kicked puppy
summary — james potter is a regular at the pub you work at. just as he thinks he's making progress with you, he shows up later, bloodied and bruised. sad like a kicked puppy.
content 4.4k words, james potter x reader, no pronouns, alcohol consumption, mentions of violence, mentions of blood.
note hehe feels good to write for james again yay!
The first time James Potter speaks to you properly, the pub is so full you can feel the noise in your ribs.
Thursday nights always settle heavily over the place. Not lively in the clean, cinematic sort of way people imagine when they think about old pubs and city life, but crowded and overheated and faintly miserable around the edges.
You’ve not had enough shots to bear anything tonight. You think about downing another bourbon and coke, lest it make the vibes less miserable.
Damp coats steaming near radiators. Beer sticking to the varnished wood floors no matter how many times you wipe them down. The low hum of too many conversations piled on top of one another until it becomes one constant sound pressing against your skull.
Someone near the television is yelling about football. The kitchen door swings open in bursts of heat and swear words.
You’ve been moving since four o’clock, and your body has started slipping into that strange automatic rhythm where exhaustion almost becomes useful. Grab glasses. Pour drinks. Smile politely. Ignore the ache in your shoulders. Ignore the ache everywhere else too.
You’re balancing a tray of pints against your forearm when a man at the corner table clicks his fingers at you. Not even maliciously. Almost absentmindedly.
Something sharp flashes through you instantly. You turn before you can say something you’ll regret professionally and find another voice cutting across the noise first.
“Jesus Christ, mate.” Light. Easy. Amused in that effortless way some people are. “You trying to get barred?”
The man laughs awkwardly and lifts his hands defensively, already turning back toward his friends.
And then you look at the person who spoke. You recognise him vaguely.
Dark curls. Glasses sliding slightly down his hawk nose. Broad shoulders crowded into a dark jacket that still looks damp around the seams from the rain outside. He’s standing beside the bar with one hand curled loosely around an empty glass, looking toward the other customer with a sort of easy disbelief.
Then his eyes flick toward you instead. Not lingering long enough to make you uncomfortable. Just enough that something in your chest catches slightly before you can stop it. You look away first.
The tray feels heavier suddenly.
By the time you circle back behind the bar a few minutes later, he’s still there waiting to order. Leaning one elbow against the counter while the crowd shifts around him in restless waves.
Up close, he looks different from the way he did across the room earlier. Softer somehow.
Not polished in the way men usually are when they know they’re attractive. His curls are still damp, pushed back messily from his forehead like he’s been running his hands through them all night without noticing. Thin wire-frame glasses sit slightly crooked on his face. There’s stubble darkening his jaw like he forgot to shave this morning and never got around to fixing it.
He looks warm. Something about him feels lived-in already. Familiar in a way strangers shouldn’t.
You adjust the tray higher against your hip before it can slip.
“Think that tray gets any heavier and it legally counts as manual labour.”
“It builds character.”
His eyes flick briefly toward the glasses balanced dangerously near the edge. “It builds workers' compensation claims.”
That pulls a small laugh from you before you can stop it. No polite customer service laughter either. Real enough that it catches you off guard.
His expression changes the second he hears it. Brief softening around his mouth, like he wasn’t fully expecting to get that reaction and likes that he did.
“There,” he says quietly, almost more to himself than to you. “Knew you could do it.”
You narrow your eyes immediately, though there’s no heat behind it. “Do what?”
“Laugh at me.”
“That wasn’t at you.”
“Mm.”
You push past him toward the bar, already reaching to unload the glasses into the sink. The warmth of the room presses against your skin, your shirt sticks between your shoulder blades from hours spent moving through crowds and kitchen heat.
Behind you, he shifts closer to the counter.
Most customers fill silence by demanding attention from it. Tapping cards impatiently against wood. Leaning too far over the counter. Looking around for somebody more interesting to speak to.
He just watches you work for a moment. Like he’s trying to place you.
“You looked homicidal carrying that thing through the crowd,” he says after a second.
“I probably was.”
“Fair enough.”
You reach for a towel to wipe spilled cider from the counter, the wood tacky beneath your hand. Somewhere behind him, somebody cheers loudly at the television.
The whole pub feels like it’s breathing around you. Expanding and contracting in waves.
“What can I get you?” you ask, finally. His patience amuses you.
“Depends.”
“On?”
“What would you recommend to someone trying very hard to seem sophisticated?”
You finally glance back at him properly then.
He’s leaning both forearms against the bar now, close enough that you can now smell rainwater still clinging faintly to his jacket beneath the heavier scents of beer and citrus and old wood. His sleeves are rolled unevenly to his elbows. There’s a faded scar disappearing beneath the strap of his watch.
“You don’t strike me as sophisticated,” you tell him.
His grin appears slowly. Pointy canines and glossy lips. “Oh, devastating.”
“You’ll survive.”
“Hard to say.”
The smile tugs unexpectedly at the corner of your mouth before you can hide it. You duck your head slightly, reaching for a clean glass, mostly to give yourself something to do with your hands.
Behind him, one of the men from his table looks over. Dark hair. Leather jacket. Sharp sort of face. He notices where his friend’s attention is directed almost immediately.
“Oh my God,” he calls across the room, loud enough that several people nearby turn to look. “He’s at it again!”
The man in front of you closes his eyes briefly. Something exhausted in the deeply familiar way people become around their oldest friends.
“I’m ordering a drink,” he calls back.
“You’ve been ordering it for like fifteen minutes.”
“That’s because the service here is terrible.”
You bark out another laugh before you can help it, and have to point your face down to the floor to hide it. The stranger looks triumphant about managing it twice.
Leather Jacket points dramatically toward you. “See? She thinks I’m funny.”
“You’re humiliating yourself in public, Sirius.” Sirius.
“I do that every day.”
Another man at the table — quieter looking, book tucked beside his elbow — finally glances up from his drink. “Can you order before she throws something at you?”
“She wouldn’t,” the stranger says lightly.
You meet his eyes while reaching beneath the counter for tonic water. “Confident.”
“I believe in human connection.”
“You’ve known me two minutes.” You've seen him weekly for the past four months.
“And yet I feel we understand each other deeply.”
You shake your head despite yourself, trying to hide the smile pulling at your mouth, but something in your chest loosens anyway. The warmth of the room suddenly feels softer around the edges, the exhaustion sitting on your shoulders momentarily lighter beneath the easy sound of his laughter across the bar.
It’s annoying.
You’re tired. Covered faintly in beer. Your feet hurt. There’s still a stack of glasses waiting behind you. You do not have the energy for a charming stranger. And yet.
“Drink?” you ask again.
He watches you for a second longer before answering, expression gentling slightly beneath all the teasing.
“Tequila and soda,” he says. Then, quieter: “Please.”
The please lands somewhere unexpected. Small enough that it shouldn’t matter. But people reveal themselves in tiny things sometimes.
The way they thank you. The way they wait for answers instead of talking over them. The way they look at service staff when they think nobody notices.
You start building the drink carefully, ice clinking against glass beneath your hands.
He stays where he is. Not checking his phone. Not turning back toward his friends immediately. Just standing there comfortably in the space beside the bar while the pub moves noisily around both of you.
“You always work Thursdays?” he asks.
You lift your brow. “Usually.”
“Brutal.”
“You lot make it worse.”
He smiles. You hate it. “That hurts my feelings.”
“Your friend tried starting a football chant twenty minutes ago.”
“He’s passionate.”
“He was standing on a chair.”
“That does sound like Sirius.”
There’s affection folded so naturally into the sentence that you glance at him again before you can stop yourself.
James catches the look immediately. You’re beginning to realise he notices everything.
“You work here full time?” he asks after a moment, turning the damp coaster absently beneath his glass while he watches you move around the bar.
“Pretty much.”
You reach for a lime beside the chopping board, your colleagues behind on backup prep, the knife sliding cleanly through bright green skin whilst music hums low overhead and conversation swells through the crowded room around you.
“And live upstairs, yeah?”
You pause mid-slice. Only for a second, but it’s enough.
Your eyes lift toward him automatically. “How do you know that?”
A small smile pulls slowly at the corner of his mouth then, something quietly pleased settling into his expression without becoming smug about it.
“You pointed at the ceiling earlier when you said unfortunately.”
For a second, you just stare at him.
The memory flashes back embarrassingly clearly now — exhausted and distracted and making some offhand complaint about hearing the pipes rattle upstairs at three in the morning.
James watches realisation settle across your face. “Observant, me,” he adds lightly.
“You’ve got a dangerous level of attention to detail.”
“Or,” he says thoughtfully, “I’m incredibly creepy.”
“That could genuinely go either way.”
His laugh slips out low and warm at that, quiet enough that it almost disappears beneath the noise of the pub.
Outside, rainwater streaks steadily down the front windows, blurring the streetlights into long ribbons of gold against dark glass. Every time the entrance opens, cold air folds briefly through the packed warmth of the room before disappearing again beneath bodies and laughter and music.
You finish making his drink slowly, suddenly far too aware of him standing there. You slide the final lime wedge into the glass before topping the drink carefully.
“There.”
The lack of motivation to finish his drink quickly doesn’t surprise you. You’re not in a rush to get him to leave. Your fingers remain curled briefly around the side of the glass while you push it toward him across the polished wood counter.
“Thanks,” he says quietly.
Then you’re the only bartender at the bar, and someone at the other end starts waving cash impatiently in your direction, and the moment breaks apart before it can become anything real.
Still, as you turn away to serve the next customer, you feel his attention linger for a second longer.
And later that night, while pushing through crowds of strangers and wiping down sticky tables beneath dim lights, you keep catching yourself looking toward the corner table near the windows.
Noticing whenever he’s there.
—
Outside, rain keeps throwing itself against the windows in uneven bursts, rattling faintly against the glass whenever the wind picks up hard enough. The front door barely stops moving all night. Groups stumble in dripping wet from the street, bringing sharp gusts of cold air with them before the warmth of the pub swallows everything whole again.
You lose track of time somewhere after eleven-thirty.
Orders blur together eventually.
Vodka sodas. Guinness. Rum and coke. Espresso martinis for girls already too drunk to pronounce it properly anymore. Somebody complains their chips are cold while you’re balancing at least eight empty glasses against your forearm. One of the newer bartenders disappears during the worst part of the rush and comes back twenty minutes later smelling like cigarette smoke and terrible judgement.
Through all of it, you keep catching pieces of James without fully meaning to. The scrape of his laugh carried across the room from somewhere near the front windows. The shape of him leaning back in his chair with one arm draped loosely across the booth behind Sirius.
His fingers tap restlessly against his pint glass whenever conversation drifts too long without holding his attention properly. It’s strange, the way awareness settles once someone’s lodged themselves firmly inside your head.
You stop looking for them consciously after awhile. Your body just does it automatically.
Every time you glance toward the windows, your eyes find him first before your brain properly catches up. Dark curls. Bare forearms. The familiar curve of his mouth whenever he’s halfway through saying something clever. The absent way he pushes his glasses higher up his nose while listening. The restless movement of his hands around pint glasses whenever he’s sitting still too long.
And later into the night, something about him feels wrong. Not dramatic enough for anyone else to pick up on. Just enough that you notice it because you’ve spent weeks accidentally learning the rhythm of him.
Sirius is halfway through some ridiculously animated story, gesturing so aggressively he nearly knocks over two drinks in the process. Remus looks exhausted in the deeply permanent way he always does when Sirius gets like this. Usually, James would be making everything worse on purpose. Interrupting. Laughing too loud. Throwing fuel directly onto whatever chaos Sirius starts.
Tonight he keeps drifting out of conversations halfway through them.
You watch it happen over and over.
His smile fades too quickly after Sirius says something funny. His attention keeps snagging elsewhere. Toward the windows. Toward the entrance. Toward movement outside whenever voices rise too sharply beyond the glass.
And every so often, toward you. The awareness of it settles uncomfortably beneath your skin after he points out your limp. You can still feel the ghost of his hand against your elbow.
Still hear the quiet certainty in his voice when he said it. You hadn’t realised anyone had been paying enough attention to notice things like that.
Near midnight, the atmosphere inside the pub shifts. The music keeps playing. People keep talking. Somebody near the televisions shouts loudly enough over football highlights that half the room groans at him to shut up.
Still, something changes. You notice it in fragments, a sharp burst of yelling somewhere outside, heads turning briefly toward the windows. The way James goes completely still mid-conversation.
Your eyes lift automatically toward him at the exact same moment his snap toward the front entrance. The shift in him is immediate enough to make your stomach tighten.
Every trace of distraction disappears instantly.
One second he’s half-listening to Sirius complain dramatically about something. The next, his posture sharpens completely, attention fixed hard toward the street outside.
Sirius notices too. You see his expression change the second he looks properly at James. You start to feel like a creep.
Whatever passes silently between them happens fast enough you can’t read it from across the room.
Then James is already standing.
The legs of his chair scrape harshly across the floorboards beneath him, loud enough to cut briefly through the surrounding noise. Several people glance over instinctively before losing interest almost immediately.
You don’t hear what he says. The music swallows most of it whole. You only catch Sirius muttering something sharp back before shoving himself upright, too.
James glances once toward the bar while moving for the entrance. Toward you. The look lasts maybe a second. Still, something uneasy twists low in your stomach before the front door even swings shut behind them.
Then they disappear into the rain. And the night keeps moving without them.
The second rush hits almost immediately afterwards.
A queue forms three people deep at the bar within minutes. Somebody drops a full pint near the pool tables and glass explodes across the floor. The kitchen bell starts going nonstop while one of the waitresses looks visibly close to killing someone with her bare hands.
You don’t have time to think. Not properly anyways. Everything becomes movement after that.
Pour. Swipe card. Smile. Carry tray. Apologise. Repeat.
Your ankle throbs harder every time you pivot wrong. Beer soaks into your sleeve after somebody knocks into you hard enough to spill half their drink. A man in a football jersey clicks his fingers at you while you’re actively serving someone else and you briefly consider phoning in a bomb threat to get this place to empty as quickly as possible.
Through all of it, your attention keeps catching on absence. It happens gradually. A glance toward the windows while pouring a pint. Another while trekking between the kitchen pass and back toward the bar. Then all at once, the awareness settles heavily in your chest.
James still hasn’t come back.
You stop near the taps for half a second longer than necessary, eyes flicking automatically toward the booth near the front windows.
Remus sits there alone now.
One arm draped across the back of the seat, phone glowing faintly in his hand while irritation tightens visibly around his mouth. Sirius’s empty glass still sits abandoned on the table beside him. Across from that, James’s drink remains untouched, the ice melted now.
Condensation slides slowly down the side of the glass.
You keep catching yourself glancing toward the entrance every time it opens, expecting him to reappear through the crowd with rainwater dripping from his hair and some easy explanation already waiting on his tongue.
But midnight stretches toward one. Then one bleeds slowly into close.
And James never comes back inside.
By closing, exhaustion settles so heavily through your body it almost stops feeling real. The last customers stumble out sometime after two in the morning, laughter echoing faintly into the street once the front doors finally shut behind them. The sudden absence of noise rings loudly in your ears afterward.
Music cuts off midway through a song and the silence feels strange.
You move through cleanup mostly on autopilot. Chairs overturned onto tables. Sticky glasses stacked beside the sink. Your hands smell permanently like citrus and beer and industrial soap no matter how many times you rinse them.
Nobody else volunteered to take rubbish out tonight. You stopped expecting them to a long time ago.
The garbage bags drag heavily behind you while you shove open the back door with your shoulder. It sticks halfway like it always does when the weather turns wet, swollen wood catching stubbornly against the frame before finally giving way.
Cold air hits you instantly. Sharp enough to sting after hours spent inside overheated rooms.
Rainwater drips steadily somewhere nearby, echoing softly through the narrow alleyway behind the pub. The security light mounted above the back entrance casts everything gold and uneven against wet pavement.
And there he is.
James sits on the back steps behind the building with his elbows resting loosely against his knees, head tilted slightly downward like he’s listening absently to the rain.
For a second, your brain struggles to place the image properly. Not because he looks unrecognisable. Because you’ve never seen him still before.
His jacket discarded, wet, at his feet. Split skin stretched raw across his knuckles, where blood has already dried in dark streaks along his fingers. Bruising blooms faintly beneath his left eye, purple already spreading against dark skin.
There’s blood smeared across the sleeve of his button down too.
You’ve spent weeks building this version of James in your head without meaning to. Warm laughter across crowded rooms. His attention catching on you from the other side of the bar. The smell of the same cologne clinging to his jacket. Long conversations after midnight while the pub emptied around you.
You’ve never once pictured him like this. Still enough to bruise.
Your grip loosens around the rubbish bags still hanging from your fingers. They hit the wet pavement heavily beside you with a dull thud you barely register.
James looks up immediately at the sound. And somehow, even now — bruised and exhausted and bleeding onto concrete — his attention still lands on you first.
“You look dead on your feet. Your ankle any better?”
His voice comes out rougher than usual, worn thin around the edges in a way you’ve never heard before. The teasing is still there somewhere underneath it — buried deep enough that it barely survives the exhaustion.
For a second, you just stare at him.
The alley suddenly feels too quiet after the chaos inside. Somewhere out on the main street, a car passes through wet roads with that low hissing sound tyres make after heavy rain.
James sits beneath the yellow wash of the security light like something half-forgotten.
Blood streaks across his knuckles in dark drying lines. The skin there looks split badly enough that fresh red still gathers slowly at the edges whenever he flexes his hand. Bruising has already started settling beneath one eye, staining the skin violet-blue beneath the harsh light overhead.
And somehow the thing that unsettles you most is how tired he looks.
“What the fuck happened to you?”
The words leave your mouth quieter than you intended.
James lets out a breath through his nose that almost resembles a laugh, though it sounds more exhausted than amused. He tips his head back briefly against the brick wall behind him before regretting it and deciding to look at you again.
“You should see the other guy.”
Normally, he would’ve smiled after saying something like that. You can practically picture it — the easy crooked grin, the softness around his eyes whenever he tries to stop you worrying before you’ve even started.
Tonight the joke just hangs there between you, tired and thin. Your eyes drag helplessly back toward his hands.
“What happened?” you ask again, softer now.
For a moment, James doesn’t answer.
His gaze shifts somewhere past your shoulder toward the mouth of the alley, jaw tightening briefly before he looks back down at his hands instead. The movement pulls another quiet wince across his face that he clearly hopes you won’t notice.
You notice anyway.
“There was some guy outside another bar down the street,” he says eventually. “He grabbed this girl — a friend — and wouldn’t let go of her.”
Something twists low in your stomach immediately.
James shrugs one shoulder lightly, though the movement looks uncomfortable.
“I told him to get his hands off her.” His eyes flick toward you briefly before lowering again. “He didn’t take it very well.”
The understatement almost makes you laugh. Almost.
“Jesus Christ,” you murmur quietly.
“I’m alright.”
“You’re bleeding everywhere.”
“I’ve definitely looked worse.”
Your chest tightens unexpectedly at the sound of it. You step closer before really thinking about it.
The movement makes James look up immediately. His attention lands fully on you with the same quiet focus he always carries around you, though now it feels heavier somehow in the stillness of the alley.
Up close, the bruising beneath his eye looks angrier. You can see where his bottom lip has split faintly near one corner too.
“You need to clean those,” you tell him, nodding toward his hands.
James glances down like he’s only just remembered them. “It’s fine.”
“No, it isn’t.”
His mouth twitches slightly at the sharpness in your voice.
For a second, neither of you says anything. The alley feels strangely separate from the rest of the world back here, tucked behind the warmth and noise of the streets. Just wet pavement reflecting yellow light. Both of you are breathing visible in the cold air.
Then James pushes himself upright from the steps. The movement is slow enough that you instantly know he’s hurting more than he’s pretending to. His expression tightens almost invisibly halfway to standing before smoothing itself back out again.
You catch it anyway.
“Careful,” you say automatically.
Something soft flickers briefly across his face at the sound of it.
You hold the back door open while he follows you inside, and the place feels almost eerie now without customers filling it. Chairs stacked high. Half-finished cleanup abandoned around the bar. The low hum of the dishwasher carrying softly through the silence.
James pauses just inside the doorway while rainwater drips from the edge of his coat onto the floorboards.
Your eyes catch briefly on the blood still drying across the bridge of his nose..
“Sit down,” you say.
He obeys with surprising ease.
The stool scrapes quietly against the floor as he lowers himself onto it, shoulders finally sagging slightly the second he stops moving. Up close, the damage looks worse than it did outside. His knuckles are swollen already. The skin split deeply across two fingers.
You reach beneath the counter for the first aid kit while James watches you silently.
“You really should’ve seen the other guy,” he says after a moment, voice quieter now.
You glance up flatly while pulling antiseptic wipes from the box. “Don’t start.”
That earns something quieter from him this time — the faint pull of a smile worn thin by exhaustion, there and gone almost before it fully settles across his face. The expression disappears quickly, though the softness of it lingers unpleasantly in your chest afterward.
You wet a cloth beneath warm water, squeezing it carefully between your fingers before stepping closer to him again. Without thinking, you move automatically into the space between his knees so you can reach his hands properly.
The position registers instantly. James goes completely still beneath you. So do you.
Heat crawls slowly up the back of your neck as awareness crashes hard into the silence between you. He sits close enough now that you can feel warmth rolling off him despite the dampness of his clothes. Close enough to smell sweat and soap and the faint metallic scent of blood still lingering against his skin.
Neither of you moves away. Your fingers tighten slightly around the cloth before you finally reach carefully for his wrist.
The second your hand touches him, James inhales softly.
This is so deliciously descriptive wow. There are too many lines I loved I could never choose favs but James “throwing fuel onto whatever chaos Sirius starts” is so aptly them and “broad shoulders crowded into a jacket that still looks damp around the seams from the rain outside” gave me suchhh a clear and evocative image
