Work Text:
Grief is love.
Misplaced love, a surplus of love, love that is caught in the corners of mouths, love with nowhere to go but back into the earth. It’s strange. We come from the earth, perhaps owe all things to the earth, and will eventually return to the earth, but we are wired to kick and scream when we lose. Selfishly or not, it must be asked: why should our love be subsumed into one? Why should it be returned to the earth, rather than given to who we want to give it to? I do not send my love to the earth. The earth cannot give me what you have given me.
1. the water and the horse
SIRIUS, AUGUST 1968
The plain truth is this: Uncle Alphard gives Regulus a purebred Arabian black stallion for his sixth birthday. It does not live.
They are staying on the coast of northern France, where the warmth of August still slips in and out intermittently and autumn clouds have not yet covered the summer stars. It is Sirius’s favorite holiday home, at least he thinks it is, because a quarter of it is made of glass panes and crystalline windows that stretch from the granite floors to the ceilings, and he can always see the ocean lapping skittishly at the shore from his bedroom. When everyone else is tucked into bed, he likes to creep out of the covers, to clutch at the banister, and stare, transfixed, at the black water painted metallic silver by the moon. A plethora of ancient wards and lustrous protective shields surround the house and the little chunk of the beach they have claimed for themselves, guarding them against unwanted eyes and ears. Nobody else can see them, but the sea can. Knowing that he can look out and into it and that it can return his gaze makes him feel special, like he has a secret.
It’s one of the few things that he does without Regulus because, as it turns out, Regulus hates the water, can’t even look at it, needs to sleep in another room on the opposite side of the house so that he can face the countryside. His parents insist that he learn how to compose himself in the water, how to “train himself” to behave properly at parties in manors with swimming pools. They send Sirius to the shore with him nearly every day, but Regulus won’t even step into the water, afraid that the tide will take hold of him and take him away. Being on the beach for the summer makes his birthday an unpleasant affair, but the holiday is salvaged by Uncle Alphard’s arrival and the handsome horse he brings with him.
“Happy Birthday, my boy. For you to do something besides stay in that house,” he says to Regulus in his low, merry voice and tips his hat toward their mother. “Please come visit soon, sister.”
His mother steps forward in her silk evening gown and starts to say something curtly, but Sirius doesn’t quite catch it because Regulus grabs him by the elbow and leads him towards the stallion. His brother’s hand reaches for the matte fur slowly, his arm trembling.
“She is pretty,” Regulus says quietly. His fingers trail a path along the horse’s chest. “Jolie.” His French is better than Sirius's.
Sirius will learn to enjoy the horse a great deal, enjoy the thrum of adrenaline in his bones when they jump over fences or race the wind that slashes across his cheeks. But Regulus, scrawny and timid and barely six years old, falls in love that summer.
I worry about your brother, Sirius. He is weak. Frail. It is inexcusable that he refuses still to step into the ocean.
Yes, Mother.
How can he fight for our family if he is afraid of some water?
Who are we fighting, Mother?.
Hush. He is your younger brother. Your responsibility. You must teach him how to swim. Tear him away from that horse and take him to the sea, or I will take the beast away from him myself.
Yes, Mother.
Do you understand?
Yes, Mother, he thinks, and he can feel her begin to leave his mind. It leaves behind a dull ache as if her fingernails are scraping across his skull as she pulls away.
Sirius tries. It is so hot today, Reggie, come play with me! Look at how fun it is! Regulus asks when they can go back to the house.
“Master Sirius,” Kreacher asks him one day, “Mistress wants to know how Master Regulus’s swimming lessons have been.”
Sirius peers out the window and sees Regulus curled up next to the horse and stroking her glossy mane. He is talking animatedly with his arms flailing around wildly, more than 12 feet away from the water but still closer than he’s ever been. The water crashes against a rock and sprays droplets across the sand, but Regulus doesn’t flinch. The horse makes him brave, Sirius supposes.
“Regulus is a good swimmer,” Sirius lies. “He’s very good.”
She comes to him in his dreams, but there is nothing for her to take. His thoughts trickle away and become bovine, lost in the steady rhythm of the ocean. He dreams, or he doesn’t, and he knows that she is there and that all she can see is the tide.
2. the stars and his tears
REMUS, JANUARY 1973
I haven’t seen the full moon since I was four, Remus writes.
It’s a strange thought to be having at two in the morning after an especially well-planned prank involving charming every single gargoyle to hurl insults at one of Sirius’s many relatives whenever they walk past. James had been positively giddy to see if it would work in the morning, even proposing that they awake until daybreak to witness the first assault. However, the excitement of it all had worn him thin, and he had fallen asleep the moment they were safely back in their dormitory. The rest had soon followed.
In all honesty, Remus doesn’t understand why James had been so eager to see if his wonderful plan worked. Remus knows that it will work because it was James’ plan, and James’ plans always work. Still, come morning, he will still be as exuberant as ever in his victory.
Remus is decidedly not feeling as exuberant. Tomorrow, he has to kill off another one of his aunts and leave in a hurry while his friends celebrate their collective brilliance and heroism under a full, buttery moon. It’s this unreasonable train of thought, leading him from James’s charming yet irritating exhilaration to having to fake a relative’s death and missing the high of a successful mission, that leads him to this particular notion. He hasn’t seen the moon before with human eyes. The last thing that he sees before he turns is his basement cellar or, as of recently, the gray ceiling in the shack. Never the moon in full, which even now tugs at his bones and makes his heart feel like a beast slamming erratically at its cage.
A slight shift in the planks cuts through the silence.
A pause, followed by another shift.
He can immediately tell that it’s Sirius from the way his weight shifts carefully on the floor. Remus closes his eyes, tries his best not to move, and feigns very asleep, very unconscious breathing.
A note: This does not make him a bad friend. Sirius only wakes to crawl into James’s bed, and James only wakes to crawl into Sirius’s. James carries the weight of Sirius’s secrets, and Sirius carries James’s in return. It is the way things are.
Another note: Remus is certain that James is sleeping obscenely well at the moment, so Sirius is out of luck.
“Lupin?” Sirius hisses.
A hand curls around Remus’s drapes but doesn’t pull them to the side. His voice sounds tired and high and very unlike the one that had seamlessly murmured incantations in the corridors two hours ago. Remus wills his body to stay unmoving and mentally scrolls through a pathetic list of things to say before settling on, “Yeah?”
Sirius pries the drapes away and settles on the very edge of the mattress without looking at him. His eyes trace the velvet fabric rather serenely. “I tried Potter. He’s sleeping like a rock.”
“Yeah,” he responds, “he was tired.”
“Amazing, Lupin. Brilliant observation.”
Remus tugs at the bedsheets around his legs. “If you’re going to be an arse about it, get out of my bed,” he says coldly. The moon and its raw, splintering glow make him crueler than he should be – or maybe more honest.
Sirius places more of his weight on the bed, scraping away another inch of sheets between them. His hand pushes away a strand of hair carelessly, and it looks like liquid as it falls back into place. “What’s your favorite color?”
“I don’t know,” he says honestly.
“My brother used to say, ‘all of them.’” Sirius smiles then, a smile too gentle and careful for a boy made of fireworks and adrenaline and thrumming emotion. Sirius snaps his fingers, and a red ball of light flickers into Remus’s vision and floats to the top of his canopy, bouncing and bobbing as if it’s riding a wave. It spins around his head in wide, lazy circles before other bright flashes of color join it, lighting up Remus’s bed like the Muggle model of the solar system his science class had seen in kindergarten. Sirius’s planets spin so rapidly on their axes that they look like they’re shivering, and it’s fascinating and horrible and frustrating, how easily these things come to him, how naturally magic vibrates in his veins and bursts whenever he calls for it. “I used to do this for him when he was scared.”
“Oh,” Remus replies, and the lights give off the illusion of glitter in his hair.
“He was always so soft, so helpless, so stupid,” Sirius continues, his mouth twisting into something ugly. Mars shrouds his face gently in its dark red light. “He could never take care of himself.”
“Alright.”
Sirius begins to cry. The planets quiver.
the letter (for reference)
November 2, 1971
Sirius,
I hope that Hogwarts has been treating you well. It’s horrible that we missed each other by just one year, but then again, I think I would have embarrassed you. Now you’re in that delightful and garishly red place where the brave at heart dwell and something else that I can’t remember. Still, it would’ve been nice to see you around and do our little trick. Imagine the havoc we could’ve wreaked with me talking into your ear from across the castle. “O’ I am fortune’s fool!”
I am writing to you because something strange has happened. I do not doubt that my mother will be unhappy that I am sharing the family “secrets” with you, but it is your business as much as it is mine.
Last week, the Malfoy’s had us over for tea, and Lucius (that pretentious prick that seems to have taken an interest in Cissy – please tell her I say hello) said something about Regulus. He said that your mother had lost her mind and killed Regulus’s horse. Of course, I didn’t believe him – why on earth would your mother kill a horse? – but he said something about how Regulus had lied, about how he didn’t know how to swim after all. I have no idea what any of it means, Sirius -- truly, I don’t -- but I thought it might be something you should know. Is “horse” a euphemism for something? Is there something I’m missing or have I become dull in my old age? We have never kept secrets from each other before. Perhaps this is when the teenage rebellion begins, after all, in your house of the brave.
All my love,
Andromeda
3. dreams
SIRIUS, APRIL 1973
“You disgust me.”
James kicks the side of his head with a socked foot, and Sirius automatically flicks his finger against his arch in a way that makes him squirm violently. “Stop doing that, you arse,” he huffs. “And I have no idea what you’re talking about. Has the inbreeding finally gotten to your mind?”
He falls back onto the pillows with a flourish, and Sirius is left with only the sight of his horrendous Christmas socks. It’s become familiar. They sleep like this – in opposite directions and facing each other’s feet – most nights. It’s a system that will only accommodate them in their scrawny preadolescence, but Sirius has grown weary of thinking too deeply about the future. The now, the paper he still hasn’t finished, and James’s extravagant taste in socks are good enough.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Sirius says to the toes.
James doesn’t refute this statement. “If I disgust you so much, then you should leave my bed and hence grant me full mobility of my legs.”
“It was your idea,” he points out then regrets it. (In truth, it had been James’s idea, but he can’t help but think that he benefits much more from it.)
He almost expects James to call him out on this, but James, despite the pomp and arrogance and his outrageous need to be right, has never learned cruelty or how to lace his words with venom. He has never had to. Instead, he snaps his fingers, dumping a hurricane of little paper hearts onto Sirius’s bed.
“Oh, you absolute –” but he can’t finish because a heart gets lodged in his throat, and he can vaguely taste the way James has charmed them to taste like sweets.
James clears his throat and smiles graciously. “Yes, I suppose it was my extraordinary idea,” he muses while Sirius removes a sticky heart from his hair, “and although you are of little intellectual value and are currently soaking my bedsheets with your saliva, I think that it is thrilling to sleep like this. Almost like farm boys, right, Remus?”
“No,” Remus groans.
Later, when the curtains are drawn and James has cast a silencing charm around the bed, Sirius says, “I’ve always known, you know. Even that day on the train. I knew that you liked Evans.”
James pushes his glasses up his nose. “You didn’t.”
“You’re a cliche. I didn't realize that people actually talked about who they fancied in their sleep.”
“It’ll pass.” He waves his hand dismissively. “Speaking of talking about girls in your sleep, how’s your girl doing? Your Jolie?”
Mum found out that Regulus never learned how to swim and decided to murder her, and now Regulus doesn’t smile at me anymore.
“She’s a horse. Died last year." James props himself onto his elbows and frowns. “I’m not advocating for beastiality or anything, Potter,” he adds for levity.
James is uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. “Well, I won’t tell anyone about your horse fetish if you don’t…”
“Tell the school about your proclivity for redheads who like to throw things at us?”
“Right,” James grins fondly and kicks the side of his head with his ridiculous Christmas sock again.
4. adiuvare
REGULUS, SEPTEMBER 1973
“Do not speak to him,” his mother had told him.
“Do not associate yourself with him,” his father had told him.
“You’d do best not to even look at me,” Sirius had said later, smiling mirthlessly and leaning against Regulus’s door frame; their parents detest it, yet it still manages an air of cosmopolitan grace. “I may turn you into stone.”
“I don’t know why you’re keeping up this act.”
“Right.” Sirius grins and clicks his tongue – another habit he’s picked up from his time with half-breeds and lowborn classmates. “I suppose you won’t want to be seen with me tomorrow, so I wish you the best of luck on your first day at Hogwarts.”
“Thank you,” Regulus says, and Sirius’s face almost falls.
The problem with avoiding Sirius is that Sirius is everywhere . He is an enigma, a rumour about brilliance or mischievousness between smiling lips. He is the one exploding snaps in the Great Hall as the teachers follow him with irritated yet amused gazes. He is the one who the boys in Regulus’s dorm room sneer at. He is the glossy black head racing through the hallways, shoving past others and simultaneously offering witty apologies as if he is on an urgent mission. He is never alone, either; the Potter boy is often an accomplice, managing to crash into others at a similar speed while Sirius berates him. His breathless grin reminds Regulus of when they would play tag and zigzag through an empty house while their parents were out at a dinner party. When it was just the two of them. The difference is that Regulus had run after him, while Potter, all long limbs and whimsical charm, runs beside him, tugging his sleeves and elbowing his middle. The Potter boy keeps up with him, while Regulus has fallen behind.
It isn’t the only place he’s fallen behind.
He excels and excels in all of his classes, and yet he is bound to incompetence in Transfiguration. The porcelain teacups refuse to reshape themselves into plates. The quills do not flatten into thin pieces of parchment. He can only press his fingers into his hands until blood blooms beneath the surface of his skin like purple flower buds and wait for the hour to finish.
“Picture it in your mind,” Dorcas Meadows says patiently.
“Center yourself,” she says, the Daily Prophet across her lap, when he comes to her after class with no noticeable results.
“Pretend there is nothing else but you and the object.” The teacup glares back at him, stark and unchanging.
“Something is distracting you then, Black.” She is a Prefect, a few years older than him, a bit ingenuine, extremely popular, the captain of the Quidditch team, and sometimes it seems like she can see right through him.
The problem with catching Sirius is that he is never alone.
“Sirius,” he tries one day, but his voice catches in his throat, and he wouldn’t have heard him anyway; Sirius is reciting prosaic Muggle poetry in exaggerated French, and the entire hallway has abounded with cheers and laughter.
"Sirius." A different morning basked in reddish hues. Sirius ignores it, racing from torch to torch and charming the flames bright pink.
He catches Sirius eventually. It's a warm afternoon, the clouds have broken briefly, and the sky is stirring itself towards dusk. He’s with Potter again, and they are chatting and furiously scribbling notes from a thick book that Regulus hasn’t seen before. The muddy turf that they’re sitting on has stained their trousers a horrible greenish color, and there are even wilted strands of grass tangled in Potter’s hair.
“Sirius.”
The beginnings of the laugh that had formed on Sirius’s face drop as he looks up. Potter’s smile also disappears, but he only nods politely and continues with his scrawling.
“Good afternoon, Reggie.” He tips his head to him in mock salute.
“Hi,” he says stiffly.
Sirius raises his eyebrows expectantly. Beside him, Potter purses his lips together in a terrible attempt to bite down a grin. “Hello.”
“I need your help.”
“Alright.” Sirius pushes himself off the ground and wipes his muddy hands on Potter’s back. Potter scowls. “Best get some privacy.” He turns to Potter. “This one’s an eavesdropper. I’ll be back soon. Don’t work too hard.”
“Never,” Potter promises as they stalk away.
“What is it?” Sirius asks quickly once they’ve retreated into a semi-hidden alcove. The roguish carelessness of the boy sitting in the grass is gone. “What’s happened? Has Mother written?”
“No, it isn’t that. It’s Transfiguration,” Regulus murmurs, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He looks down at his boots. “The midterm is coming, and I can’t -- I can’t transfigure anything.”
“Oh,” Sirius says lightly. “When’s your exam?”
“Next Thursday. At four.”
Sirius leans back into the wall. “Do you trust me?”
Don’t speak to him. Don’t associate yourself with him. “I do.”
“Then it’s an easy fix.”
He expects some kind of contact from Sirius in the days leading up to the exam, but everything remains the same. The four of them – Sirius, Potter, a willowy boy who is notorious for missing class, and spineless Pettigrew – wreak havoc on the Slytherin common room, set off dung bombs in the library, try and fail to seduce Dumbledore into letting them drink alcohol at the Halloween feast. Nothing changes. Regulus waits, waits, and waits until Thursday arrives, and he is eye-to-eye with his doom.
And then -- and then Sirius is there, in his head, and it feels like pressing an ice cube to his skin and waiting for the heat to surge from underneath. Relax, he reminds himself as Sirius gingerly prods at his mind and searches for what he’s looking for. Beside him, Avery whispers something in his ear about a meeting he’s arranging after class, and Regulus nods politely without understanding what he’s saying. His vision is growing strangely translucent, and he can vaguely see McGonagall approaching his desk with the bunny he’s supposed to turn into a pair of slippers. Her image is swimming at the edges, and the bunny is pale gossamer, as if he is seeing through filmy water. He blinks hard.
There is a coast. There is Jolie. Sirius, half-emerged in the sea, is calling for him.
He blinks again. A pair of snow-white slippers have replaced the bunny, and Sirius is gone.
5. a sad, horrible thing
SIRIUS, SEPTEMBER 1975
“Potter,” he had called him the first two years.
“Prongs,” he had called him the third and fourth.
“James,” he says now. “It’s not what it looks like.”
James stands in the doorframe to the broom cupboard, unimpressed, and brushes aside a cobweb clinging to his sleeve. “Christ, I at least thought you’d have the decency to bring her somewhere nice. This is ghastly.”
“It didn’t go exactly as planned.”
Mary MacDonald rolls her eyes and wipes the leftover combination of spit and lipgloss off her mouth with the back of her hand carelessly, elbowing into a glass jar of something green in the process. Sirius discreetly disentangles her leg from his hip in the most dignified manner possible. “It wasn’t so bad,” she says.
“Sirius or the broom cupboard?” James asks.
Mary hikes down her skirt. “You decide.” She pats Sirius on the head fondly. “I’ll see you around, Black.”
“See you, MacDonald,” Sirius replies politely as she gently brushes past James and retreats into the hall. He sighs. “I take it you’ll be telling the others about this?”
“It’s likely.” James’s mouth curves upwards. “I wasn’t going to until I saw that you brought her to a potion’s storage closet for your first date.”
“It wasn’t a date,” Sirius says shortly.
“Alright.”
“Alright.” Sirius stares at him for too long then looks away. “Don’t tell Remus.”
Setting: The library, 9:09 P.M.
“Black,” Marlene says loudly.
Sirius turns away from the neat row of book spines he was facing and smiles. He’s met with a scowl and crossed arms. “Mckinnon, I didn’t think that I’d find you here.”
“Believe me, this is the last place I would think to look for you,” she replies grimly and readjusts her dark blue tie until it hangs loosely around her neck. “I didn’t know that you knew where this place was.”
“I am full of surprises.” He carefully scoops the pile of books sitting at the edge of the desk underneath his robes. “Well, enough with the chatter. You know how I value my studies. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You’re using her.”
Color rises in Sirius’s cheeks, but he continues his elaborate task of hiding more textbooks under his clothes.“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re using her,” she spits. “You know that the MacDonalds are on the ousts now that Mary’s father has proposed the bill for increasing Muggleborn protection. Her entire familyー”
“I don’t choose my friends based on who their father is or what political bill they siー”
“Yes, you do! You only started this very public thing with Mary because you knew that those people would hate it and word would travel quickly, and your reputationー”
“My reputation? Not everything that I do is solely to piss off my parentsー”
“No!” She exclaims and lowers her voice.“It’s not just your parents!” She glares at him indignantly. “Your brother. You pretend like he doesn’t even exist, but he does ー him and his creepy friends who whisper and plot and give information to You-Know-Who. If you keep this up with Mary, they’ll hate you, but they won’t touch you. But Mary? All of Mary’s grandparents are Muggles. They’llー” Her train of thought shudders to a stop. “You know what they do to people that aren’t like us.”
Sirius is quiet. “My brother isn’t a Death Eater.”
Marlene’s eyes soften into something pitiful.
THE NIGHT THAT FOLLOWS:
- 11:03 PM: Sirius Black sneaks inside the hospital wing, where a battered Remus Lupin is sleeping. He leaves the books he had stolen from the library at the foot of the cot and means to leave, but then Remus sighs and turns over fitfully, and Sirius pauses. His chest clenches the same way it does when he drinks hot cocoa too quickly, sweet and aching and hot, and gravity keeps him there for thirty more seconds.
- 11:05 PM: He leaves the hospital wing. There is one more thing he needs to do.
- 11:24 PM: Sirius Black creeps behind the tapestry by the dungeons. He waits.
- 11:36 PM: Regulus Black steps out of the Slytherin common room, and the wall closes soundly behind him. He looks both ways, as he always does, pulls his hood over his head, and silently makes his way down the hallway.
- 11:37 PM: Sirius follows, James’ cloak still wrapped securely around his shoulders.
- 11:41 PM: Regulus steps into the night air. Four figures dressed in black are waiting for him.
- 11:42 PM: Sirius goes back into the castle. James will berate him for not investigating further, for not waiting, but Sirius doesn’t want to know.
Evans is still awake when he returns to the common room. Her red hair curtains her face as she bends over a long piece of parchment and nibbles at the end of her quill.
“Sister again?”
“Yes,” she says flatly.
“You know that’s not going to go well.”
She lifts her face to the light, and he expects something bitingly scornful, but now, past midnight, she only shrugs. “Most likely. But different approaches elicit different results.”
“Tell me when you have the formula, then.”
“Get to bed, Black.”
“Potter,” he had called him the first two years.
“Prongs,” he had called him the third and fourth.
“James,” he says now. “It was my fault.”
“It was not your fault.”
“Mckinnon warned me what would happen. I saw them in the woods that night. I could’ve stopped it. I could’ve saved her. It was my fault.”
“It was not your fault,” James repeats, running a hand through his hair and pacing the room rather violently. “There were five of them: Snivellus and Avery and Malfoy and Mulciber. That whole lot of them and their pureblood idiocy. They’ll pay. Dumbledore–”
“Dumbledore will let them get away with it,” Remus interjects darkly. James pauses in his fervent pacing and turns to him, surprised.
“I don’t understand.” Peter shrinks back into his pillows. “There’s proof. Mary was bleeding. Everyone knows what happened. Everyone knows what they did to her. She told Lily.”
“Pete’s right,” James says slowly. “Dumbledore will fix this.”
“It’s her word against theirs.” Remus glares into the fireplace, and the bright flames against his skin are unforgiving. Every scar, every blemish, every tear in his skin are magnified, unable to hide in sympathetic shadows or bowed heads. He continues, “It’s her word against five purebloods who all have money, who all have alibis, who all are better than her. Dumbledore won’t bother.”
“How can you say that?” James asks incredulously. “Dumbledore is on our side. He won’t let this go.”
“He will if it’s beneficial to him. And it is.”
“Moony, what’s gotten into you?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Then help us to!” James turns to Sirius desperately, grappling for support. Sirius says nothing.
“She is half Muggle. Half as good, half as pure. They will take their word over hers any day, and Dumbledore knows that. He won’t jeopardize himself for one girl.”
“Every life matters.”
“No, Prongs, not every life matters!” Remus yells and pulls himself off the ground. For a moment, he is outlined in gold, the yellow flames glowing starkly behind him. “Your life matters. Sirius’s life matters. Peter’s life matters.” James can only stare. “Her life doesn’t matter. Lily’s life doesn’t matter. My life doesn’t matter. Don’t you understand?”
James doesn’t answer.
Sirius says, quietly, “It was my fault.”
Remus’s face softens. “Sirius, you should sleep.”
“There were five of them. Regulus was the fifth.”
6. same scene, different setting
REGULUS, DECEMBER 1975
Christmas holidays are a respite from the cold.
Regulus wears fitted clothing and gabardine coats that taper at his odd angles and do not make him look as though he is drowning in fabric like the Hogwarts robes. He is clean and trimmed neatly, whereas Sirius is roguish and rough at the edges. For once, he does not need to be handsome and charming and witty and all the little things that make Sirius’s presence so wide and engulfing. For once, he can smile politely and discuss politics, receiving accepting nods while his parents reap the praises for their well-bred, mannerly son. It evens the score, if only for two weeks.
“Do you reckon that Lucius Malfoy’s hair is real?” Sirius mutters to him at their third Christmas party that year. He’s been shoved into expensive robes with gaudy sleeves, and his hair is sheared shorter than it’s ever been since he left for Hogwarts. From afar, he looks every bit the young dauphin, but up close and against the fire, he seems brittle, his nonchalant words almost nervous. It’s unfitting. Sirius is never nervous.
Regulus adjusts himself on the divan that they’re sharing. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Sirius raises his glass toward Malfoy, who is losing a game of chess to Narcissa and looking quite pleased with himself. “Look at it.” Malfoy brushes the silvery strands away from his forehead as Narcissa takes his queen. “That must be hours of potions or Muggle bleach.”
“Perhaps he changed it to look like hers,” he suggests, and Sirius turns to him inquisitively. “So that she can feel like she’s marrying within the family and keeping tradition.”
Sirius nearly spits out his drink.
“Christ,” he manages between spurts of coughing, but he’s grinning and looking at him differently. “That’s twisted, Reggie.”
For once, he doesn’t mind the nickname.
They get on for the rest of the holiday. They don’t hide under the blankets and exchange ghost stories, and Sirius doesn’t snap his fingers and make the planets rotate around him, but they get on. With their mother holed up in her room and refusing to leave for hours at a time and their father preoccupied in Frankfurt, he begins to think that perhaps their animosity had nothing to do with themselves but rather with the people around them, moving and propelling them forward like the pawns on Narcissa’s chessboard.
At four o’clock in the morning on January 2nd, he hears muffled voices from Sirius’s bedroom.
“...hate to sound sentimental, but I can’t wait for you to come back. God bless his soul, but Moony must be the worst Quidditch player I’ve ever seen. Even Wormy absolutely obliterates him.”
“Moony – how is he?”
“He taught me how to roll a cigarette. Pretentious bastard. He also dared us to go skinny-dipping in the lake.”
“Moony? Skinny-dipping and cigarettes?”
“Yes! It was great fun. We should listen to him more often.”
“So we should,” Sirius says so quietly that even the Potter boy seems to miss it and continues to rattle on.
“Well, I’ve spilled everything I have for the week. Tell me about your thirteen holiday parties and inbred pureblood cult. Have you sacrificed any infants yet? Offered adorable animals for vivisection?”
"Six Christmas parties, and the only animal being offered for vivisection is my brother.” Something irate has come up in his throat, something so blindingly different from the way he had spoken about rolling cigarettes and going skinny-dipping. “He practically salivates at these functions, prances around, and lets the Malfoys and the Mulcibers pet him like some sort of fucking dog.”
“Guess it runs in the f–”
Regulus pulls his ear away from the door.
7. my shadow, my brother
REGULUS, FEBRUARY 1976
As a child, he had followed him around the house, content to chase his brother’s shadow and glue himself at his side. There were dark corners in their house in London. The second elf head in the hallway next to the parlor was never looked in the eye. The untouchable goblet by the fireplace was always tiptoed around. The house was mentally marked off with places that were restricted, rooms that would swallow him after dark, stairs with monsters hidden under their planks. In the daylight, he would be cautious, hyperaware, prepared to hide, but in Sirius’s shadow, he was safe, secure.
“Where are you going?” Regulus stands in the hallway, effectively blocking it.
“I’m leaving,” his brother whispers. His cheeks are still grey from his mother’s curse (a long incantation, a thick, jagged line, and bright orange), and the ripped coat that he’s wearing is a size too large and smells of the half-breed.
“I know that you’re leaving. But where are you going?”
Sirius evades his question. “You should go too. I packed enough for us both.”
Sirius is no longer the blinding, romantic hero who always makes the right choices and is never mistaken. He is brash. He is less than two inches taller than him. He is a traitor.
“Please,” he says.
He is a traitor.
“I thought you and your friends prided yourselves on your loyalty. Your bravery.”
Sirius’s face twists into something ugly. “Come or don’t. Just let me pass through.”
Something horrible tugs at his chest, and he knows. This isn’t a threat or a passing fantasy. Sirius is leaving, and Regulus can feel it – the desperation, the words that threaten to tumble out of his throat. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me.
“I’ll scream,” he says raggedly. “I’ll wake everyone up. I’ll wake everyone up, and then you won’t be able to leave. I’ll do it.”
For a moment, Sirius looks stricken. Then, a hard look pulls at his jaw, the same look he used to give him when Regulus stole something from his wardrobe or told a white lie that Sirius could see right through. “You won’t.”
Sirius elbows past him.
He wants to follow him. He doesn’t.
8. love like this
REMUS, JANUARY 1978
Remus stares at his stopwatch intently. Eight minutes until midnight.
“I’ve never spent the holidays here, you know,” Sirius is saying, gathering his stupidly long hair into his fist and pushing it behind his neck. The bottom of his sweater rides up slightly, and Remus tracks the movement, drawing a line in his mind where knitted wool meets taut skin. They’re on the roof, and the night falls like a dark blanket over their heads, but Remus can recognize him. He could recognize him anywhere. “It was always with my wonderful family for the first sixteen years, then James’s last year. I didn’t want to be that arse intruding on their holiday dinner this year though. Seemed a bit desperate to take away their last Christmas with their golden son.”
Remus leans back on his forearms and carefully avoids looking at him. “Well, now you can experience Hogwarts fireworks in all their glory — shot out for the eight unfortunate children that would rather be here than go home for Christmas.”
“How many times have you seen them?”
“Four.” He motions for Sirius to pass him the bottle of liquid he’s been cradling under his coat. “This will be the last, I take it. The last before a lifetime of unemployment, petty larceny, and likely homelessness.”
“Come live with me, then.”
He pauses. This time, he can’t help but look at him.
Sirius's expression is entirely aloof.
You must know, Remus thinks desperately. Sirius is good at this — being all mirth and then surprising him with such dry genuineness that it feels like his bones will melt and be subsumed into his.
“You would hate to live with me.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“What would you do every month? Chain me to the fridge and hope I don’t destroy the flat?”
“No,” he says seriously. “There would be no chaining involved. Unless that’s what you want. Whatever you want, say the word, and it’s done.”
Remus waits for the punchline.
It is cold in the house without Sirius here.
There is a silver cup filled with deep burgundy liquid.
They are telling him to drink from it.
His mother is smiling.
His life is ending or beginning.
He isn’t sure which.
“Moony.” Sirius’s hand, his beautiful, smooth, pristine hand, brushes over a scar on Remus’s cheek, and the sky begins to sizzle with tiny bursts of starlight. “Moony. There’s a war coming.”
“There’s a war coming,” they are telling him as he drinks. There is a war coming, and he must protect his family. The cup is large, and the flow of liquid seems ceaseless, unlimited. There is less than a minute until midnight.
“I want to be with you when it happens. Is that alright?”
“Yeah,” Remus breathes and turns his face so that his lips brush over Sirius’s palm. He can feel his breath stutter. “That’s alright.”
Sirius gulps. Remus’ watch begins to buzz faintly. It’s 1978.
“Oh,” Sirius says quietly, and the inky sky collapses into reds and silvers. Remus doesn’t look away to marvel at the colors; he’s seen it all before. And Sirius, despite all the fawning over the fireworks he's done in the last week, doesn’t look away either. “Oh. Bollocks.”
He rolls his eyes, and then his hand is reaching for the collar of Remus’s shirt, and their lips are crashing together.
His mother clasps his hand. His father’s eyes seem lighter, as if some of the weight they’ve been carrying since Sirius left has fallen. This is his family. His duty. His responsibility. This is where he belongs.
This is where I want you to belong, Remus thinks, even as his hand moves under the hem of his sweater ー the same sweater that had mysteriously disappeared from his drawer last month. He knows that it's futile. Sirius does not belong to him. They do not belong to each other the way Lily and James belong to each other, like a pair of gloves or a set of lungs. Remus belongs to Sirius, and Sirius belongs to the war.
I love you , he thinks stupidly. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, you idiot. And he can’t say it, can’t draw his vocal cords together to force the words into the sharp January air, but he spells it into Sirius’s lips, mouths it against his neck and jaw until he is panting. The war is a cruel and tempting mistress. She takes the best for herself — James and Lily and Longbottom and the McKinnons and the best people he knows. It can spare one man. What difference could one man make? I love you, you idiot. Don’t go. I love you, he thinks, as if that could make him stay.
Candles casting orange glows. A circle in the house that he hates. Cool black skirts brushing against his sides. Searing pain eating at the skin on his wrist and charring it black.
Fireworks shattering into thousands of sparks. A balcony in the Astrology Tower they’ve studied from since they were twelve. A handful of sweater bunched up in his fist. Sirius’s smile against his mouth.
The fabric around his wrist bunched up to his forearm. The mark, carved onto his skin. His name etched into the stone.
R + S, 1978.
Regulus Black, Death Eater, 1978.
9. to go with grace
SIRIUS, JUNE 1978
Regulus comes to him in his dreams, sometimes.
He’s never been as good as Occulemecy as Sirius. His image is always fuzzy at the edges, sometimes slightly translucent like the ghosts who wander the hallways. Sirius could easily cast him aside, make him disappear by sheer will, and replace him with a lively Quidditch game or a round of chasing Moony through the forest. Still, he lets Regulus stay.
“I am scared, Sirius,” he admits, and the waves splash at his ankles. He stands at fifteen, but he is wearing the clothes he wore at six – cuffed black trousers and one of Sirius’s white button-ups with yellowing bishop sleeves.
“Leave.”
“I am scared,” he repeats. His dark hair whips wildly around his face, and only then does Sirius realize that they are back at their coastal summer house in northern France. The waves grow higher. “I am scared. Help me.”
“You don’t deserve my help.”
Regulus begins to weep. His image has developed an abstract paint-like style, moving in colored blobs that only vaguely resemble him. “I am scared. I am scared. I’m sorry. I’m scared.”
“You are one of them.”
Regulus nods vehemently. “Please listen to me.”
“You’ve picked your side. Go.”
“Don’t make me go,” Regulus begs, hardly anything more than a quivering mess of colors.
“Leave,” Sirius says again, louder, and his brother disappears into the waves.
“Sirius?” Remus mumbles, and his arm falls over Sirius’ chest. They are crushed together in a bed that isn’t made for two, and his knee is digging painfully into his side, but Sirius only rolls over and presses his lips into Remus’s hair. He smells of boyish restlessness and sleep.
“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
They graduate with the heat of June beating down their backs and bottles of firewhiskey poorly disguised underneath their robes. He stands beside Slytherins who pull their sleeves down to their fingers as they receive scrolls indicating high honors or exemplary marks. Today, they are classmates, adolescent bullies; tomorrow, they would sooner see him dead.
10. the flat
SIRIUS, MAY 1979
At an Order meeting in Glasgow, the old man pulls him aside and tells him that Regulus had run to the coast, where he was hunted down by Death Eaters and killed. His body was never recovered. Sirius only laughs, and when he Apparates back to his flat, he is still laughing, doubled over and clutching his stomach as if there is a worm digging its way through his intestines. He collapses onto the fraying rug Lily had given him before she moved for the umpeeth time. When Remus comes back from whatever the hell he does every night and refuses to disclose, he is flat on his back, the occasional giggle still bubbling out of him occasionally.
“What’s happened?” Remus kneels onto the floor, pressing his hands against Sirius’s cheek, his collarbone, pulling his sleeves to look at the translucent skin of his wrists. “Are you hurt? Are you alright?”
Remus smells like old blood, and there is a new gash that stretches from his collarbone to his ear. “You look terrible, Moony.”
“You look worse,” Remus says light-heartedly, but there’s no humor in it.
Remus’s hand goes still on his chest, and he lets it rest there.“Do you remember what used to be here before Lily gave us this awful rug?”
“Nothing?”
“The second week after we graduated, we pulled a mattress up the stairs and laid it right here. It was so hot that–”
“We wore Muggle band t-shirts and nothing else.”
“Yes,” Sirius sighs and watches the slow rose-bloom stretch of Remus’s mouth. “We ate chocolate, smoked an eighth of weed, didn’t even tell anyone where we were or how to find us, and didn’t leave for four days. There was a cover band playing across the street every night that week, and you would crack open the window so that we could listen to whatever Donovan rubbish they were playing. And I thought, Moony, that this was the happiest I’d ever be.”
Remus is quiet for a moment. “We shouldn’t have left.”
“We shouldn’t have,” Sirius agrees.
Later, he will tell Remus what’s happened to his brother, and Remus will open a bottle of whiskey that leaves Sirius hunched over the toilet the next morning. Then, Remus leaves and doesn’t return.
11. kreacher
REGULUS, UNDATED
Dear Sirius,
I am doing something quite stupid. You would not approve. Or perhaps you would.
Dear Sirius,
I am sorry for what they did to you, and for all the things that I have done to you.
Dear Sirius,
You must wonder why I've had a change of heart. In short, it is because they have done something to Kreacher. You wouldn't understand.
Dear Sirius,
You make me brave. You have always made me brave.
I hope that you remember me fondly.
Your brother,
Regulus
12. the water and the horse
SIRIUS, OCTOBER 1981
On his final mission before the ground collapses beneath him, the old man stations him in France to scope out a noble family with distant ties to his bloodline. He is sent alone, as he often has been recently. Remus had unceremoniously left to live God knows where five months earlier, and James, his perpetually absent partner, has become nearly permanently absent. The last time he’d seen him was in July; Harry had plucked one of the studs off of his leather jacket and held the glittering gem up to the light until he was sick with laughter, and James had leaned his unruly head of hair on Sirius’s shoulder. It was the first time he’d felt a sense of lightness, buoyancy even, since Remus left, and Lily had captured the moment on her shell blue camera and let him have the picture.
In August, four Death Eaters captured him. They scorched the jacket and the picture, and he watched the flames consume James's smile. He killed them for it and returned to an empty flat with the metallic taste of death lingering in his mouth. He’s rejected every one of Lily’s invitations back to the Hollow since then.
As it turns out, the family he’s supposed to be gathering information from died four weeks ago (all in one go, likely a massacre from what he deducts). He reckons that he should return to Manchester and relay the information, but the apartment feels far too empty without Remus, so he stays in France.
After a week of hedonistic spending and drinking from the balcony of four-star hotels, he finds himself in front of his family’s holiday home, the ocean waves slapping against the slate gray rocks with fervor. The property is overgrown and not as beautiful as he remembers, but the wards still welcome his blood, squeezing at his body fondly as if they’ve missed him.
There are dirt-caked footprints in the hallway leading to the kitchen. His hand instinctively touches his wand as he carefully follows the prints through the house and out the back door, to where the porch opens to the monstrous mouth of the sea, still skittishly lapping against the sand. The footsteps stop abruptly halfway to the shore, and it dawns on Sirius that Regulus had been here.
He collapses next to the footprints, letting the sand ride up his trousers and against his ankles. He wants to scream, shake the identical pair of feet beside him by the shoulders and ask, Why didn’t you come to me in my dreams? Why didn’t you tell me to come back here? Why didn’t you stay put until I could find you?, and then he wants to postulate on the ground and tell him, I’m sorry that I didn’t come and see you that week I graduated. I’m sorry that I wasn’t a better brother. I’m sorry about your horse. She was beautiful.
His eyes stare at the ocean, black and beautiful and painted metallic by the full moon, and it stares back.
“It’s beautiful, Reggie.” Regulus waves at him from the water, knee-deep in the smooth blackness. “Jolie.”
Grief is love.
Misplaced love, a surplus of love, love that is caught in the corners of mouths, love with nowhere to go but back into the earth. It’s strange. We come from the earth, perhaps owe all things to the earth, and will eventually return to the earth, but we are wired to kick and scream when we lose. Selfishly or not, it must be asked: why should our love be subsumed into one? Why should it be returned to the earth, rather than given to who we want to give it to? I do not send my love to the earth. The earth cannot give me what you have given me.