Against the Odds - James Potter x reader

Part 1 - Idiots like that

College was fine. Sure, sometimes it was tough during exams, but overall fine. That's what you would tell your parents and friends when they texted you and asked how you were doing. Fine with a smiley face. Not the boring kind of fine, just the averagely "not much going on in my life" kind of fine.

So was this Saturday. You woke up around nine and noticed that your roommate Louise hadn't returned from her boyfriend's dorm, as usual on the weekends. Pleasant. Having the room to yourself in the morning was nice. If there had been a possibility to get a single dorm room, you would have taken the chance immediately. Privacy was underrated.

Not that you didn't get along with Louise. She was a nice girl. But you were two very different kinds of people and she liked to talk. A lot. Both of you had realised how little you had had in common after a few weeks of sharing the room in freshman year, so you had given up on making friends with each other rather quickly. It wasn't a result of malicious intent though. Just two people who didn't have enough common interests to keep a conversation going. So you had started sharing the room while not getting into each other's business too much. You helped each other out when something critical was going on, but other than that, you lived your lives separately. Almost like co-workers who got along well at work, while both knew they would never spend a day with each other in their free time.

This Saturday, after lying in bed and scrolling through all sorts of social media for half an hour, you decided to lie in bed some more and picked up your laptop to watch an old season of Brooklyn 99 on Netflix. Some minutes into the second episode your phone vibrated once and you saw Remus Lupin's name popping up on your screen.

A frat party. Wow. Not a thing you would have thought to be attending ever again. You had tried it out once, when your best friend from back home had texted you to "come out of your shell more" and enjoy college. The party hadn't been enjoyable a tiny bit tough, so you'd gone home and had called it quits for partying.
Remus was right though - you needed friends. It wasn't that you had no one at all, but none of the people you were really close with were going to your uni, and anyone you had met here wasn't worth the effort to stick with. Remus was a good guy - a friend of some sorts. You had partnered up with him several times in English class and got to know that even if he was quiet at first, he also was witty, smart and reliable.
You weren't entirely sure why he would go out of his way and invite you to a party. You knew he wasn't asking you out; that wasn't the kind of relationship you had with him. But if he was nice enough to ask you, you should be nice enough to at least show up there for a minute.