Chapter Text
Regulus Black hasn’t seen his brother in six years.
At the crux of it all he knows that it’s his fault, knows that he was the one who left and never looked back. Knows that despite Sirius’s pleading, despite the promise of peace, Regulus turned away and kept walking.
It’s been six years since he last saw Sirius.
It’s been even longer than that since the world ended.
When Pandora Lovegood knocks at his door before the sun has even risen completely she has a black eye that wasn’t there the day before. His first instinct is to burn the world to the ground. His second is to hide her away.
“The Carrow’s sold our supplies,” She says, not waiting for him to so much as point out the blue and green bruise around her left eye, “And then they went into hiding, because they’re fucking cowards.”
She shoulders her past him without preamble, shutting the door behind her. Regulus looks down at her muddy boots, doesn’t point out the fact she’s missing her flannel, and walks in after her.
“They punched you?” Regulus questions, watching as she sits down on his raggedy kitchen table held up by an old phone book covered in crayon drawings.
“No,” She leans down and undies her laces, pushing the shoes aside when she finally gets them off. He reaches over to the pair of boots he’d found earlier that week and passes them over, watching as she ties the laces and tries them out. “That was Warrington. ”
Regulus breathes out, pleased and a little annoyed all at once. “Are you going to explain what’s going on anytime soon? Or am I meant to guess?”
“I was getting there,” Pandora rolls her eyes, lifting her hair and tying it up into a ponytail. Regulus, unimpressed, raises an eyebrow at her. “The papers, Reg— they gave them away.”
Regulus stops imagining beating them up. His blood runs cold, heart racing in his chest so fast he can hear it. He struggles to speak but gets the words out anyway, strangled and afraid. “To who? Gave them to who?”
He sounds more out of control than he wants to. He sounds more frightened than he’s ever let anyone see him, but it’s Pandora, and he can’t be bothered trying to pretend like a dozen emotions are flooding through him all at once, none of them good. He clenches his fists, turning his fingers inward. He focuses on the sting of his nails biting into his palm to ignore the desperation racing through him, the panic that makes him too warm and too aware of how shitty the world is.
Pandora pauses, looking down at her knees before standing up. Her chin juts out, face carefully stiff and blank.
“The Phoenixes,” Pandora admits, reaching up to fiddle with the silver pendant hanging low on her chest, swallowing as she meets his eyes. “He sold us out to You-Know-Who.”
“Fuck,” Regulus says, then louder, “Fuck!”
Before he’d found his brother, before he’d learned what it felt like to hold a gun to someone’s head, before he’d learned what it felt like to fall on the ground with his head hitting hard cement as someone tried to bite into his face, Regulus was. . .happy.
He had Pandora, an apartment overlooking Central Park with glass pane windows taller than him, and a little girl that giggled airily and held his hand when they walked down the road to buy bread from the bodega. He had a job. He had a life, one filled with laughter and only the occasional panic attack from memories of his parents, had found friends and a home. He made macaroni and cheese every Wednesday night and helped Luna make cupcakes every Saturday, would take her out to the park for picnics with Pandora every weekend and spoiled her rotten. He worked a stupidly easy job in a company that happily snatched him up when they realized who he was, how he could help them be bigger than his parents, made so much money he didn’t know what to do with, and spent weekends doing yoga with Pandora and Luna in Dorcas’s wooden and green apartment.
He’d been happy, is the thing, so happy that sometimes it hadn’t felt real.
So happy that it turns out it wasn’t.
Eleven years ago, after— after Luna, losing Evan and Dorcas at some point in the chaos, protecting Pandora even when they didn’t want to be alive anymore— Regulus met the leader of the Order of the Phoenix in the Manhattan quarantine zone.
Regulus tries not to remember. Does his best not to think of brown eyes and warm hands, a toddler waking him up in the mornings and someone singing softly into the night when things seemed hopeless. He tries not to remember James Potter, but if someone told him he’d been cursed to never forget him he’d believe it. The thing about James Potter is that even now, after six years of avoiding him and any mention of his name, resolutely looking the other way when posters of his face popped up all over town, he can’t escape him.
Even now, as he trips Alecto Carrow and watches Pandora hold a knife to her neck while lifting her head by her hair, James Potter surfaces from the alleyway behind them.
He has one arm cradling his lower abdomen, blood seeping through his shirt and spreading across his fingers. His glasses are cracked, hair mussed in a way that makes Regulus itch, want to run his hand or a brush or something through his hair to make it stop poking upward.
“I kind of need her alive,” He says, coughing out a laugh that makes him wince. Pandora looks up at Regulus, eyes still just as wide as they were when they were ten years old, questioning. Waiting.
Regulus nods at her to let the knife drop, moves his foot to settle on Alecto’s back, boots coating her worn shirt with mud. He can’t help but rub it in a little when she makes a disgusted face, streaking dirt and mud across her shirt.
Alecto grins up at him, teeth and eyes sharp, pure hatred in her face even as she begins to talk. “Gonna listen to lover boy, Regulus?” She asks, blood dripping down her mouth. She coughs, spraying red all over his boots, and Regulus steps down harder, ignoring her noise of pain.
“Pandora,” Regulus says, and that’s it.
Pandora lifts her gun threateningly and keeps it trained on her head, not even blinking when James makes a noise of protest.
“Regulus, come on,” He raises his hands and steps forward as if Regulus gives two shits about what he has to say, “I need her.”
“Well, we needed our shit,” Regulus points out to James, right as Pandora pulls the trigger and doesn’t even flinch back as the bullet hits Alecto dead center between her eyes, body going limp and still. Her eyes stare up at them. Regulus turns away, jaw clenched. “You have our weapons,” He tells James, back straight and face as stoic as he can get it while pissed off, “And you stole our papers.”
James lifts his eyes away from Alecto, grimacing at the dead body bleeding out in front of them but unconcerned for himself. As if Regulus wouldn’t be able to kill him with a single step. As if Pandora and him weren’t the ones that took over the whole city when the Auror’s came through a year after the outbreak.
“I didn’t steal anything,” James replies, “I traded for them.”
“Those weren’t theirs to give away,” Pandora snaps, not as tolerant to James as she used to be, a lot more strained these past few months. “Give us our fucking supplies back or I swear to god—”
“Tough shit, Pandora, because it already fucking happened.” James retorts right back, a harsh tilt to his words that makes them both pause. James breathes in loudly, very clearly exhales and tries to relax his shoulders. “I’m not giving them back. But seeing as you just murdered my only other option, I’m willing to make a deal.”
“Like hell we’ll make a deal with you,” Regulus begins, stepping forward angrily on instinct.
Pandora raises her hand, resting it against his shoulder and shooting him a frown before turning back to James and sending him the same exact look, only a little bit nastier, a lot more impatient. “What are you proposing?”
James grins, charming, fake. Regulus knows that smile like the back of his hand— he’s the one who taught him it, after all. “Deliver something for me, cargo, and I’ll give you your weapons. A car. The papers.”
Regulus clenches his jaw. He looks sideways at Pandora, who looks at him right back and raises a single eyebrow.
What do you say? her face is asking, and Regulus can’t do anything but sigh out loud.
“Lead the way.”
James doesn’t like violence.
Regulus watches, reluctantly impressed, as he takes down two Auror’s in front of the ladder leading down the bridge and into the city anyway. They half jog, half sprint down the streets, through rundown buildings and avoiding any people when they can. Regulus stays one step in front of Pandora and two behind James. He struggles to ignore the way his heart feels heavy, chest tight. He remembers quiet laughter, teeth brushing across his ear. Remembers what it felt like to hold someone’s hand and trust them to save you.
Regulus focuses ahead of him, ignores the burn traveling up his throat, behind his eyes, the way his heart aches—
“We’re here,” James says, breaking through his thoughts, shattering the mind numbing rush of melancholy that was beginning to worm its way into him. James beckons Pandora closer to help him with the door, shoving it open and maneuvering around a filing cabinet knocked over in front of it.
They follow behind him, quick and silent, and Pandora turns around towards him, opens her mouth to say something before Regulus feels someone bumping into him, tackling him, small fists hitting his chest as he falls to the ground. His head hits the cement just as Pandora shouts out and grabs hold of a flurry of limbs and snarls, lifting the kid up by his midriff, arms wrapped around him. Regulus sits up quickly, scrambling back and then forward, wavering between retaliating and getting as far as possible from the hazel eyes glaring at him.
“Hey,” James shouts loudly, reaching out despite his still bleeding wound, blood coating his hands and covering the kids cheeks as he holds his face, “Harry, hey, stop! It’s okay. I’m okay.”
Harry, Regulus thinks manically, resisting the urge to laugh in pure disbelief, it’s Harry.
“You’ve been shot,” Harry says, voice thick with fury and desperation, “Who shot you?” He turns his glare to Pandora, then Regulus, who watches as he falters, face shuttering.
Regulus lifts his chin, tightens his jaw. He tries not to let it show how fast his heart is racing, tries not to react to the way Harry is narrowing his eyes at him, finger lifting up to poke James in the shoulder.
“Who the fuck is this asshole?”