hands, and you think about the deadline and the draft and the ending you still haven't written.

you think about what the ending is going to cost.

the problem with being a writer is that you think in words.

everything that happens to you gets processed through language, filed away in sentences, given shape and edges and a place to live. it's how you've always worked — something happens, you find the words for it, and once it has words it has a box, and once it has a box you can put it down.

the problem with james is that every time you find the words, they're the wrong ones.

he's easy to be around — true, but not enough. he's interesting — accurate, insufficient. i notice him — you notice everyone, that's not it. you sit at your desk at eleven at night and you go through the vocabulary you have and none of it fits right and that, more than anything, is how you know you're in trouble. you've never been short on words before.

you try to be logical about it.

you make a list — not in the article draft, not in your notebook, on a loose scrap of parchment that you will later throw into the common room fire — of reasons why this is manageable.

one: it's proximity. you've spent six weeks in deliberate, sustained closeness with someone specifically because you needed to understand them. of course something happened. that's just how humans work.

two: he's objectively — fine. you're not a person who's immune to that. that would be weird.

three: it'll pass. it's not — it's not anything real. it's just a response to a situation and once the situation ends it'll correct itself.

you look at the list. you think about the tea. you think about the way he said i haven't told anyone that on tuesday like it was information he'd been carrying alone and had simply decided, without fanfare, that you were the place to put it down.

you fold the list up. you throw it in the fire.

logical isn't working.

the feeling, when you stop trying to name it and just let it exist for a moment, is something like this:

it's the thursday library quiet, the scratch of his quill, the way the lamp on his side of the table makes the shadows go warm. it's the specific way he looks when he laughs — not the easy social laugh, the real one, which is shorter and slightly more surprised, like it got out before he decided to let it. it's the fact that he always hands things back to you that you've set down without noticing — your quill when you put it behind your ear and forget about it, your scarf when it falls off the bench, small objects migrating back to you through his hands like he's just always watching where your things are.

it's the way he says hong — not your full name, not y/n, just the one syllable, like he's decided that's the version that belongs to him. you've heard other people use your name your whole life and it has never once done what it does when he says it.

it's the fact that you know things about him now that aren't in any article. that he's a light sleeper. that he rewrites his playbook diagrams at least three times before he's happy with them. that he gets quieter, not louder, when he's stressed, which is the opposite of what you'd expect from someone who takes up as much space as he does. that he's been carrying the weight of this last quidditch season like something he owes someone, though you're not sure who.

none of that is in the draft. you never put it in the draft. and you're starting to understand that the reason you didn't — told yourself it was too personal, too specific, too much — was actually much simpler than that.

it was yours. you wanted to keep it.

you tell kazuha on a friday night, sitting cross-legged on her bed in ravenclaw tower with the curtains drawn and the fire going, because if you don't tell someone you think you might actually combust.

you don't say i have feelings for him. you can't quite make yourself say that yet. what you say is: "i think i've made this complicated."

kazuha looks at you over her book. she sets it down. "how complicated?"

"complicated."

she's quiet for a moment. "how long?"

"i don't know. a while." you pull at a loose thread on her duvet. "i kept telling myself it was just — proximity. the assignment. that i was just doing the job."

"and now?"

"and now i know what tea he gets me from the kitchens." you look up. "he asked the house elves, kazuha. he remembered what i had at breakfast a week ago and he asked the house elves."

kazuha's expression does something careful and complicated. "y/n."

"i know."

"the article—"

"i know."

"it runs in—"

"i know." you press your hands over your face. "i know exactly when it runs. i know exactly what's in it. i know exactly what's going to happen when he reads it and i can't—" you stop. "i tried to pull it. i went to sora two weeks ago and she said it was too late. it's already — it's built into the issue. it's happening."

kazuha is quiet for a long moment. when she speaks, her voice is careful. "does any part of it — could it hurt him? reading it?"

you think about the draft. the crossed out lines. the incomplete sections. the notes to yourself that you forgot to delete. "i don't know," you say, which is not true. "yes," you say, which is.

kazuha reaches over and puts her hand over yours. she doesn't say it'll be fine because kazuha doesn't say things she doesn't know to be true. she just sits with you in it, which is what you needed anyway.

"what do i do," you say. it doesn't come out like a question.

"i don't know," she says honestly. "but i think you should finish the article and i think you should be honest in it. really honest." a pause. "you're always honest in your writing. don't stop now just because it's scary."

you sit there for a while. the fire goes. outside, ravenclaw tower is quiet, the kind of quiet that only exists late at night in the castle, deep and particular and old.

"i really didn't want this assignment," you say finally.

"i know," kazuha says.

"i told sora no."

"i know."

"this is her fault."

"it really isn't," kazuha says, gently, and you almost laugh, and it almost reaches your eyes, and she squeezes your hand once before she lets go and picks her book back up.

you sit there a little longer. you think about james. you think about the article. you think about the eight days between now and the first of december and how strange it is, to be running out of time on something you never wanted to start.

yoonchae finds out on saturday.

not because you tell her — you were going to, you'd been meaning to — but because you're sitting in the common room when james comes looking for seonghyeon and seonghyeon isn't there, and james looks at you on the couch and says "where is he," and you say "no idea," and he says "of course," under his breath, and then instead of leaving he drops into the armchair across from you like he's been here a hundred times, which he has, and says "what are you reading."

you tell him. he asks what it's about. you explain it badly, the way you always do when you're actually invested in something, all out of order and from the wrong end, and he listens to the whole thing without interrupting and then asks a question about the middle that tells you he was actually following, and you answer it, and he asks another, and fifteen minutes disappear before either of you notices.

seonghyeon never shows up.

james leaves an hour later, and the common room is quiet again, and yoonchae appears from the staircase where she has apparently been sitting for god knows how long and looks at you with an expression of profound, sympathetic devastation.

"oh, y/n," she says.

"don't," you say.

"babe."

"yoonchae, i'm serious, don't—"

"you're so—"

"don't."

she comes and sits next to you on the couch. she doesn't say the word. she just puts her head on your shoulder and you sit there together and you stare at the fire and you think about eight days and the draft and the ending you still haven't written and the way he asked questions about your book like he had all the time in the world.

"what am i going to do," you say.

"i don't know," yoonchae says into your shoulder. "but whatever happens — we're here. okay? all of us."

you lean your head against hers. outside, november is doing its worst against the tower windows, cold and relentless, and inside it's warm, and you close your eyes, and for just a little while you let yourself not think about the article.

just for a little while.

the last thing that happens before week six ends — before you have to sit down and finish the draft and send it to sora and let the whole thing become real and irreversible — is this:

sunday evening, the astronomy tower, which is your place, your thinking place, the one you retreat to when the common room is too loud and your head is too full. you've been coming here since fifth year. almost no one knows about it.

you hear footsteps on the stairs and your first thought is annoyance and your second thought, before you've even turned around, is somehow already oh.

james comes through the door. he sees you and stops.

"sorry," he says. "i didn't know anyone—"

"how did you know about this spot?"

a pause. "you mentioned it once. in october. you said you came here when you needed to think." he looks at you. "i wasn't following you. i just needed to—"

"think," you finish.

"yeah."

you look at each other. the tower is open to the sky, cold and clear, and the castle stretches below, all lit windows and moving staircases and the distant flicker of the quidditch pitch torches. it's a good spot. you've always thought so.

you move over on the stone ledge. just slightly.

he comes and sits next to you.

you don't talk for a while. the silence is the comfortable kind — the kind you've built, slowly, over six weeks of libraries and courtyards and thursday evenings, the kind that doesn't need anything from either of you. you look out at the castle and he does too and the wind is cold and it doesn't matter.

"you okay?" he says eventually.

"yeah," you say. "you?"

"yeah." a pause. "no. kind of." he exhales. "i keep thinking about the end of the year. like — what it's going to feel like. leaving."

"seventh year."

"seventh year," he agrees. he's quiet for a moment. "does it feel real to you? that it's almost over?"

you think about the article. you think about december first. you think about the fact that in eight days something is going to happen that you can't undo, and after that nothing is going to look the way it looks right now.

"no," you say honestly. "it doesn't feel real."

he nods slowly. he's looking out at the lights below, his jaw set in that particular way it gets when he's thinking about something he hasn't resolved. and then, very quietly, almost to himself: "i'm glad this year happened the way it did though. some of it."

you don't ask what he means. you're afraid of the answer. you're more afraid that you already know it.

you sit there until the cold gets too much, and then you both get up, and you walk back down the stairs side by side, and at the bottom where the corridors split he says "night, hong," and you say "goodnight, james," and you walk back to gryffindor tower and you go straight to your desk and you open the draft.

you read it from the beginning. all of it — the tips, the crossed out lines, the incomplete sections, the notes to yourself.

and then you pick up your quill, and your hand is very steady, and you write the ending.

you send it to sora on monday morning.

you don't read it again before you do. you made that decision the night before — write it, send it, don't look at it again, because if you look at it again you'll take something out and if you take something out it won't be honest anymore and kazuha told you to be honest and kazuha is almost always right.

sora's reply comes two hours later.

this is the best thing you've ever written.

and then, a minute after:

i mean that. truly.

and then, a minute after that, which is the most un-sora thing she's ever sent you:

are you okay.

you stare at the three owls lined up on your desk. outside, the november sky is doing something grey and noncommittal, the kind of day that can't decide what it wants to be. you think about james in the astronomy tower. i'm glad this year happened the way it did. some of it.

you write back to sora: just run it.

she does.

the week between sending the draft and the first of december is the strangest week of your seventh year.

on the surface, nothing changes. you go to class. you eat breakfast. you write. you go to the library on thursday and james is already there with two cups of tea and you sit across from him and you work in the quiet that belongs to both of you now, and you are normal about it — you are so normal about it, so careful and steady, that by the time you walk back to the tower you're exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the essay you finished.

underneath the surface, everything is ending.

you know things he doesn't know yet. you carry that around all week like something breakable — the knowledge of what's coming, the shape of the impact, the fact that you sent sora the piece and it's being typeset right now in the little chronicles office on the third floor and there is nothing left to do but wait.

you think about telling him. you think about it seriously, more than once — just walking up to him and saying there's something you need to know before december first and watching his face and dealing with whatever comes after. you play it out in your head, different versions, different words.

in every version, he looks at you differently after.

you don't tell him.

you know that's the wrong choice. you make it anyway, because you're a coward about this specific thing in a way you've never been a coward about anything else, and because some part of you — the part you're least proud of — wants one more week of the library and the tea and the astronomy tower quiet. one more week of the way he says hong like it's the version of your name that belongs to him.

you take the week. you'll regret it. you take it anyway.

on wednesday, four days before the issue drops, james finds you after dinner.

not in the library, not in the courtyard — in the corridor outside the great hall, in the post-dinner crowd, and he just appears beside you the way he does now, like it's where he was always going to end up.

"walk?" he says.

you say yes.

you go the long way around the castle, no particular destination, the way you've both gotten into the habit of when neither of you wants to be anywhere specific. the corridors are quieter up on the fourth floor, away from the common rooms and the staircases. your footsteps echo.

he talks about the upcoming match. about martin doing something catastrophic at practice that he's sworn the whole team to secrecy about. about juhoon finding what might be an undiscovered room on the seventh floor that turns out to be full of broken furniture and nothing else, which is somehow funnier the way he tells it, flat and unhurried.

you laugh. genuinely, fully, in the way you don't have to think about with him anymore.

and then he goes quiet for a moment, and you walk in the comfortable silence, and he says: "i like talking to you."

simple. direct. no performance in it.

you look straight ahead. your chest does something complicated. "you talk to lots of people," you say, which is true and also completely beside the point and you both know it.

"not like this," he says.

you don't have an answer for that. you walk another few steps and the silence is different now, warmer, weighted in a way that makes the back of your neck feel warm despite the cold corridor.

"james," you say, and it comes out quieter than you meant it to.

"i know," he says. which could mean anything. which feels, somehow, like it means everything.

you reach the end of the corridor where it splits — his way and yours. you stop. he stops. and he looks at you in the torchlight with that expression you've been collecting for six weeks, the one he doesn't wear for anyone else, and you think about the article and the deadline and the four days between now and the first of december, and you think about kazuha saying be honest, and you open your mouth—

"goodnight, hong," he says softly.

and he goes.

you stand at the fork in the corridor for a long time after he's gone, looking at nothing, and then you go back to gryffindor tower and you sit on your bed and you press your hands over your face and you stay like that for a while.

yoonchae doesn't say anything. she just comes and sits beside you and that's enough.

december first arrives the way terrible things do — quietly, on an ordinary morning, while you're still half asleep.

you're awake before the rest of the dormitory. the sky outside is that particular december blue, early and cold and clear, and you lie there for a moment looking at it and thinking about the fact that today is the day.

you get up. you get dressed. you go downstairs.

the chronicles copies are always left in stacks by the great hall entrance — that's been the distribution method since second year, charm-duplicated, one per student, neat little towers of parchment that people grab on the way in to breakfast. you walk past them without taking one. you know what it says.

you sit at the gryffindor table. yoonchae arrives seven minutes later and sits next to you without a word and puts a cup of tea in front of you and you wrap both hands around it.

keonho arrives from the hufflepuff table. he crosses the hall, sits across from you, and looks at you with an expression that is entirely gentle and entirely serious. "it's out," he says.

"i know."

"are you okay?"

"not really."

he nods. he doesn't move.

kazuha appears on your other side, which means she came down from ravenclaw tower specifically to be here this morning, which means she owled yoonchae last night to coordinate, which means your friends are doing the thing they do where they quietly arrange themselves around you before you know you need it. you look at the three of them and feel something enormous and unnameable move through your chest.

"whatever happens," kazuha says, "we're here."

you nod. you drink your tea. you watch the great hall fill up around you, the familiar morning noise of it, students grabbing copies of the chronicle on their way in, the rustle of pages, someone at the ravenclaw table already laughing at something in it.

you watch the hufflepuff table.

james isn't there yet.

he reads it at breakfast.

you know because martin is the one who brings it to him — you watch it happen across the hall, martin sliding the open chronicle across the table with an expression you can't read from this distance, saying something. james looks at it.

you look away.

you can't watch. you stare at your plate and you breathe and you feel yoonchae's hand find yours under the table and you hold onto it.

a minute passes. another.

keonho says quietly, "he's still reading."

you don't look up.

another minute. the great hall noise continues around you, ordinary and oblivious, and you sit very still in the middle of it.

then keonho says nothing, which is somehow worse than anything he could say, and you look up.

james has put the chronicle down.

he's not doing anything dramatic. he's not standing up, not saying anything to martin, not looking across the hall. he's just sitting there, very still, in the particular way he gets when something has his actual attention — and he's looking at the parchment in front of him, and his expression is the one you've never seen before, the one that has no name in your catalogue, and even from across the great hall you can see the exact moment he understands.

he looks up.

across the hall. directly at you.

you don't look away. you can't. you sit there and you let him look and you think i'm sorry as clearly as you can, like maybe if you think it hard enough it'll cross the distance between you, and his expression does something you will spend a long time trying to describe and never quite manage.

then he looks back down.

he picks up the chronicle. he folds it. he puts it in his bag.

he gets up and leaves.

he doesn't come to the library on thursday.

you go anyway, out of habit or hope or something you don't have a name for, and you sit at the table that has been yours and his for six weeks and you open your notebook and you stare at a blank page for forty minutes and you write nothing.

the tea on his side of the table stays cold.

seonghyeon finds you in the common room on friday evening.

he sits down across from you with the expression of someone who has been asked to do something he's not sure about, which is so unlike seonghyeon's usual ease that it makes your chest tighten before he's said a word.

"i'm not here to — i'm not taking sides," he says carefully. "i just wanted to say that he's not — he's okay. he's fine."

"he's not fine," you say.

seonghyeon looks at you. "no," he admits. "but he's not — it's not like he's falling apart. he's just." he stops. "he let himself—" another stop. "james doesn't really do that. let people in. and he did, and then—"

"i know," you say. your voice is very even. "i know what i did."

seonghyeon nods slowly. he doesn't say anything else for a moment. then: "the article was—" he seems to be choosing words carefully. "you could tell. reading it. that it wasn't just an assignment."

you look at him.

"i think he knows that too," seonghyeon says. "i think that's almost the harder part. for him."

you sit with that for a long time after he leaves.

you write him a letter on saturday.

not for the chronicle. not for anyone else. you sit at your desk in the early morning quiet when the dormitory is still asleep and you write it the way you write when no one's watching — honest, unguarded, all the way down.

you tell him you didn't choose the assignment. you tell him you tried to get out of it, that you went to sora and she said it was too late, that you should have tried harder and you didn't and you know that. you tell him that somewhere in october the line between research and reality disappeared and you panicked and kept going anyway, which was wrong, and you know that too.

and then you tell him the true thing — the one that's been sitting in your chest since the astronomy tower, since the corridor, since the thursday library and the tea from the kitchens. you tell him that the last part of the article, the part that doesn't sound like tips anymore, the part where the writing changes and the distance collapses — that part has nothing to do with the assignment. that part is just real. that part is the most honest thing you've ever written and you'd written it long before you typed it up and sent it to sora.

you tell him you're sorry.

you fold it up. you write his name on the front. and on saturday morning you walk to the hufflepuff common room entrance — the one by the kitchens, that keonho showed you in third year — and you slide it under the door, and you stand there for a second with your hand flat against the stone, and then you walk away.

you don't hear from him.

not saturday. not sunday. the weekend passes in that particular slow, heavy way that bad weekends have, and your friends are there — yoonchae bringing food you don't ask for, kazuha sitting quietly with you, keonho checking in with that careful gentleness that costs him something too, you know, given that james is his housemate and this is all complicated in ways that extend beyond you — and you're grateful, genuinely, in a way you'll tell them properly later.

but the hours pass and there's no reply, and by sunday night you've decided that's your answer, and you sit at your desk and you look at the blank notebook in front of you and you think about the fact that you've managed, in six weeks, to take the most important thing you've built this year and dismantle it from the inside out.

you open the notebook. you pick up your quill.

you write, at the top of the page: things i know to be true.

you sit there for a long time.

you write: i didn't want this to happen.

you write: i let it happen anyway.

you write: i would do the last six weeks again.

you stop. you look at that last line. you don't cross it out.

he finds you on monday.

astronomy tower, just after curfew, which means he got past the prefects somehow, which means he came here specifically, which means he read the letter.

you hear the footsteps on the stairs and you know before the door opens. you've known the sound of him for two months now — the particular weight and rhythm of it, unhurried even when it shouldn't be. you look out at the castle lights below and you wait.

he comes through the door. he sees you. he doesn't say anything for a moment.

"you left a letter," he says finally.

"yes."

"under the door."

"yes."

he comes to stand beside you. not close, not far — a careful distance, the kind that's aware of itself. you look out at the lights. he does too.

"you should have told me," he says. not angry. just true.

"yes," you say. "i should have."

"the whole time—"

"not the whole time." you turn to look at him. it's important, suddenly, that he knows this part. "the first week, maybe. the first two. after that it stopped feeling like an assignment and i didn't know what to do with that, and i made the wrong choice, and i know that." a pause. "i'm not asking you to be okay with it. i just needed you to know."

he's quiet. he's looking at you with that expression again — the unreadable one, the one that doesn't fit any of the categories — and the wind comes across the tower and you're cold, you're always cold, and he doesn't move to close the distance between you and you don't ask him to.

"the article," he says.

"yes."

"the end of it." he stops. seems to be deciding something. "that wasn't — that wasn't part of the assignment."

it's not a question.

"no," you say. "it wasn't."

he looks out at the castle. something in his jaw works, once. "i know," he says, very quietly. "i could tell. that's—" he stops again. "that's the part that made it worse, actually. because i read the whole thing and i was—" he exhales. "and then i got to the end and it was different. and i know your writing well enough by now to know when you're doing something and when you're just being honest."

your chest aches. "james."

"i'm not—" he turns to look at you. "i'm not over it. i want to be clear about that. you had six weeks of—" he stops. finds the words. "i let you in. i don't do that easily. and you were taking notes."

"i know."

"but." he looks at you for a long moment. "you also stayed. when i didn't give you anything worth writing about — the tuesday in the library, the pitch after practice, all of it. you stayed." a pause. "i'm not stupid, y/n."

it's the first time he's used your name. not hong. your name.

you feel it everywhere.

"i know you're not," you say.

"so i know some of it was real." he looks back at the lights. "i just need—" he stops. "i need some time. to figure out what to do with all of it."

"okay," you say. and you mean it — fully, without conditions. "take whatever you need."

he nods slowly. he doesn't leave though. he stays where he is, the careful distance still between you, and you stay where you are, and you look out at hogwarts together — all lit windows and ancient stone and the far-off flicker of the quidditch pitch — and you breathe.

"the tea," he says eventually, out of nowhere.

"what?"

"in the article. you wrote about the tea. he brought it without asking, already knew what kind, said it like it was nothing. you kept that in."

"yes," you say quietly.

"why."

you look at him. "because it was the moment i knew i was in trouble," you say. "and i wanted to be honest about it. the way it actually happened."

something crosses his face. not the unreadable expression this time — something softer, something that almost looks like the boy in the library who forgot to perform for a little while.

he doesn't say anything. neither do you.

the castle glitters below you in the december cold, and the year is almost over, and nothing is fixed yet — that's the truth of it, you're not pretending otherwise — but he's here, and you're here, and he said some of it was real in a voice that meant more than that, and for right now, in this particular moment, that's enough.

it's not immediate.

that needs to be said. he doesn't take your hand on the way down the stairs. he doesn't appear at breakfast the next morning like nothing happened. the library on thursday is just you, alone, and the empty seat across from yours, and the single cup of tea you make for yourself, and the essay you actually manage to finish because there's nothing else to do.

it takes time. real time, the slow kind.

but things happen, in the days after.

small things, first.

he nods at you in the corridor on wednesday — not the old nod, the new one, the one that's shorter and slightly more uncertain, which is somehow more than the old one ever was because it costs him something and he does it anyway.

keonho tells you, very casually, that james asked how you were. keonho said she's okay. james said good. keonho delivers this information and then looks at his hands, and you look at yours, and neither of you makes anything of it.

seonghyeon stops looking guilty when he sees you, which means something has shifted.

and then one morning — a thursday, of course a thursday, it was always going to be a thursday — you come into the library and he's there.

your side of the table. your seat. two cups.

he looks up when you come in. he doesn't smile yet — you're not there yet, you both know it — but he looks at you, and he looks at the seat across his, and he looks back at you.

you sit down.

you wrap your hands around the cup. it's the right tea. of course it is.

"i'm not—" he starts. stops.

"i know," you say.

"i just." he looks at the table. "i missed this. the thursday thing."

something opens in your chest, careful and quiet. "me too," you say.

he nods. he opens his playbook. you open your notebook. and the library settles around you, warm and familiar, the scratch of quills and the distant sound of the castle, and it's not the same as it was — it won't be the same for a while — but it's something.

it's a start.

the rest happens slowly, the way it always has with you two. nothing announced, nothing performed. just the incremental return of things — the banter first, careful at the edges, then less careful. the saturday courtyard. the walk back from dinner that neither of you plans. the morning he falls into step beside you on the way to class and doesn't mention it and neither do you.

one evening in the astronomy tower — your spot, which is his spot now too, which happened without discussion and which you've stopped questioning — he sits close enough that your arms touch, and this time neither of you moves away.

"i read it again," he says. "the article."

you go still.

"the end," he says. "the part that wasn't tips anymore." he's looking out at the castle. "you wrote—" he stops. seems to decide something. "you wrote that somewhere in october you stopped being able to tell where the assignment ended. and that by the time you noticed, it was too late to go back." a pause. "you meant that."

"yes," you say.

"it wasn't—" he turns to look at you. "none of that last part was for sora."

"no," you say. "none of it."

he looks at you for a long moment. the december wind comes across the tower and you're cold — you're always cold — and this time he closes the careful distance between you, unhurried, like he's decided and there's no reason to perform the deciding. his shoulder against yours. solid and warm.

"okay," he says quietly.

"okay?" you say.

"yeah." a pause. "okay."

it's not everything yet. but with james it was never going to be everything all at once — you know that now, you've learned the way he works, the slow and deliberate way he gives things. and that's fine. that's more than fine.

you lean into him, just slightly. he doesn't move away.

below, hogwarts glitters in the dark, and the year is almost over — your last year, the one that's been running out since september — and there are things still to figure out and words still to say and you'll say them, in time, in the order they happen.

for now: december. the astronomy tower. the warmth of him beside you in the cold.

for now, that's everything.

how to get the guy: a field guide by hong y/n | castle chronicles, december issue

there's a type of person who makes everything look easy.

you've seen him — maybe you know him. the one who walks into a room and doesn't have to announce himself. the one who's funny without trying, confident without cruelty, well-liked without seeming to care about being liked. the one who catches the snitch and lands like it was never in question.

i spent six weeks trying to figure him out.

here's what i learned.

tip one: don't be impressed.

everyone else already is. and he knows it — not arrogantly, just factually, the way you know the sky is grey in november. the moment you join that crowd you become part of the landscape, and part of the landscape is invisible. be the thing that doesn't quite fit the pattern. let him wonder why.

tip two: show up. just keep showing up.

not desperately. not strategically. just — be there, consistently, until your presence becomes something he reaches for without thinking about it. there is a kind of person, underneath all the easy confidence, who is very used to being looked at and very rarely actually seen. proximity isn't nothing. let yourself become familiar. familiar, for someone like him, becomes necessary before he knows it's happened.

tip three: pay attention to the right things.

not the quidditch. not the confidence. not the thing he shows the room. pay attention to the thing he shows when he thinks no one's watching — the way he checks on the nervous fifth year after a hard practice. the way he rewrites the same diagram three times until it's right. the way he goes quieter, not louder, when something is actually wrong.

the performance is real but it isn't everything. find the everything.

tip four: don't make it easy.

push back. disagree. let a silence sit longer than is comfortable. he has spent his entire life having things come easily and he is, underneath it all, a little bored by easy. be the thing that requires something from him. be interesting in the way that has nothing to do with trying to be interesting.

he'll notice. i promise you he'll notice.

tip five: let it be real.

this is the one i got wrong.

i came into this with a notebook and an assignment and the professional certainty that i could observe something without becoming part of it. i was wrong about that. i was wrong about it somewhere around week three and i kept going anyway, and i'm not sure i can fully defend that choice.

what i can tell you is this: somewhere in october, in a library, over bad ink and thursday evenings and a cup of tea i didn't ask for, the line between the assignment and the actual thing disappeared. and by the time i found it again it was too late to do anything but be honest.

so here is the honest version:

he remembers things you say in passing. he makes space for you without announcing it. he tells you things he hasn't told anyone else and he does it quietly, like it's not a big deal, which makes it a bigger deal than anything he could have said loudly. he shows up to the corridor you're standing in even when it leads nowhere. and when you're cold — which you always are — he closes the distance without making you ask.

i don't have a tip for that part. i don't think it's the kind of thing you can engineer.

i think it's just what happens when you stop taking notes and start paying attention with something other than a pen.

i think — if i'm being fully honest, which i promised myself i would be, which is the only way i know how to write — i think i stopped doing this for the article a long time before the article was done.

i think that's the only tip that matters.

let it be real. even when it's terrifying. even when you have a deadline and a word count and a very composed slytherin editor waiting for your draft.

let it be real.

especially then.