#mihowrites

The gavel lands and nothing really changes—just another person set free. The only one, actually, out of the marked and tasked; Draco Malfoy gathers his robes and steps off the unbounded seat, warily, as if he’s forgotten the press of his own feet. [drarry, postwar]

Harry can see the resemblance, obvious at any angle, but now that he sees James in real life, he can see they’re not at all alike. Harry doesn’t have the same hold, the way James just is, even in this brief exchange. He’s confident like a sport, one he’s played and consumed since birth. Harry’s angled shoulders on James are rounded with lean muscle, broadening the range of his chest, stretching out his robes. They’re the same height, which Harry’d known from the forest, but that James had been a father, and he’d carried it even as a ghost. This James looks unchained, unfettered. He’s not the boy Harry’d seen in a pensieve, the one that had made Harry rush for assurance in a fireplace by Sirius and Remus. Nor is he the man buried beneath the earth in a cemetery in Godric’s Hollow. James Potter is alive, thrumming with life and staring at Harry with dwindling patience as Harry crashes heart-first into the realisation he should have known, presumed before they’d even thought to venture through time—that Harry doesn’t know this man at all, and neither does he in turn. ‘Have we met?’

‘You don’t flinch,’ Remus says.