Chapter 1: i never could've seen you coming (i think you're everything i've wanted)
Chapter Text
preface.
i miss the way the stars looked
reflected in your eyes
i have never seen a more worthy mirror
for infinity than you
harmony, whitney hanson
11 Suppose for a moment that the heart has two heads, that the heart has
been chained and dunked in a glass booth filled with river water. The
heart is monologing about hesitation and fulfillment while behind the
red brocade the heart is drowning. Can the heart escape? Does love
even care? Snow falls as we dump the booth in the bay.
Suppose for a moment we are crowded around a pier, waiting for something
to ripple the water. We believe in you. There is no danger. It is not
getting dark, we want to say. […]
24 You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves
you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terr-
ible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself
a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy,
and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to
choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and
he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your
heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you
don’t even have a name for.
You Are Jeff, Crush, Richard Siken
MEPHISTOPHELES
And then you’ll speak of faith and love eternal,
of a single, overpowering urge-
will that flow so easily from your heart?
FAUST
Enough, I say it will.
Verse 3056-3059, Faust I, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Damaged people love you like you are a crime scene
before a crime has even been committed
They keep their running shoes beside their souls every night,
one eye open in case things change whilst they sleep.
Their backs are always tense as though waiting
to fight a sudden storm that might engulf them.
Because damaged people have already seen hell.
And damaged people understand that every evil demon
That exists down their was once a kind angel before it fell.
Nikita Gill
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, posessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
Scheherazade, Crush, Richard Siken
so if mortality takes you
if fate is unkind
if forever falls apart
there are a million neurological pathways
that spell your name in my heart
harmony, whitney hanson
James Potter was just about the last thing Regulus thought would ever happen to him.
And yet, he came careening into his life with unruly curls, a wide, contagious smile and a pocket-sized sun in his chest.
The first time they met was at the yearly Black Foundation charity gala.
As the sole heir since his brother’s disappearance, Regulus attended the gala as one of the speakers of the night. His dark suit was too stiff, and the tie was suffocating him.
The ride in the limousine was spent listening to his mother going on about the disgrace that his uncle Alphard had brought upon all of them, and that another scandal was the last thing they needed, especially after Sirius’s departure the year before.
Regulus did a very bad job of suppressing his scoff.
Departure.
It sounded too kind, as if he’d merely left the Black mansion to study abroad and would return any day.
Escape was more accurate.
Someone who departed didn’t do it in the middle of the night, didn’t make sure to leave all the creaking stairs out, didn’t tell his little brother he’d come back and get him, just to never call him back.
Someone who departed wasn’t burned off the family tree.
The thing was, Regulus understood why he’d done it. It had been hell for him, and everyone deserved a chance to escape hell if they were able to.
But what went beyond him was the fact that Sirius had done it alone. He’d left Regulus in hell.
It didn’t matter that, if Sirius had given him the chance, he might have chosen to stay.
The limousine slowed to a halt in front of the red carpet, and the door was opened from outside.
Walburga climbed out first, with Orion following her shortly after. Regulus straightened his tie and joined them.
As soon as he was visible, a storm of flashing lights was unleashed on him.
A lifetime of media training kicked in and he smiled, closed-mouthed, at the row of photographers.
His parents were a few steps ahead of him, but there was also a woman in a deep red dress, throwing her hair over her shoulder. Regulus was pretty sure she was an actress and featured in a recent action movie, though he couldn’t recall her name or the film title.
He kept smiling politely and looking directly at the photographers that shouted “look here!” the loudest.
The whole ordeal was entirely useless, and Regulus wanted to bolt.
He didn’t, of course.
There were far too many eyes on him.
Besides, he didn’t have anywhere to go.
He took confident strides, and focused on the door that would lead him inside, instead of the click-click of the cameras aimed at him. He had about two thirds of the way behind him when a cheer erupted behind him. He whipped around, expecting to see another celebrity. Sure enough, a popstar Regulus vaguely recognized had appeared.
He shook his head, and resumed walking, eager to get out of the spotlight, and glad for the distraction provided by the popstar. He was whisked inside by some of the staff. They didn’t need to look at the guest list, everyone knew who he was.
Son of the wealthiest people in the room.
The foyer and ballroom were crowded, though not overly so. Regulus easily wove through the clusters of people, all of whom led meaningless conversations. He grabbed a champagne flute off a passing waiter’s tray, less because he liked it or needed the drink, but because he needed something to hold on to.
He joined the other guests in their easy conversation, passing from group to group without lingering anywhere long enough for them to notice anything that mattered. For instance, the fact that he hated very few things as much as the yearly charity gala. It was even worse, now that Sirius was gone.
Back when their parents forced both of them to attend, they would stand in a corner and make up stories about the guests based on their appearance. Sirius had always been more creative than Regulus, inventing elaborate schemes about infidelity and unrequited love. Not that they’d ever believed any of the things they imagined were true, it was about as possible as the stories in the books Regulus read at school and hid under his desk so that his parents wouldn’t find out, but it was a glimpse into Sirius’ mind that was rare, seeing as he kept himself composed when he was around their parents and barely ever dared to speak his mind.
Today, nobody mentioned Regulus’ brother, instead they asked about the family business—“splendid”—what he was planning to do once his university degree was completed in a few months—“join the family business”—and if the rumours were true that he was going to marry Miss Greengrass—”if things went well, yes”.
The latter one was accompanied by a forced smile.
If only they knew.
If only they knew about the lunch dates set up months in advance, the tense conversation over plates far too big for the small amount of food served, the gifted jewelry picked out by Miss Greengrass’s personal stylist.
If only they knew about the hands they untangled the moment they were out of sight of the ever-present photographers.
Their engagement was going to be announced in May, so that they could have a wedding in late summer, because apparently late summer weddings were the trend this year, but none of the guests knew yet.
One of the bolder guests, Mr. Zabini, a dark-skinned gentleman with a golden watch on his wrist who was one of the Black’s closer business associates, dared to ask the obvious question—where was the lady in question?
“Sadly, she wasn’t able to make it,” Regulus said, chalking it up to a scheduling conflict with a gallery opening in Paris. Miss Greengrass was one year away from graduating from her art history major, after all.
Throughout it all, Regulus kept throwing glances at his watch.
He was supposed to give his speech at eight pm, sharp, just before dinner was to be served.
As the time crept closer and closer, Regulus found himself growing anxious. He was tugging his sleeves over his palms and fiddling with his cufflinks. He scolded himself for it, he was supposed to be the picture-perfect, confident heir.
At a quarter to eight, he couldn’t take it anymore.
He excused himself from his conversation with a shareholder and his wife, who stood half a head taller than him, even in one-inch-heels—a Mr. and Mrs. Goyle—with the intention of going to the bathroom to collect himself. The only issue was that he couldn’t find it. Instead, he ended up in a deserted hallway adjacent to the kitchen.
The muffled shouting and cluttering of metal, plates and silverware was sort of comforting, so he decided to stay and take another look at the notes he’d written down for his speech. He pulled a notecard out of his suit jacket, covered in his messy scrawl, and squinted to decipher it.
The speech was supposed to include all the usual talking points—thanking the guests for coming and donating to the charity, praising his family and their ability to cheat the rest of the world out of more wealth, not outing himself as queer, not hinting at the real reason of Sirius’ disappearance. Though he’d technically written the speech himself, he’d had to run it by a publicist and PR manager before his mother gave the ultimate green light.
His back was turned to the door that led into the kitchen, so he jumped in surprise when someone appeared behind him.
Regulus dropped his notecard.
It swirled to the ground in an unpredictable pattern, evading all of Regulus’ attempts to catch it, landing right in a puddle of clear liquid. Regulus snatched it up instantly, but it was no use - the card was soaked. The ink had bled through the paper, blurring the letters beyond recognition.
Regulus cursed, then turned around to aim some strong words at whoever had interrupted his solitude, but the words got lost somewhere between his brain and his tongue.
The man was clearly a server. His warm brown skin stood out against the crisp white button-down and black bow tie, and his eyes sparkled behind gold-rimmed glasses.
They both stood frozen for a moment, taking each other in.
They were polar opposites, after all, one clearly a guest, the other a member of the staff, one pale and green-eyed, the other brown-eyed and scruffy in a Han Solo sort of way, as if he was a rebel, halfway to overthrowing the corrupt government and this was an undercover assignment.
It was the server who regained his wits first.
“Um—you’re not supposed to be here.”
Regulus stared at him with a blank expression.
“I know,” he forced himself to say, “I’m sorry. I just needed a moment.” A deep breath, and the relief that it was just one of many servers, insignificant compared to one of his parents stumbling across him in this state. “There are just too many people,” he explained, and the stranger nodded.
“Yeah,” he said, “I get that.”
“I needed a second to myself,” Regulus said, feeling stupid. Why did he feel the need to explain himself?
The stranger took a step back.
“Do you want me to leave?”
Regulus closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall.
“No, stay. As long as you don’t tell anyone.”
He felt a presence beside him, and he opened one eye to see the stranger, leaning against the wall a foot next to him.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
Regulus had every reason not to believe him, for God’s sake, he’d known him for the better part of two minutes, and yet he had a lingering feeling that he could trust him.
“I’m James.”
Regulus turned his head to fully look at him.
“Regulus,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, Regulus,” James said and held his hand out for Regulus to shake it. Regulus took it.
They went back to the silence, but it was a comfortable one, the kind that wrapped around you like a warm hug. Like the ones Sirius used to give him, before he left.
There was something in his throat now, making it hard to breathe. It was a feeling he’d grown used to, and it usually mounted into an anxiety attack.
He forced his breathing to even out, anything to avoid having an anxiety attack in front of James.
Do not show vulnerability. To anyone. Ever.
That had been the first and most important unspoken rule during his childhood.
“I hope there was nothing important on that card,” James said apologetically, nodding to the card Regulus was still clutching tightly. The corners had bent and the paper was curling into itself.
Regulus released an involuntary sigh.
“Only the speech I have to give in—” he glanced down at his watch, “—nine minutes.”
James’ baffled expression leaned slightly into horrified, and spoke volumes.
“Sorry,” he said earnestly.
Regulus waved him off.
“I’ve got most of it memorized, and there’s nothing intellectually challenging in it, anyway.”
“I’m glad—I guess? Or not, you’d probably rather give an interesting speech.” James’ apology seemed earnest, which coaxed a laugh out of Regulus.
“Yes, actually.” James looked relieved. “You’re the first person in a while to get it.”
Usually, people assumed it was easier to fit in, instead of acting out, but it ceased to be when he had to spend every day of his life forcing his heart to remain on the inside of his ribcage to protect it from the stab wounds his family inflicted on him under the guise of keeping him safe.
Who was this man, Regulus wondered, who took one look at him and pried his ribs apart, exposing his insides? Who pulled at a single thread and unravelled his entire net of carefully-constructed half-truths and practiced blank facial expressions that obscured his true feelings?
Who was he, to claim the right to look at Regulus and see him for who he was instead of who everyone wanted him to be?
To look straight past the heir and son, the façade he put up for the world, past the picture-perfect outside and directly at the scars he was desperately trying to hide.
“I’m afraid I can’t say anything interesting on that stage,” Regulus said, “not even if I wanted to.”
“Why not?”
“I just—I can’t.”
James turned his entire body to look at Regulus full-on. He leaned against the wall, propped up on one shoulder.
“Why not? It’s not like they can cut off the mic and drag you off that stage without making a fuss and shattering the illusion.”
Regulus narrowed his eyes.
“How do you know there’s an illusion they could see through?” Regulus asked.
James smiled, as if he’d waited for Regulus to ask.
“Easy. Your shoulders are tense, but not the nervous-because-I-have-to-give-a-speech kind of nervous, it’s a practiced kind of tension that tells me you’ve been told to stand upright often enough to have internalized it. You’re not nervous about the speech, you don’t have an actual issue with talking to people and you’re obviously used to people looking at you—and seeing right through you. Process of elimination, really, so it’s the content of the speech that’s got you worried. And you didn’t strike me as the kind of person who likes to take the easy way out if there’s a more exciting alternative.”
James’ smile strained until it bordered on nervous.
“How much did I get right?”
“Pretty much—everything.”
The confession filled the space between them, pulling them apart and closer together simultaneously with the knowledge that James knew something about him nobody else did while Regulus barely knew anything about him at all. The imbalance of power unsettled him. Wasn’t it supposed to be reversed? Regulus had all the money he could ever want, all the power, in theory, to do anything he wanted, and yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was James who was in command of this stolen space they’d carved out in the grand scheme of the universe.
In the silence, the sounds seeping out of the kitchen grew louder in comparison, and Regulus glanced at his watch.
Two minutes to eight.
“I’m sorry,” he said to James, pushing himself off the wall, “I have to go.”
“Wait,” James called out, stopping Regulus after only three steps.
He turned slowly.
“Yes?”
James breathed in.
“It was nice to meet you,” he said.
Regulus’ carefully maintained expression cracked a sliver apart—just enough to reveal a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“You, too.”
I wish I didn’t have to go.
But he did, so he forced himself to turn around and keep walking down the hallway.
“Another thing,” James said, raising his voice slightly.
Regulus looked back again and stopped, as if his legs were being ordered to, merely by the sound of James’ voice.
“It’s that way,” James said, and pointed his thumb over his shoulder, in the opposite direction Regulus was currently walking.
Face growing hot from shame, Regulus marched past him, back to the crowd.
***
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for coming tonight,” Regulus began, following the script down to the letter, “and supporting causes that are important to us at the Black Foundation.”
He swept his gaze across the crowd, over his parents at the table closest to the stage, his mother clutching a nearly-empty champagne flute and his father tensing his jaw at every one of Regulus’ words, to Mr. and Mrs. Goyle, who were of the same height while sitting down.
“Tonight’s proceeds will go toward several organizations all over Europe aiming to improve access to live-saving medical care for families who are less fortunate than us.
Two chairs were empty at Orion’s and Walburga’s table—one belonged to Regulus, the other to someone Regulus hoped would make an appearance soon, otherwise he’d have to scrap much of the second half of his speech.
He squared his shoulders and soldiered on.
“It is incredible to see so many of you here to do something good and make a real difference.” He paused for dramatic effect, and breathed out in well-concealed relief when he spotted a tall figure, half-obscured by the dim light among the crowd, confidently make his way between the tables until he sat down next to Orion. They traded a handshake and a stern nod.
“I’d like to especially thank one man who is here tonight—Mr. Thomas Riddle!”
Regulus raised his hands to clap, and the crowd joined in. Riddle rose from his seat, as if he’d been there the whole time, looked around the room once and nodded in acknowledgement.
The applause ceased, and Regulus continued.
“Over the course of the last two decades, Mr. Riddle has donated millions of pounds and made the lives of countless people immeasurably better. Tonight, he is especially generous. He has decided to auction off a painting from his private collection and donating all proceedings to the Black Foundation.”
The curtain behind Regulus fell away, and the painting in question was revealed.
The ‘oh’ that fell from the audience’s lips spoke volumes.
“The Lovers by René Magritte, painted in 1928,” Regulus said, stepping to the side and allowing everyone to properly admire the painting.
The painting depicted a man and a woman mid-kiss, though both of their faces were obscured by clothes.
One he was sure everyone had caught an appropriate glimpse, he stepped in front of the microphone again.
“Bidding starts at one million pounds.”
Regulus kept his poker face on as the bids rose higher and higher—everyone wanted to win.
To win for the sake of winning, to show that they had what it took, to win to display their commitment to the cause and prove that they were more important than the others, but also to win to prove their loyalty to Riddle.
He was their unspoken leader, admired and bordering on being feared, and every one of his followers was eager to own a piece of him, to be able to call something theirs that had once been his.
It repelled Regulus—but his expression never wavered. He was the epitome of professional, the son and heir his parents could be proud of.
Perhaps he’d never win their love—but he could be their pride.
“Going once, going twice—sold to Mr. Lucius Malfoy.”
Too bad his mind kept wandering off to wild curls and bright eyes and a dimple on a cheek.
Chapter 2: i've never felt this close to someone (what if you're my weakness?)
Notes:
chapter title is (again) from the blue by gracie abrams.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Over the course of the following week, Regulus did a very poor job of forgetting James.
Their chance encounter had only lasted minutes, and yet Regulus couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something undeniably different about him.
He was probably the realest person Regulus had ever met—even facturing in Sirius. He, too, had been forced to put on a mask.
And James had read him like an open book, and recited the words that were written across his heart back to him.
Regulus had spent his entire life surrounded by the pretentious, picture-perfect friends of his parents’. They didn’t care about him in the slightest, their only concern was the money. It was all about keeping up the pretense of the perfect family.
Sirius leaving had been the first crack in the glass, and it was up to Regulus to hold the glass together with duct tape and promises. It may have seemed as if it was working for a while, but now his arms were covered in tiny cuts from hundreds of shards and blood was running down, dripping into an ocean of crimson.
One day, he was going to drown in it.
Today, he was keeping himself afloat with the memory of James. It was comforting, in a way, to know that they would never meet again. Meeting Regulus hadn’t altered the trajectory of James’ life in the slightest, but meeting James had caused Regulus’ life to venture far off-course.
James would never know the impact he’d had, the beat Regulus’ heart had skipped, the way he kept circling back to the few precious moments they’d shared.
They were frozen in Regulus’ memory forever, unchanged, destined to be the prompt of an endless stream of what-if scenarios Regulus kept playing out.
They might have exchanged numbers, or addresses, or last names, and seen each other again and fallen in love—in another life.
They might have gotten to know each other well enough to know every insignificant detail, the stories behind every scar, the subtle changes in their faces when they were trying to hold back laughter, the way a tear would roll down their cheek. The way their bodies felt against each other, whether James slept on the left or the right side of the bed, what his handwriting looked like, what flowers were his favourite.
Regulus inexplicably kept circling back to the last one. It was an entirely insignificant question, yet he needed to know the answer.
It haunted him throughout all of the following week, trailed behind him as he walked down nondescript corridors and floated over his shoulder while he talked to lawyers and consultants and people who claimed to know what was best for him. It echoed around his head when he tried to fall asleep and transformed the dark swirls in his pitch-black coffee (two cubes of sugar) into flower petals.
***
Two days after the gala, Regulus knocked four times on a door that belonged to an office on the fifth floor of the Black Foundation Headquarters. The name on the door belonged to the sister of the man he’d once called his best friend.
“Come in,” a voice called out cheerfully, and Regulus did.
Pandora Rosier sat behind a mahogany desk in a brightly-lit office. The sunlight made her shoulder-length, hydrogen-blonde waves appear even brighter and created a halo that floated around her head.
“Regulus,” she said, rising from her chair and walking around the desk to shake his hand, “what a pleasant surprise.”
Regulus shook her hand and smiled involuntarily. Though they’d only ever met during school holidays spent at the Rosier’s estate, they’d always fallen into easy conversation and Regulus had always considered her someone he could trust.
Today would prove if he was right.
He let his gaze wander around the office, taking in the bookshelves behind the desk, filled to the brim with law volumes and poetry collections. The walls were decorated with framed art prints, all of which depicted nature in some way.
“So,” Pandora said, once she’d settled into her chair again, “have you come to catch up wth an old friend?”
He shook his head.
“I’m very sorry to disappoint you, but my visit is business-related.”
“I see. You need me to bury a body between the intricacies of international law?”
“Quite the opposite, actually.”
Her eyebrows rose halfway up her forehead.
“Alright, I’m listening.”
This was it. Time to jump off the metaphorical cliff.
“I know that you are employed by the Black Foundation, so you are under no obligation to serve the Black Corporation or disclose the contents of this conversation to anyone outside of this room.”
She nodded.
Of course she would—he’d done his share of reading, he knew that it was up to her conscience to decide if she was going to help him.
“I have suspicions that the Black Corporation is involved in illegal proceedings.”
She cocked her head, the poker face not betraying any of her feelings.
“As a lawyer, I’m obliged to inform you that suspicions won’t hold up in court.”
He took a breath.
“What if I told you I have proof?”
“Show me.” Her no-nonsense attitude had been one of the main reasons why he’d chosen to ask her for help.
He opened his briefcase and pulled out a manila folder.
“This is everything I found so far,” he said as he handed it across the desk, “but there’s probably more.”
He watched her expression carefully as she scanned the pages, the twitch of her left eye when she got to the section about the cryptocurrency transactions and the offshore accounts. She flipped through the folder with practiced calm, and didn’t look up until she reached the last page.
“Can you verify that all of this is real?” she asked.
“All the files are from the Black Corporation main server. I can give you the account details through which I gained access.”
“That would help. Anything else? This is just the money trail, but what is it for? What are they doing behind closed doors?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
A beat of silence, an agreement.
“Alright—I’ll look into it,” Pandora said. “I’ll tell you as soon as I find something. You’re going to stay as far away from this as possible and act normally.” She gave him a stern look. “You’re being watched far more closely than I am. Don’t attract attention.”
He gave her the crooked smile that they’d shared over countless games of Scrabble.
“Will do.”
He moved to get up, but she stopped him.
“One last question—why? Why are you doing this? Why not merrily go along with it? They’re your family, after all.”
He looked at the art print next to the window, a black-and-white picture of a cherry tree.
“You, of all people, should know that family is often complicated.”
With that, he left.
***
Nine days after he’d met James for the first time, he was in the backseat of a dark car heading from the Black Corporation Headquarters back to the mansion. He spent most nights at the penthouse apartment near Hyde Park because his mother preferred the mansion, but she insisted on frequent dinners.
They were a pretentious affair, the three of them sitting at opposite ends of a table meant for twenty, Regulus in the middle.
When Sirius had been there, they’d sat opposite each other and close enough that, if they talked with low voices, they could joke without their parents overhearing. Whenever Walburga had noticed either of them saying anything without her being able to hear it, she’d insisted on them repeating it out loud.
Sirius was better than Regulus at coming up with excuses and it was usually him who claimed they were talking about a topic that wasn’t off-limits. One time, Sirius came up with such a ridiculous excuse—Regulus didn’t remember what, exactly—that Regulus burst into uncontrollable laughter. Walburga hadn’t been pleased and the brothers had endured punishment for talking back and lying to her.
He snapped out of the memory when he spotted a flower shop across the street.
“Stop the car,” he ordered the driver.
“Sir,” the driver objected, “We’re going to be late—”
“I said stop the car!” Regulus snapped, and the car jerked to a stop. “It’ll be just a minute.”
He climbed out of the car and jogged across the street, much to the disapprovement of several drivers, judging by the honking that followed him all the way to the bell that jingled quietly when he pushed the door open.
He inhaled deeply and revelled in the cool air that smelled of earth and roses and flowers Regulus didn’t have names for.
The colours were overwhelming—in the best way. All shades of green, ranging from pale tones to vibrant dark leaves as well as the occasional spot of red and pink. The colours reminded him of James and his unapologetic liveliness—but then again, many things reminded him of James now.
Regulus stepped around a shelf that was filled to the brim with potted plants of all shapes and sizes and was met with another outburst of colour when he spotted the flower section. He instantly gravitated towards the only ones he knew apart from roses—orchids.
They brought back memories of hours spent in the sun room of his cousins’ summer estate up in Scotland. Light spots on polished hardwood floors. Tucking himself into the crammed space between a bookshelf and a chaiselounge during games of hide-and-seek that seemed to never end. During one game—Andy had been the one to search for the rest—none of them had remembered to check the sunroom, so Regulus had spent hours with his back against the wall with the flower-print wallpaper, memorizing the shapes of the purple and yellow orchids on the low windowsill as the only thing to do.
By the time he’d been discovered, they had been burned into his mind.
The orchids had become impossibly tangled with his memories of his childhood. They blurred together with Andy’s snorting laughter at one of Sirius’ terrible jokes, the way Bella ran barefoot across the lawn, and Cissy’s hands flying across piano keys.
Crawling into Sirius’ bed after a nightmare.
What flowers sparked memories for James? Had he been to enough funerals to recognize lilies without a second thought? Had he ever bought roses for someone? Had he—
“Never thought I’d see you here,” someone said behind Regulus, and time stopped.
It was impossible. It was supposed to be impossible. And yet—it was undeniably James’ voice.
The universe had a cruel sense of humor, and who was Regulus to claim any causal connection? To believe in a thread that tied them together, that had pulled Regulus across all of London, to this flower shop at a quarter past five in the afternoon, to a place and time where James existed alongside him?
Regulus breathed in deeply, turned around slowly, and the world resumed spinning.
“I never thought I’d see you again, at all,” he said.
James smiled crookedly. His gold-rimmed glasses glinted in the light. Unlike the first time they’d met, James was wearing faded jeans and bright red converse covered in messy drawings and words.
“And yet you are here,” James said. “Are you looking something in particular?”
“You.”
James’ eyebrows rose in an expression that just said “oh.”
Regulus fought to keep the blush off his pale cheeks.
“Well—you found me. What now?”
“I haven’t thought that far,” Regulus admitted.
James looked at him—really looked at him. Trailed his eyes along the sharp lines of Regulus’ face, down to his shoulders in the tailored suit and the emerald green and silver pin that sat on his lapel. He looked at Regulus as if he were something precious, something worthy of being looked at.
Regulus wanted to squirm under his gaze, hide somewhere. If James only looked long enough, he’d realize that Regulus was just a waste of his time, something he could only admire from a distance, someone he’d never really have.
“You’re beautiful,” James said, and it sounded like he was simply stating a fact, like saying “the Earth is round” or “humans need oxygen to breathe.”
“Regulus is beautiful.”
He’d never thought of himself as beautiful. He’d been told that he was handsome many times, until it had become an obligation, another box he had to tick. Beautiful felt different, somehow. Less like a tie that was choking him and more like the silver rings he kept in the top drawer of his bedside table and only allowed himself to wear when he was alone and the streetlights outside the building were on.
It sounded like all the things he kept neatly stashed away in a small box at the very back of his mind labelled Don’t Think About it, all the suppressed feelings and stolen moments he’d never get to keep.
This was just another stolen moment, so he might as well take what he can.
“What are your favourite flowers?” he blurted out.
“Sunflowers,” James replied, without even a hint of hesitation. They were in a flower shop, after all—James was working here? Or looking at flowers? Buying some? Regulus didn’t know.
All he knew was that, somehow, they’d gotten a second chance. Regulus would be damned if he didn’t make the most of it.
“Can I get your number?” It seemed like James’ presence alone caused Regulus’ usually very strict brain-to-mouth filter to completely shut off in favour of allowing him to voice every thought that ran through his mind. “It’s just that—I can’t stop thinking about you. You’re the first person in a long time that made me want to be live instead of just being alive.”
“Sure,” James said brightly and gestured for Regulus to follow him further into the shop. He confidently led them to a counter that was covered in all kinds of clutter—ranging from pieces of scrap paper and pens to a variety of gardening tools—further affirming Regulus’ previous assumption that he was working here.
“So,” James said, as he rifled through the clutter in an attempt to locate a suitable piece of paper, “are you looking for flowers? Somehow, I don’t buy that you saw a magical streetsign saying James is here that pointed at this shop.”
That coaxed a shy laugh out of Regulus.
“No. It was more of a feeling that I was supposed to be in a specific place at a specific time.”
James nodded and found a piece of paper that fulfilled his expectations. Next, he embarked on his search for a pen. They all looked the same to Regulus, but James seemed to be able to tell a difference.
“I know the feeling,” James said, casting aside another pen after clicking it once to see the tip. “It’s what made me fill in for a friend of a friend at the gala. He was in a car accident and asked around if anyone was able to take the shift on short notice. I wasn’t even supposed to be free that evening, but the stars aligned and—well, here we are.”
Regulus was so busy counting the freckles dusting James’ cheeks and the bridge of his nose that he didn’t notice James had finally found a pen and scribbled his name and a phone number down until James regained his full height and held the paper out to him to take it.
When he did, their fingers brushed against each other for a split-second, but it was enough to send a series of sparks up his arm, straight into his heart.
“Oh—thanks.”
“It’s my pleasure. Don’t hesitate to call me—unless it’s before seven a.m.. I need my beauty sleep.”
Regulus found himself smiling again.
“Will do.”
The silence between them grew into a living thing that curled around them and bound them together, and Regulus could have listened to the soft sounds of James’ breathing and the low honking of the cars outside forever, but he was here on borrowed time.
“I guess I have to go,” he said, wishing he could stay. “I’m already running late.”
James perked up.
“Wait—just a second. You can’t possibly leave a flower shop without flowers.” He pushed his sleeves up over his elbows and joined Regulus in front of the counter. “Tell me, where are you going on this lovely evening?”
Against his upbringing and years of etiquette training ingrained into him, Regulus rolled his eyes.
“Family dinner.”
“Let me guess—it’s as bad as the gala?”
“Most of my family is alright, I guess,” Regulus said, “Except for my parents. They’ve always been—well, stiff doesn’t quite cover it, so we’ll go with traditional—but it’s gotten worse since my brother left.”
A wicked grin took over James’ face, and it made his eyes glint with mischief in a way that should send Regulus running in the other direction but somehow made him want to get even closer to James.
“Any chance they know the language of flowers?”
Regulus shook his head, certain that he knew where this was going.
“Well, then we’re going to send them the most sophisticated and hidden-in-plain-sight screw-you they’ve ever received.”
Regulus shouldn’t agree to this, shouldn’t trust this technically complete stranger, shouldn’t—there a million things he shouldn’t do, he’d grown up with a list of things he hadn’t been allowed to do, all the things he’d been denied, the golden cage he’d never left.
Sue him, he’d caught a glimpse of the world on the other side of the bars.
“Let’s do it.”
James moved between the flowers with practiced ease and efficiency, rattling off different flowers and colours and their meanings, let Regulus choose until they’d assembled a bouquet consisting of hydrangeas—arrogance and vanity—and orange lilies—pride and hatred—and yellow carnations—rejection, disappointment and sadness.
They stood in front of the door, both well aware that Regulus had to leave.
With a soft smile, James pressed the bouquet into Regulus’ hands. In the same motion, he leaned forward until their lips brushed against each other.
It could barely be called a kiss, but Regulus still tilted his head to the side to get a better angle.
It was over as soon as it had started.
“Call me,” James whispered, and Regulus walked out of the door and onto the sidewalk and across the street and into the car. Later, he wouldn’t be able to recall anything that happened during the ride, except the way he kept touching his lips, trying to figure out if it had really happened.
Walburga gracefully chose to forgive his delay when he told her he’d brought her flowers. One of the staff put the bouquet into a vase in the entrance hall, and Regulus was ushered into the dining room.
His parents sat in their usual places at opposite ends of the table with Regulus between them, but there was nobody he could have a whispered conversation with. Dinner dragged on for hours, most of it spent in a tense silence unlike the comfortable one he’d shared with James earlier. By the time he was allowed to leave the table, it would have been too much of a hassle to return to the flat he considered more of a home than the building he was currently in, so he climbed two sets of stairs and settled into his childhood bedroom for the night.
A spy in the belly of the beast.
He shrugged off his suit jacket and slung it over the back of the desk chair, when he remembered James.
James.
Thinking of his name alone was enough to make a stupid smile pull at his lips.
He reached into the inside pocket and panicked for a second when his fingers didn’t make contact with anything. Pulse quickening, he searched the other pockets until he found the precious piece of paper. He must have been so beside himself that he’d forgotten where he’d put it.
He unfolded it and exhaled in relief when he saw James’ handwriting.
James, was written at the top, and below, a number. Beside it, he’d drawn a small heart.
His phone was in his hand before the thought had fully formed. The number was punched in within seconds, the phone lifted to his ear as soon as he’d pressed the call button.
It rung once, twice.
Regulus could hear the smile in James’ voice when he answered.
“I knew you’d call.”
Of course he’d known.
Notes:
some more notes on the flower symbolism:
- orchids: luxury, love, beauty, strength, refinement
- yellow: friendship, start of something new
- purple: respect, admiration, royaltyi love you and remember to take care and be kind to yourself<3
Chapter 3: i thought the plane was going down (how'd you turn it right around?)
Chapter Text
Regulus’ hand found the light switch and the room was plunged into darkness. This far out of the city, there were no streetlights that cast a faint glow into the room.
Just him, a queen-sized bed, and James on the other side of the line.
“Sorry that it took me so long to call.”
“Don’t apologize. How was the family dinner?”
Three steps carried Regulus across the room until he flopped back onto his bed.
“Just as bad as expected. But my mother liked the flowers.”
A bubble of James’ laughter reached Regulus’ ears.
“I bet. They were beautiful.”
The silence was back, and it felt too intimate to be calling James from his childhood bedroom. It was a part of himself he’d been desperately trying to keep under the surface, the one place he was avoiding at all costs.
All the previous versions of him had gotten dressed looking at this very mirror, and the pillows had absorbed everything from silent tears and nightmares to dreams of an escape that was never going to take place.
Was James just another attempt to escape? A getaway car driver that was going to be just another casualty they inevitably crashed?
No, this wasn’t about Regulus’ foiled attempts to break free from his invisible shackles. It was about the beat Regulus’ heart had skipped the first time they’d looked into each other’s eyes, and the way breathing was easier when they were in the same room, about the way the sun had broken through the clouds on the way to the Black Mansion, a phenomenon Regulus must have witnesses hundreds of times, yet today had been the first time he’d truly seen it.
“Tell me about your day,” he said quietly. “You know about my messed-up family situation, but all I know about you is that you work in a flower shop.”
“And you know that I like sunflowers.”
“Yes. That, too.”
A beat of silence, a breath on the other side of the line.
“Well—the flower shop was my best friend’s idea. Her name is Lily, actually. And our other best friends—Remus and Peter—opened up a bookshop next door. You might’ve seen it when you were there.”
A tiny laugh escaped Regulus’ lips.
“The one with the pride flags in the window?”
“Yes, that one,” James confirmed, and Regulus wished, not for the first time, that they could have this conversation in person. He wanted to see James’ facial expression, memorize every crease of his brow and dimple on his cheeks. “It’s a whole thing. Remus established a rule that he only sells books with at least one queer character, but Lily argued with him until he relaxed that rule to headcanons. They have an odd competition going on of who can come up with the best books. If they don’t agree if a book can be admitted, I have to be the judge. All three of them prepare a PowerPoint presentation and we order enough takeout to last me for days.” A pause. “You should join us sometime. I’m sure they’d love to have you.”
“I’d love to,” Regulus replied without a second thought.
“Great.”
Regulus looked up at the ceiling, and spotted the one glow-in-the-dark star his parents had missed. His mother’s screams still echoed through his head, scolding him for destroying the property and bringing disgrace over the family name, for talking back and thinking thoughts they didn’t approve of.
Somehow, the glow-in-the-dark star had survived it all. A final reminder of the quiet rebellion he’d unknowingly started long before he’d been able to put a name on it.
And what if he’d never be free?
What did it matter how he’d end up? Broken and lonely, forever caught up in what-ifs?
He had something magnificent right here, a sun in the shape of a person, and, for the first time in his life, Regulus wanted to be greedy. Wanted to take what he could, as long as he was able to.
And James was right there, asking for nothing in return, the worst choice Regulus would ever make.
It was going to wreck Regulus, inevitably so. He was already broken—what was one more crack in the foundation?
At least he was going to die knowing what a broken heart felt like.
It wouldn’t destroy James. He had friends, Lily and Remus and Peter, people who loved him unconditionally, who would pick up the pieces Regulus would leave him in.
It was selfish, he was selfish, and greedy, and overall a horrible person, but if he did this, he was never going to ask for anything else ever again.
Another glance at the glow-in-the-dark star sealed the bargain with the universe.
He took a deep breath.
“Will you on a date with me?”
“I kissed you.”
Regulus’ heart skipped a beat, and something sparked alive in his chest—something like hope.
“Yes. I—I know.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“So, will you go on a date with me?”
“Yes,” James breathes, half-laughing. “I’ve already kissed you, I thought the whole I-want-to-go-on-a-date-with-you thing was kind of obvious.”
“Well, I wasn’t sure—”
“You can be, now. Sure, I mean.”
The smile fought its way back onto Regulus’ face, and he let it.
“When are you free?”
“Just name a time and place, and I’ll be there.”
“How about tomorrow? When are you done at the shop?”
“Tomorrow works. Lily has the late shift, so I’ll be off at three.”
Regulus vaguely recalled something about a meeting at four, but he’d push it to another time. Being the heir did have its perks that came with the constant pressure and impossible expectations.
“I’ll pick you up,” Regulus said.
“Where are we going?” James sounded genuinely curious.
“You’ll see.”
He did have a specific place in mind, but he wanted to see James’ face when he realized it.
“Tell me? Please.”
“No. You’re going to see in about fifteen hours.”
“That’s too long.”
“Would it make it better if I promised you that the waiting will be worth it?”
“Yes. Yes, it would.”
“I promise, then.”
It hung between them like a string of fairy lights, connecting them through the phone line.
Regulus didn’t dare to move or say anything, afraid to shatter the moment.
The darkness created an illusion of security and invulnerability. The things they were saying to each other, confessing, were just for them, and as long as they were talking, the world outside was frozen.
“Penny for your thoughts?” James whispered.
“Nothing much. Just—I can’t believe I met you again,” Regulus admitted.
“Same here. What are the odds?”
“I don’t know. Either close to zero, or one hundred percent.”
Regulus imagined that James smiled at that.
“I’d like to think that it’s a hundred percent. It felt kind of inevitable. We would’ve found each other again, sooner or later, one way or another. I don’t think there’s a universe where we don’t meet a second time.”
Regulus’ breath hitched in his throat.
“And what if it’s nearly zero?”
“Then we’ve just defied the math, and the entire universe. I’d cross galaxies to meet you a second time.”
Regulus’ eyes fell shut.
Was this real?
Was James real? This beautiful man, who was telling him beautiful things that nobody had ever told him?
“I’d travel through time to meet you a second time,” Regulus whispered.
Neither of them said anything after that.
Regulus just listened to the sounds of James breathing as they evened out and grew further apart. When he lifted his phone to his eyes again to hang up, the timer had climbed to more than an hour.
Notes:
i know that this is really short, future chapters will be a lot longer!!
have a nice day, take care of yourself, drink some water, i love you<3
Chapter 4: i, i loved you in secret (first sight, yeah, we love without reason)
Notes:
chapter title from dancing with our hands tied by taylor swift
i am the kind of person to immediately look up all the paintings mentioned, so i wanted everyone who does the same the trouble of having a hundred browser tabs open and put the links into the chapter. all the links lead you to the museum website (and in one case wikipedia).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
James was quickly becoming Regulus’ favourite person, and it was terrifying. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the kiss. Or the phone call.
He’d woken up with his phone abandoned next to his ear, the screen black but still open to James’ number.
A quiet reminder that he hadn’t dreamed, that James wasn’t a creation of his restless mind, a cruel fantasy because it would never be real—except it was real. James was breathing somewhere on the other side of London, either still in his flat or already at the flower shop, and going on about his day. Probably sipping coffee—or tea—in this very moment, maybe even thinking about Regulus and their date—
Right, their date.
Regulus forced himself to get up, bones audibly popping in protest. Hell, he wasn’t even twenty-six and already waking up in an old man’s body.
He got ready in record speed, desperate to get back to the flat near Hyde Park. He hopped into the shower quickly and changed into one of the similarly-looking and far too expensive suits that still hung in the wardrobe. Before he climbed into the car that was waiting in front of the house, he stopped by the kitchen to find a cup of coffee and two sugar cubes to dump into.
The drive passed in a blur, and Regulus didn’t register their arrival until the driver opened the door and a cacophony of sounds from the street poured into the car. Thanking the driver, Regulus went inside.
Objectively, the flat was perfect. Floor-to-ceiling windows that let natural light pour across the polished hardwood floors, the spacious kitchen and subtly decorated walls. None of the artwork meant anything to him. All of this had been picked out by the interior designer his parents had hired. The emptiness was bad on a normal day, but today it was especially quiet.
Too quiet.
The records sat on the lowest shelf in the living room, and the record player right above them. Regulus crouched down to run his fingers along the records.
Some of them had belonged to Sirius, and he hadn’t taken them with him. Perhaps he’d left them behind on purpose, something for Regulus to remember him by—as if he could ever forget. He breezed past Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Queen’s A Night at the Opera, touched the Bodyguard soundtrack by Whitney Houston until he arrived at the more recent ones. Conan Gray’s Superache caught his eyes before he settled on a different one.
The vinyl slid out of the sleeve easily, and Regulus put it on the record player with care, setting the needle in place as the black disk spun around.
The first notes of Lizzy McAlpine’s doomsday sounded through the too-big space that wasn’t meant to be occupied by a lone person, and Regulus didn’t cry.
***
At exactly seven minutes to three in the afternoon, the bell jingled above Regulus’ head for the second time in two days.
Being surrounded by plants was unexpectedly comforting. Stepping farther into the shop, past the first shelf, he spotted a mop of fiery red curls. They belonged to a woman in a green flannel shirt that matched her eyes and cuffed jeans. She broke into a grin when she noticed Regulus.
“You must be Regulus,” she said, and wiped her hand on her jeans, then stuck out it out for Regulus to shake.
“Yes—that’s me. Lily?”
She nodded, and her eyes sparkled.
“James is still in the back, but he’ll be out in a second.” She pointed over her shoulder. “This means a lot to him, you know. He hasn’t shut up about you all day.” She gave him a stern look that Regulus couldn’t tell if it was serious or not. “Don’t mess it up. That man has a heart of gold.”
Regulus swallowed.
He was spared the burden of having to lie to her when James emerged from a doorway that was missing an actual door and was instead covered by some sort of curtain made of beads that jingled softly when James stepped through.
“Lily,” he called out, oblivious to Regulus’ presence, “have you—oh.”
His eyes fell on Regulus, and his face lit up like a Christmas tree.
“You’re early.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—I didn’t—”
“No, it’s fine—great, actually.” He turned to Lily. “Do you mind?”
She watted him away. “’Course not,” she said, “off you go. Have fun.”
Thanking her at least half a dozen times, they left the shop. Out on the street, James turned his head up to the sun.
“So,” he said, eyes closed, simply enjoying the warmth cast across his features, “where are we going?”
Regulus smiled, both at James’ eternal curiosity and the way his cheekbones looked in the golden light.
“For now, to that bus stop over there.”
“You didn’t bring a horse-drawn carriage?” James joked as they walked.
“No, Cinderella needed it today.”
James’ bright laughter on this bright day, the first warm day in March, on a crowded street, surrounded by strangers, flooded Regulus’ brain with candyfloss.
James’ laughter, that Regulus caused.
If they froze this moment in a snowglobe and put it on the shelf in Regulus’ flat, right next to The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and he could revisit it any day, Regulus would never do anything else, spend every spare minute for the rest of his life shaking the snowglobe and dreaming himself back into this moment.
The first bus that crawled down the street in the busy traffic was the wrong one, but the second that stopped in front of them, covered in advertisements for Mamma Mia! The Musical, was the right one. James clambered up the stairs to the top floor like a puppy, and Regulus followed him.
They chose two seats at the very front of the bus, only the scratch-covered glass to separate them from the city. James pointed out landmarks they passed like a tourist, as if neither of them had ever been to London before, and Regulus let him, revelled in the way his voice sounded when he spotted something he deemed particularly exciting.
Occasionally, Regulus threw in an offhand comment about the history of the buildings they passed, trivia about the people that had lived and worked and died there, and James listened to him.
It was a first for him.
Actually being listened to, not being told to shut up.
They nearly missed their stop.
James was rambling about Nelson’s column and somehow ended up at ABBA’s Waterloo—Regulus wouldn’t trade it for the world.
But when Nelson’s column did come into view, Regulus remembered where they were going.
“Get up!” he said, interrupting James, who was in the middle of breaking down the second verse. James barely looked around, simply jumping up and following Regulus off the bus.
On the sidewalk, James took a proper look around and finally realized where Regulus had taken them.
“Nelson’s column—Trafalgar Square.”
He literally performed a slow three-sixty turn and narrowed his eyes at a building across the street.
“The National Gallery?”
Regulus nodded.
“Is it okay?”
“Regulus—I’ve wanted to go for years!”
James nearly managed to be run over by a car because he didn’t look before crossing the road, and Regulus had to pull him back by the sleeve of his jacket.
“Slow down,” he said, “you don’t want to get yourself killed.”
The easy smile on James’ lips drew Regulus’ gaze in, and it was impossible for him to look away on his own.
“Come on,” James said, shaking Regulus out of his haze.
They managed to cross the street without dying, and entered the museum through the main entrance. Regulus bought a paper map and navigated them to the floor above them and watched James’ eyes go wide.
“This is the Sainsbury Wing,” Regulus pointed to the left, “Medieval and Early Renaissance art. A lot of art from Italy, we can stop by later.” He turned them to the right and marched down a corridor. “My personal issue with Medieval art is that they either ignored or forgot a lot of things Ancient Greece figured out. No realistic perspective—it’s basically two-dimensional. Don’t even get me started on the halos. Raphael is essentially the Italian Renaissance artists. His greatest work is The School of Athens.”
“Where is it?” James asked, unfazed by Regulus’ infodumping. “Here?”
Regulus laughed.
“No—it’s a fresco, painted directly on a wall in the Vatican.”
They arrived in the first proper showroom, and James stopped dead in his tracks.
“Wow,” fell from his lips.
James gazed upward at the white ceiling, decorated with gold, and the sage wallpaper that matched the dark green marble doorways, the gold-framed paintings on the walls, and Regulus watched him as he took in his surroundings.
Regulus softly linked his arm with James’ elbow and pulled him to the left, to the painting closest to the door.
“The Dream of Saint Helena,” Regulus explained, “by Paolo Veronese.” The painting depicted a woman, asleep, leaning on a windowsill. Two baby angels were carrying a cross towards her. “In a dream, the location of Christ’s cross was supposedly revealed to her.”
He allowed James another moment of taking in the painting before turning him around and crossing the room to the opposite wall.
“This is another one by Paolo Veronese,” Regulus said, “Happy Union. The couple in the centre are probably getting married, and the woman on the left is thought to be Venus. The boy at the bottom could be Cupid—but it’s not certain.”
“Greek mythology, huh?” James said.
Regulus blushed.
“Yes.”
For a second, James just looked at him, looked at him instead of the paintings around them.
“Anyway—Paolo Veronese isn’t his actual name, Veronese just means ‘from Verona’—where he grew up—but he spent over half of his life in Venice.”
Regulus was rambling—he knew that he was rambling—but James was listening.
Listening while Regulus explained the difference between types of paint, the supposed intentions of artists, and somewhere between Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo’s Mary Magdalene and The Triumphs of Caesar, a series of paintings by Andrea Mantegna, their hands had found each other, and their fingers had threaded together, and now Regulus was pulling James through the gallery by their intertwined hands.
They walked through the Central Hall, past a portrait of Eva Gonzalès done by Edouard Manet, and other people whose names had been lost to time, into the next room.
Regulus could pinpoint the exact moment all air was knocked out of James’ lungs.
They were surrounded by paintings of landscapes, ranging from mountains and rivers to coasts and cities. Some depicted the sceneries during daytime, others at sunrise, drenched in golden sunlight or overshadowed by storms.
They spent close to an hour in that room alone, Regulus telling James about the techniques the artists used and how it reflected the era or the masters they’d studied the craft under, the things they invented and re-used, the revolutionaries and visionaries.
James seemed particularly intrigued by one that was tiny in comparison to the other ones in the room, and dwarfed even more by the thick frame. It was a stormy sea painted in wide, sweeping brushstrokes of black and white.
“The Tempest,” Regulus said, “by Peder Balke. The irony is, he painted this after he stopped painting professionally, and yet, it’s the only painting of his in this gallery.”
“It reminds me of another painting,” James said, “Gathering Storm by Ivan Aivazovsky.”
Regulus smiled.
“Yes, that’s an excellent choice. But there’s another one by Aivazovsky that I might like a tiny bit more—The Ninth Wave.”
James shook his head.
“I can’t say that I know it.”
Insistent to share his knowledge with James, Regulus whipped out his phone and typed ‘aivazovsky the ninth wave’ into the search bar without letting go of James’ hand. He clicked on the first result and angled the phone for James to see.
“It’s breathtaking,” James said, staring at the screen. In Regulus’ opinion, it barely did the original justice. The colours of the sky were washed out, the real one looked as if the sky was actually on fire, as if the canvas had caught flame.
“Yes. I wish I could show you in person, but it’s in a museum in Saint Petersburg.”
“One day,” James said, and Regulus almost believed it—believed him. “One day you’ll show me.”
The final one they stood in front of depicted a pale cloudy sky in shades of blue and grey and orange.
“The Sky at Sunrise,” Regulus said.
“Who painted it?” James asked. Up until then, Regulus had mentioned the artist and the title of the painting in the same breath.
“Another irony—nobody knows who exactly, just that they were French. But we know exactly when and where it was painted.”
James’ hand squeezed Regulus’, once.
“I think it’s beautiful. Creating something more important than yourself, something that outlives you. Something that people admire and cherish long after your name has faded from history.”
“Yes,” Regulus agreed, “it’s beautiful.”
The next room was dedicated to European paintings—especially ones who depicted humans—because it had been deemed important to have mastered the human form in order to be allowed to study at an official art school, as Regulus explained.
When his eyes fell on a familiar painting, one he’d spent countless hours studying, The Execution of Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche, a painting that him favouring would be referred to as ‘grossly morbid’ by his parents, it hit him.
He’d never taken anyone here.
Up until now, this place had belonged to him—only him.
He’d started coming to the National Gallery years ago, but he’d never told anyone about it, not Sirius, not Andy or Bella or Cissy, certainly not his parents and—well, he didn’t have anyone outside of his family that he could talk to about things like this. Years ago—back during their boarding school days—he might have told Barty and Evan about it, but they’d gotten too caught up in life, they had drifted apart until the chasm between them had become too wide to be closed with a single bridge.
It had been his safe haven, the one place he could be himself without anyone watching him.
Here, he could be one among many, just another man in a tailored suit, admiring paintings without saying a word.
Who are you when nobody is watching?
This was who he’d been when nobody was watching, when he didn’t have to keep an act up for the sake of the family name, when there was nobody to impress, when nobody hovered over his shoulder, waiting for him to slip up and make a mistake.
But—now someone was watching him.
James.
James.
And James wasn’t just watching him, he was looking at him—studying him, committing him to memory, looking at him like Regulus was something worth being looked at.
It was the first time Regulus felt seen.
And not only seen—heard, and understood.
He’d seen Regulus, and he hadn’t wanted to look away.
That hadn’t happened since—he didn’t know.
James followed him as Regulus tugged him through the gallery, past paintings he’d love to tell James about, about Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Ulysses deriding Polyphemus - Homer’s Odyssey and Georges Seurat’s works in Post-Impressionism, but there was another painting that couldn’t wait.
The room with the Van Goghs.
Regulus stopped in front of the Sunflowers.
He listened to James’ breathing as he registered the painting in front of him.
A bouquet of sunflowers in the process of wilting, half of them had already lost their petals.
Sunflowers—wilted.
“You remembered.”
He was looking at Regulus, eyes wide.
“You remembered my favourite flowers.”
“Of course I did. I thought getting you real ones was kind of mainstream—since you work at a flower shop and everything—so I thought I’d show you some instead.”
In retrospect, their first kiss barely counted. It was just a brush of lips against each other, it had lasted less than a heartbeat. And yet it had been enough to tilt Regulus’ world off its axis.
But this kiss—it was enough to send Regulus’ entire universe spiralling off-course.
James’ hand was on his hip, pulling him flush against his chest, and the other was cupping his jaw, angling his head just right, and it was perfect. Regulus’ hands found their way around James’ neck, and he was pulling him down while he rose onto his tiptoes.
They were kissing in front of a goddamn Van Gogh painting, in a room full of strangers, in a city they both loved.
A stolen moment of perfection, forever frozen Regulus’ imperfect, broken mind.
Notes:
all the art stuff has been vetted by certified art nerd Ri (i love you<3), everyone say thank you to her!!
i spent my week applying to my dream university, soldering a plane out of copper wire, crying about the fact that it's been four weeks since i graduated high school, and writing chapter 8 of this fic. someone should remind me to water my plants.
remember to drink some water and be kind to yourself<3
Chapter 5: all the stars we steal from the night sky (will never be enough)
Notes:
chapter title from never enough by loren allred (from the greatest showman soundtrack)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“I’ve been meaning to ask you ever since you showed me the Sunflowers,” James said through the phone, “but there wasn’t a good time for it, so I’m doing it now.”
Regulus nodded until he remembered James couldn’t see him.
“Go ahead.”
“What’s your favourite Van Gogh painting?”
Regulus was on the couch in the oversized living room, dangling upside down. The lights were off, and the city lights in the distance could almost count as stars—almost.
“The Starry Night,” Regulus replied easily. “My brother and I used to joke that our stars were in it—we were both named after stars. Whenever we could see them at night, he’d sneak into my room and we’d try to find them. We had a map of the night sky and everything.”
He still had the map, actually. It was in the topmost drawer of his desk, locked away, along with the postcard he’d received from Sydney.
I still look for our stars. -S
“The Starry Night is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,” Regulus asked, guessing James’ next question before he could ask it.
A beat of silence at the other end of the line, then—
“Would you ever go to space?”
“What?”
“You know about constellations, and most kids go through the astronaut phase. If you had the chance, would you go to space?”
“Maybe—if I were on Mars, at least I wouldn’t have to deal with my parents anymore.”
Regulus closed his eyes and pictured James on the couch next to him, or just in the same room. Being in James’ immediate vicinity was like being drugged—in a positive sense. The kind of drug that made you believe you could do anything.
“I’d go any day,” James said, “I’d love to experience weightlessness.”
Regulus laughed. “You don’t have to go to space for that.”
“But the view is great,” James argued. “No light pollution. You’d be able to see your beloved constellations.”
Since their museum date, they’d spent every evening like this—at opposite ends of the city, connected through a phone call.
“Sally Ride compared her first launch on a Space Shuttle to a roller coaster at Disneyland, so it can’t be that bad,” James said.
“I believe the STS-51-L crew would disagree,” Regulus deadpanned, referring to the 1986 mission during which the solid rocket booster had exploded shortly after liftoff, causing the death of the entire crew.
“Point taken,” James admitted. “But I bet you can’t explain why they exploded during launch.”
“Enlighten me.”
Regulus listened and stared at the high ceiling as James talked and talked and talked, about too-stiff O-rings that were supposed to keep the highly corrosive fuel at bay, and how too-low temperatures at the launch site had impacted their viscosity, and how the Rogers Commission that investigated the accident later.
He would stay here forever if it meant listening to James.
“When are you free again?” Regulus asked when James took a breath. “We could go on another date.”
James hummed on his end up the line. Regulus imagined him rifling through the clutter on his kitchen table in search of a calendar.
“Saturday. I worked last week, so it’s Lily’s turn.”
Saturday was the day after tomorrow. Thirty-six hours.
“Can I pick you up at ten?”
“Oh, you’re picking the location again?”
“You can choose next time,” Regulus offered. “And don’t pretend you didn’t like the National Gallery.”
“I did like it,” James admitted, “I like seeing you happy.”
James was too much—he overwhelmed Regulus in the best way, flooded his senses with dimpled smiles and sparkling eyes and intertwined hands and words that seeped through his ribs and curled around his heart.
“I’ll send you the address,” James said.
“I’ll see you then,” Regulus said.
An obvious goodbye.
Neither of them hung up.
***
“Sit down,” Pandora ordered, and pressed a manila folder into Regulus’ hand, a mirror image of them two weeks ago. It was the day after the phone call, and Regulus was tired to his very bones, but he held himself upright with years of boarding school and endured punishments.
Regulus opened the folder to the first page.
“I was able to trace some of the money to a letterbox company called Mangemort Inc., but there’s an entire net of them.”
“Death Eater,” Regulus translated.
Pandora nodded. French was mandatory in both their families.
“Does that sound familiar?”
“No, but I’ll look out for it.”
Pandora gestured at the manila folder.
“Go to the last page,” she said, and he complied. “This man seems to be at the centre of everything. His codename is ‘Voldemort’ and he’s running in the same circles as our parents. I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got so far.”
“Flight of death—interesting,” Regulus commented. He scanned the page. Most of the boxes were marked with unknown, but there was one that caught his eye. Last known whereabouts.
“How do you know he was in Paris at that time?” he asked Pandora.
“Some of the money was used to buy a painting at an auction, and the only person with access to that specific account is Voldemort. It had to have been him.”
Regulus bit down on his lip.
“Do we have any information about the painting? Or the buyer? Auction houses keep records.”
“I’ll look into it,” Pandora promised, sounding less than hopeful, “but auction houses don’t like disclosing information about their clients.”
That wasn’t new information to Regulus—he’d been to his share of auctions, and Orion had taught him how to acquire something without paying more than he wanted to. Even before Sirius had left, it had only ever been the two of them, as if Orion had always known Regulus would end up being the heir instead of Sirius.
It was funny how Sirius leaving had drawn a line right through Regulus’ life, a line that divided everything into Before and After.
Both were in shades of grey, but Before had tinges of red and orange, of quiet courage and muffled laughter, while After consisted of a tone between sepia and something akin to silver, sharp and unforgiving, like the shards of a broken mirror or faded polaroids.
To Regulus, it seemed like a straight line that ran through his memories, but it was jagged and curved and blurry at times.
Like the way Orion had always treated Regulus like his older son instead of Sirius, and the fact that it had taken four months for Sirius’ name to be replaced with Regulus’ in official Black Corporation and Foundation documents.
And the worst of all: mirrors.
Regulus was nearly as old as Sirius had been when he’d left, and every day, he saw more of Sirius in his own face. It wasn’t immediately obvious, since their noses were different, and their eyes, but there was something about the way their features fit together, the way their cheekbones curved and their jaw was sharp, and that spot where the edge of their brow hit the bridge of their nose that was the same.
Pandora gave him a quizzical look that let him know he’d gotten lost in his thoughts, and he stood up, thanking her. He buttoned his suit jacket closed while she assured him that they were eventually going to find something that would hold up in a court case—it was only a matter of time until someone made a mistake.
Eventually—but how much longer would he be able to stand it? How much longer until the price he payed for every breath he took in the same room as his family and their friends until he couldn’t pay anymore?
How much longer until he had nothing left to give?
***
Regulus had bribed the driver with a Simon & Garfunkel CD—a live recording of the concert in Central Park in the Semptember of 1981—something the driver had once let slip that he was having trouble getting his hands on. For his end of the deal, he dropped Regulus off two blocks from James’ flat, and promised not to tell his family. As far as the Black Corporation was concerned, he drove Regulus to a meeting at a bank in another district.
He double-checked the address as he got closer to James’s flat. Outside of the building, he texted James i’m here.
The reply came instantly: just a minute<3
A few seconds passed, then another message appeared.
do you want to come up?
Regulus hesitated, fingers hovering over the keyboard at the bottom of the screen.
okay.
The door buzzed and Regulus let himself in.
which floor? he typed as he climbed the stairs.
3rd was the immediate response.
The door was already ajar by the time Regulus reached the floor, and Regulus knocked softly before he stepped over the threshold.
“Come in,” James called out.
Regulus would be lying if he said he wasn’t curious about the place where James lived—the place where he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and walked around without bothering to put on shoes.
The hallway Regulus stepped into barely deserved to be called that. It was less than a square metre big and littered with shoes—some of which Regulus was certain didn’t belong to James. Unless he regularly wore vibrant pink size 5 four-inch heels covered in glitter.
There was nothing wrong with that, of course—but they were far too small for James’ feet, judging by the battered pair of red converse that had been flung down beside the heels, the same ones he’d been wearing the past two times they’d met.
The living room consisted of a violently neon blue couch shoved against one wall, a crate serving as a coffee table, covered in potted plants and books, and a shelf that bent under the weight of countless CDs, books and notebooks, leaning precariously to one side. A small kitchen took up the opposite wall, and a round table with four mismatched chairs sat awkwardly in the centre.
“Sorry for the mess,” James said, whizzing past Regulus, into presumerably the bathroom. “Feel free to sit down somewhere,” he shouted through the door.
Regulus settled into one of the chairs at the table, a bright red one with a back made from plastic and legs of silver metal, the kind you only saw in stereotypical American high school movies. It creaked and shifted when Regulus put his full weight on it.
Everything in this place was wrong—nothing fit together, every surface was covered in clutter, and it was the kind of lived-in messy that revealed secrets about the inhabitant. If he were able to, he’d trade it for his cold, sterile flat any day.
His gaze wandered upward, and he spotted a model plane that hung from a spring attached to a screw in the ceiling.
“I’ll be done in a minute,” James said, while crossing the room again, this time to his bedroom, “I promise, I just got caught up with—everything.”
“Take your time,” Regulus told him. “We’re not in a hurry.”
A crash sounded through the flat and Regulus rose slightly, but James seemed fine. It amazed Regulus how he was always moving at twice the speed a normal person might—as if he were part of a different dimension and this was perfectly normal for him.
“When are you telling me where we’re going?”
“You know the drill—it’s a surprise.”
James emerged from the bedroom with his hands in his hair, obviously trying to tame his curls—a futile attempt, as far as Regulus was concerned. On the way back from the National Gallery, London had proven its moody weather and they’d been rained on while they’d waited for the bus, and James’ curls had absolutely exploded.
“I’m ready,” James said, with a crooked smile on his face.
He pulled on his shoes and Regulus did not study the way his shirt hugged his broad shoulders.
***
“The Science Museum,” James breathed, and gazed at the tall building in front of them.
“As long as we’re inside, I’m granting you official rights to yap as much as you want,” Regulus said. Last time, he’d done most of the talking—this was James’ turn.
The grin James shot him spoke volumes.
Regulus had reserved tickets the evening before, so they could go inside without waiting.
Inside, James’ eyes went wide and he tugged Regulus along, who was all too happy to follow him. James was instantly drawn to the space exhibition on the ground floor, especially the replica of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module.
“It’s called ‘Eagle,’” James explained, “the CSM—that’s the Command and Service Module, the one in which Michael Collins stayed and orbited the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went down to the surface—was called Columbia. A little boring in comparison to the other missions, in my opinion.” He pointed to the ceiling. “Upstairs is ‘Charlie Brown,’ the original Apollo 10 CSM. The Lunar Module was ‘Snoopy.’”
That earned him a laugh from Regulus.
“So that’s the first of many,” he said, “I remember reading about a stuffed animal Snoopy on board of Artemis I as a zero-g indicator.”
James gave him a look he couldn’t quite decipher—something between admiration and pure wanting.
“Artemis I was an uncrewed mission,” James said, “so technically Snoopy was the Commander of a spaceship.”
Regulus kissed the smile off his face.
“Tell me more—no, tell me everything you know.”
And he did.
He patiently explained the complexities of a Space Shuttle on a model that barely measured a foot, and gushed about the different parts of the International Space Station, pointing out the Columbus Lab and Destiny Module. He told Regulus about the history of the Hubble Space Telescope—a replica of which hung from the ceiling—the woman who had worked on the project, Nancy Grace Roman, who now had a telescope named after her, scheduled to launch in 2027, and the mission that had brought Hubble into space in 1990 and the many maintenance visits it had experienced since.
James, Regulus was starting to realize, had a tendency to start talking about one topic and jump to another, getting tangled up in his own words. The only word that came to mind when Regulus thought about it was endearing.
Regulus followed him as he showed him the model of a J2 rocket engine as they had been used in the Saturn V rocket.
“It looks so small,” Regulus said. It was about two metres in diameter and a little over three metres high.
“It is,” James agreed, “compared to the F-1 engines that made up the first stage of the rocket. Those are nearly twice as big in diameter and height. The J2 engines were only used in the second and third stage.”
He proceeded to highlight the different stages of the rocket, then dove into the development of the rocket, and ended up at Wernher von Braun and other Nazi scientists the Americans took as prisoners of war. Much to his suprise, Regulus found himself actually caring about the topic.
He was good at obtaining information quickly, but all he’d read on the topic so far, all the documentaries he’d only listened to with one ear, had only been surface-level. James was actually deep-diving into the impact the experiments that had been conducted on human prisoners in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War still had on space medicine.
“They flew to the moon with knowledge gained from illegally imprisoned people—they didn’t think twice about pardoning many of the Nazis even though they committed unforgiveable crimes,” James argued.
Regulus nodded.
Two steps further, James spotted a spacesuit—propped up in a way that imitated an astronaut standing on the lunar surface next to ‘Eagle.’ It promptly sent him off into a rant about sizes of spacesuits and the fact that the orginally scheduled all-women spacewalk in 2019 had to be postponed because there was only one spacesuit sized M on the International Space Station. From that point, it was a relatively small leap for James to mention that Christina Koch—one participant of the first all-women spacewalk that had happened later, was part of the Artemis II crew and supposed to go to the moon—though not step on it—in the near future.
Regulus didn’t even know what was the next thing to set James off into a new direction—maybe the Apollo crew patches, or the Soyuz-capsule—all he knew was that James was suddenly talking even more animatedly than before, his hands flying through the air in front of his face, while he was making his case as to why Pluto deserved to be a planet.
“It was officially classified as a planet from its discovery in 1930 until 2006, when some morons decided it should be a dwarf planet. I mean—why do you have to exclude a planet that’s already so lonely, farther away from the sun than all other planets? Can’t you let it exist in peace?”
He tried—Regulus really tried to take him seriously, but it was hard when James looked so beautiful in the warm light and his curls fell into his eyes and he was so excited about a topic other people might call mundane.
“What is the difference between a normal planet and a dwarf planet?” Regulus asked.
James buried his hand in his curls, causing his glasses to sit askew.
“Its diameter has to be below a certain number—but that number is entirely human-created. They share all other defining characteristics. Theoretically, there’s no reason Pluto shouldn’t be a planet.”
“You should write to NASA—or ESA? Are they responsible for us because we’re in Europe?” Regulus wondered aloud.
James sighed in defeat.
“I’m sure someone already tried that.”
Eventually, James had supplied commentary on every single piece on display in the space exhibition, and they decided to move on to the upper floors.
Over the course of their entire visit, Regulus clocked several pieces of information about James. One, he could talk for minutes at a time, seemingly without coming up for air. Two, James was a proper nerd. He knew a myriad of facts about spacetravel, the Second World War, and gay history.
The latter two converged when they stood in front of an Enigma machine in the middle of the mathematics exhibition on the second floor.
“The Germans used in in World War II,” James explained, “thought it was impossible to crack. Well, in the thirties, some guys in Poland did crack it, and told a British fellow about it. The MI-5 established the GC&CS—that’s for Government Code and Cypher School, but insiders often referred to it as Golf, Cheese and Chess Society—and bought an estate in Bletchley. All throughout the war, they broke German traffic. For instance, they made sure the Germans bought that the invasion wasn’t happening in the Normandy in ‘Forty-four.”
Regulus looked at the Engima machine more closely. It was a typewriter in a wooden box, with a few wires and three wheels sticking out of it.
“How does it work?” he asked.
James beamed like a child on their birthday.
“Well, you press one letter—let’s say A—and it goes through the three wheels, which scramble it, and then a reflector, which scrambles it again. And, mind you, at least one whees turns after every letter. So if you put an A in, you might get an F. If you press A again, you get a different letter, maybe a T. But because of the reflector, you never get an A again.”
“And that’s how they cracked it?”
James nodded excitedly.
“The looked for cribs, words that showed up frequently, like weather report or military ranks in German. A lot of mathematicians worked on it, but they recruited anyone who was good at it, even women. Peggy Rock and Margaret Lever, for example. One of the men in charge of a hut, Dilly Knox, supposedly once said ‘Give me a Rock and a Lever and I’ll move the world.’ But because cracking the codes was time-consuming and required a lot of people working round the clock, and because the wheel settings changed every day at midnight, Alan Turing invented the Bombe machine.”
“I know about Turing,” Regulus said, “didn’t he go on to invent the computer some time after the war?”
“The Bombe machine was kind of the first computer—it looked for cribs and narrowed it down to about a dozen wheel settings that had to be tried out manually.” A pause. “Turing was gay, did you know that?”
A shake of Regulus’ head.
“He worked in Cambridge, after the war, and came up with a lot of concepts that laid the base for computer science. In 1952, he was prosecuted for being gay, and had to undergo hormone treatment so that he didn’t have to go to prison. Two years later, he died from cyanide poisoning, which may have been suicide.”
“Oh,” fell from Regulus mouth. A wave of guilt washed over him, for not knowing the history of a group he himself was a part of.
“How old was he?”
“Forty-one.”
Forty-one years.
Forty-one short years.
It seemed impossible for anyone to die that young, for anyone to die at all.
In the silence, James’ hand found Regulus, again, and their hands transformed into a singular being that breathed on its own.
They kept wandering around the museum, and James pointed at the airplanes that hung from the ceiling on the third floor, and Regulus asked an endless series of questions about everything they passed. It was nice to be the one listening for once, and to listen properly, instead of only waiting for the other to be done speaking in order to get out a few words of his own.
Was this what people felt like when they were in love? That everything faded, except for the other person, and that every word that came out of their mouth became a new bible? That the sound of their breathing became the only white noise that truly quieted their mind?
Notes:
... you see, i'm a space nerd. the martian by andy weir is my favorite book.
i wrote most of this chapter right before the mock exam of my oral a-level exam in maths, sitting in a deserted hallway of my school, wearing a pluto—never forget—1930-2006 t-shirt. the actual exam went well though.
i've visited the science museum two summers ago and i can really really recommend it to anyone who is interested in science and engineering
remember to be kind to yourself and drink water<3
Chapter 6: if i’m not the one for you (you’ve gotta stop holding me the way you do)
Notes:
i am posting this chapter from a train because this week has been truly crazy—the life of a showgirl announcement!! wishbone release!! and on thursday i welded at my internship, which i was terrified of at first but ended up being really fun
chapter title from water under the bridge by adele
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
It had started with an off-hand comment from James. A text message, more accurately, nine words sent at 2.16 am on a Wednesday night.
i wish i could get out of the city
An hour later, Regulus had called ahead and sworn Mrs. Weasley to secrecy. The Blacks owned a cottage in southern Wales—more for tax reasons than the fact than any of them particularly cared for the landscape—and paid a local woman to look after it regularly.
He’d only stayed at the cottage once before. Their Uncle Alphard had taken him and Sirius there for a long weekend one May. Back then, Mrs. Weasley had still been Miss Prewett, and at nineteen, she’d been the same height as thirteen-year-old Regulus. Regulus vaguely recalled a young man who’d lived in the town, a struggling inventor named Arthur Weasley, who had a bush of dark red hair that had rivalled Molly’s mop of aggressively orange curls.
He called in a favour and obtained a car, a dark blue convertible, and found a reasonable excuse for him not being in the city for thirty-six hours.
On Friday morning, he asked James if he was free that weekend, and if he’d ever been to Wales.
***
James gaped at him when Regulus pulled up to the curb in front of the building his flat was in, wearing sunglasses and a wide smile.
“How did you do that?”
“A magician doesn’t reveal his secrets.”
And James honest-to-God pouted.
He threw open the passenger door and dropped his bag on the backseat.
Regulus watched him buckle himself into the passenger seat, resting one hand on the steering wheel.
“Fine,” James said, “Can I at least pick the music?”
Regulus let him, and they spent the drive with Céline Dion, Whitney Houston and Taylor Swift. The wind whipped their hair around their faces and the scenery whizzed past them in a blur of green and blue and grey. Every time James spotted sheep—which, while they were driving through Wales, was every few minutes—he pointed at them excitedly. Regulus struggled to keep his eyes on the road.
They stopped in a town that consisted of a dozen houses scattered along a Main Street. Upon raiding the single shop—which sold food, books, and, inexplicably, crocheting supplies—they had what they declared lunch, sitting on the hood of the car.
“What does the tattoo mean?” Regulus asked, mouth full of chips, nodding to James’ left forearm. He’d spotted a splash of ink the last time they’d seen each other, the first time James had worn short sleeves around him.
James swallowed before replying.
“It’s a lion,” he explained, twisting his arm so Regulus could catch a better look. The lion stretched three inches from his elbow down his forearm, caught mid-roar. “The school we went to had a thing with sorting students into houses. We ended up in the lion’s, and it evolved into an inside joke.”
Regulus turned his gaze away and blinked against the bright sun.
“Lily was a tough nut to crack, it took us years to convince her to get one, too. Remus got his before me, actually, but he’s been getting tattoos since we were sixteen.”
Regulus turned back to James just in time to watch him tug his shirt up to reveal the left side of his lower ribcage. There, creating a stark contrast against his skin, is a drawing of a Lily—the flower—in pitch-black ink.
“There’s a moon on my shoulder, too,” James added, “but I can’t reach it properly. Maybe you’ll see it sometime.”
The shade of red Regulus’s cheeks took on should’ve sent him into a spiral of embarrassment, but something about James stopped him dead in his tracks. And when James looked at him from under his lashes and raised one corner of his mouth, he knew that it was futile.
James was the sun at the centre of the solar system, the centre of gravity that had pulled Regulus in and now refused to let him go.
Blame it on the laws of the universe, all of it, from the first words they’d exchanged all the way to this moment, when Regulus pushed his fingers into James’ hair and pulled his lips into a searing kiss, and James slipped his hand onto Regulus’ hip, and he found the exact spot where his waist dipped, and his fingers curled around the jut of his hipbone, and Regulus arched into him and—
Maybe some things were inevitable, maybe they always would’ve ended up like this in this exact moment, or maybe it was one string of impossible choices that had led them here, and it had happened against all odds.
Either way, when an involuntary moan slipped past Regulus’ lips, a spark of electricity flew through his veins, he was sure that he’d never felt more alive than here in this moment, on the hood of a blue convertible in the middle of nowhere.
***
James’ mouth fell open in surprise for the second time that day when Regulus slowed down in front of a cottage. It wasn’t big by any means—just a two-storey house, painted pale yellow—but it stood at the top of a cliff-like hill that looked out over the rest of the town. They’d driven past the half dozen other houses that sat there, and Regulus had pointed out the Weasleys’.
Their house was made up of at least four floors—but it was hard to count them. The house seemed to defy the laws of physics. Rooms had been added in a seemingly random pattern, stacked on top of each other like childrens’ building blocks, creating the impression that magic was the only thing preventing them from toppling over.
The Black cottage sat in the centre of an elaborate garden, and the gravel crunched under their soles as they walked up to the house. The foyer was cooler than the air outside, and Regulus led James upstairs to the bedrooms. He picked the biggest one—with a king-sized bed, en-suite bathroom and balcony that looked out over the Atlantic behind the cottage.
In the kitchen, they found a cookbook—which, for some unfathomable reason was German, of all languages—and James flipped it open to a random page.
“Pfannkuchen,” he read aloud, most likely horribly mispronouncing the word.
Regulus held back a laugh and pulled up Google translate.
“How do you spell that?” he asked, leaning over James’ shoulder.
“P-F-A-N-N-K-U-C-H-E-N.”
“According to Google, it’s pancakes.”
James looked at the rest of the page—and at the picture in the top right corner, which showed a stack of pancakes.
“Oh, yeah—that makes sense.”
They ran the list of ingredients through the translator as well and raided the kitchen cabinets—only to discover them empty.
“It really doesn’t make sense to store food in a place you only visit once a decade,” Regulus admitted.
“A trip to the store it is,” James announced, and it was sealed.
Regulus hesitated briefly before they stepped out of the front door, but James took his hand with a certainty he didn’t want to destroy.
He’d never held anyone’s hand outside—the two times he’d held James’ hand had both been in the relative privacy of museums. There was something about holding hands outside, in plain daylight, that felt like a confession he couldn’t take back. Like him putting a claim on James the way you couldn’t really claim the sky as your own because the sky was infinite and you were entirely irrelevant in comparison.
James noticed Regulus inner turmoil and stopped over the threshold.
“Are you okay? Or is this too much?”
Regulus shook his head and squeezed James’ hand.
“Rationally I know there’s nothing wrong with me holding your hand,” he said, “and nobody here knows who we are, but—it’s not easy. There’s no switch I can flip to make it alright from one second to the next.”
James brought his free hand up to Regulus’ jaw.
“Take your time, love,” he said, and Regulus felt the heat rise in his cheeks at the pet name. “I’ll wait for you until you’re comfortable with it.”
The naked honesty overwhelmed him. He rose on his tiptoes until his lips pressed against James’. His arm looped around James’ neck on instinct, and he pushed one leg between James’. James sighed into the kiss and returned it softly.
They broke apart to take a breath, and James used it as an opportunity to push Regulus against the doorframe.
“I would—love—to hold—your hand—in public,” he mumbled between kisses, “but—I won’t—force you—to do—anything—that—makes—you—uncomfortable.”
Regulus let go of James’ hand and used both of his to cup James’ jaw and hold him a few inches away from his face.
“I want to hold your hand, too,” he assured him, “and I’ll tell you the second I’m having doubts, okay?”
James nodded, still caught in Regulus’ loving grip.
“Deal.”
Eventually, they made it out of the house, and half a mile down the street, to the only store in the town. They picked up flour, sugar and baking powder, salt, and milk and eggs. James ambushed Regulus with a banana and shot him twice—Regulus played along and dramatically fell to the ground, landing half on top of an aggressively pink flamingo pool floatie. They spent seven minutes translating and arguing about the final ingredient of the pancakes—Apfelmus—until they figured it was apple sauce.
On the way back, they each carried one bag of ingredients. Their free hands were swinging between them—intertwined.
They took a small detour to the sliver of beach, but the tide was so low that they only caught a glimpse of pale blue water in the distance. Seagulls circled above them and dove down, spreading their wings just in time to avoid a collision with the wet sand.
The beach was deserted, and James begged Regulus to join him until he agreed.
Leaving their shoes and the pancake ingredients by a bench, they took off running toward the water. Screaming due to the cold sand, Regulus slowed down to roll up his trousers. He bent down and managed to secure one leg, but when he touched the hem of the other one, he was swept up into someone’s arms.
“James!” he exclaimed. “Put me down!”
James’ laughter mixed with the squawking of the seagulls, and he sprinted to the edge of the water, carrying Regulus bridal-style.
“Don’t you dare drop me!” Regulus demanded as soon as he realized what James was going to do.
“I would never!” James claimed—moments before wading into the water and dropping him.
Regulus was submerged within a heartbeat and struggled to break through the surface again. When he did, it was to splash James with a load of icy water.
“Hey!” James shouted in protest, but Regulus didn’t let up.
James’ shirt was soaked through by the time he threw all caution into the wind and plunged into the water next to Regulus. Regulus waited for him to come up for air again—the water only went up to his hips—but an arm was slung around his waist and pulled him down like the tentacle in Star Wars did with Luke in the garbage compressor.
Thrashing wildly, Regulus tried to wriggle out of James’ grip, but it was futile.
The water curled around him, engulfing him. He coughed, not having had enough time for a proper breath. James seemed to notice, and rose above the water line again.
“Are you okay?” he asked, breathless.
Regulus blew his curls out of his eyes and clung to James’ torso like a koala.
“Yeah,” he said, and kissed James.
James tasted like salt and wind and life, and Regulus’ heart skipped a beat when James started kissing him back. In response, Regulus’ legs found their way around James’ hips and James gripped his thighs to secure his position.
Their bliss lasted only seconds, until the wind picked up and blew a gust of cold air over them, sending shivers down Regulus’ back that had little to do with the way James’ chest looked underneath his now basically see-through shirt.
“We should get back to the cottage,” Regulus whispered. “I don’t want you to get sick.”
A drop of water ran down James’ forehead and down the bridge of his nose. It picked up another drop and they rolled farther until they hung at the tip of James’ nose, threatening to fall at every motion.
James blew out a breath and Regulus watched the drop shudder and fall.
“Yes, we should,” James agreed.
He hoisted Regulus up and slung him over his shoulder, once again ignoring Regulus’ shouts of protest.
***
They arrived at the cottage dripping and freezing.
“You can shower in the bathroom attached to the master bedroom,” Regulus suggested awkwardly, “I’ll take the one down the hall.”
James hovered in the hallway next to him until he nodded.
“Sure.”
There was a brief moment when they tried to walk up the narrow stairs at the same time and their shoulders bumped against each other.
Regulus flinched and pulled back as if he’d been met with a spark of electricity.
Instead of pulling back too, James took Regulus hand and pulled him up the stairs along with him.
Another thing Regulus found himself wishing he could get used to.
***
It turned out that James did not actually know how to make pancakes. However, he made up for this lack of experience with a bottomless well of enthusiasm and the CD player he’d found in the living room. He’d gone through the collection while Regulus was in the shower, put on the West Side Story soundtrack and skipped over enough songs just in time for Regulus to catch him belting out I Feel Pretty, using a spatula as a microphone.
Once Regulus recovered from the laughing fit that had inevitably followed, and the kiss—James’ attempt at getting him back down—the actual cooking commenced.
According to Regulus, they shared the work—which meant James measured ingredients and mixed them into a batter while Regulus sat on the counter next to him and offered suggestions he got from a French website he had opened on his phone.
“Contrary to the actual instructions, this suggests mixing the dry ingredients first,” Regulus read out.
James emerged from the cabinet he’d stuck his head into in search of a bowl big enough to fit the amount of batter they’d need.
“Sounds reasonable,” he agreed, and set a bright pink bowl down on the counter. “Any idea where the mixer might be?”
Regulus shook his head.
“Sorry, no idea.”
Regulus kept scrolling down the page while James opened the door of every cabinet until it looked like someone had broken in and searched for something. It was when he opened the very last cabinet that he finally exclaimed, “Found it!” and raised the mixer above his head in a victory pose.
Regulus dropped his phone into his lap and clapped four times.
Following Regulus’ instructions—he calculated the amount of flour, sugar, salt, eggs and milk they needed with the calculator on his phone—he was gay and could drive a car but not do math in his head to save his life, thank you—James meticulously measured every ingredient.
During the thirty-minute resting time the batter demanded, James beat Regulus at eleven rounds of Uno. Regulus would have won the last one, he swore, if the timer hadn’t interrupted them.
Since the pancaked required constant attention to avoid getting burned, they ate leaning back against the counter, apple sauce dripping out of the rolled pancakes and onto the finest china in the house. In James’ defense, these plates were the first ones he’d found, and Regulus was far enough in his hidden rebellion to do anything that would send Walburga into fits of disbelieving anger.
Later, by the time the light shining into the kitchen through the windows wasn’t enough anymore and they’d turned on the yellow-glowing overhead light, James rolled up his sleeves and washed the dishes while Regulus sat on the counter again with a dish towel and put the dried plates and cutlery and other things they’d needed for the pancakes down next to him.
After handing Regulus the last plate, James ran his hands under the tap to clean them from dish soap and Regulus couldn’t stop staring at his knuckles.
He kept his eyes on them as James stepped between his legs and grabbed a piece of the dish towel to dry his hands.
“Hey,” he said, looking at Regulus from under his lashes.
Regulus lowered the plate, losing his train of thought.
“Hey.”
James extended his hands and took the plate from Regulus, letting it join the others already stacked beside him.
Suddenly, Regulus noticed the silence. Hours ago, they’d put on a few CDs, but they must have forgotten to switch to a new one when the last one had ended.
“Are you okay?” James asked, and the concern written across his face was real. “You’ve been quiet all evening.”
Regulus shrugged.
“I’m just—I don’t know what you expect from me now. I’ve never done this before, and I didn’t bring you here to sleep with you, and you probably have lots of experience with a lot of people—and that’s okay, obviously—I’ve just never—”
James slipped Regulus hand into his.
“I don’t expect anything from you,” he said slowly, “I didn’t come with you to sleep with you, but to spend time with you. I like you—genuinely. You’re funny and sarcastic and you don’t try to put me into a box, and though you’re terrible at Uno, you aren’t a sore loser.” He inhaled deeply and his eyes found Regulus’. “I would like to sleep with you, in general, but it doesn’t have to be today, or ever, if you don’t want it. I’ll wait until you’re ready, even if you’ll never be. I need you to know that I won’t try to pressure you into anything you’re not comfortable with, and—”
He was cut off by Regulus crashing his lips into his.
“We can try to see how far we get tonight,” Regulus whispered, “and I’ll tell you the second I want to stop. Okay?”
James nodded, and Regulus had never seen anyone look as beautiful as James had in that very moment, lips pink, pupils blown wide, and breathless.
“Okay.”
Notes:
be kind to yourself, drink some water and listen to wishbone by conan gray <3
and in case you’re interested, this is my personal pancake recipe (this is for four pancakes, multiply the amount accordingly if you want more): mix 250g of flour, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 pinch of salt. in a separate bowl: mix 250ml of milk and two eggs. mix everything together until it’s smooth, near-liquid and doesn’t have any chunks in it. wait for 30 mins. bake them in a pan like a thicker-than-usual crêpe and flip it before it gets too dark. apple sauce goes well with them but feel free to get creative.
Chapter 7: you'd rather die than take your eyes off me (you're a reckless driver)
Notes:
chapter title from reckless driving by lizzy mcalpine featuring ben kessler.
i want you to know that i tried, even though i have no idea what i'm doing.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
They barely made it up the stairs and into the bedroom. On the stairs, James’ lips kept finding the dip of Regulus’ collarbone just below the hem of his shirt, and Regulus could neither think nor walk straight when James’ hands were touching any part of his body.
They were breathless, messy, frantic, hands moving in a desperate attempt to pull each other even closer. James’ hand pressed into the small of Regulus’ back and he arched into the kiss, pulling at the roots of James’ hair hard enough to coax a sigh out of him.
James removed one hand from Regulus’ shoulder and pushed down the doorhandle.
The back of Regulus’ knees hit James’ bed, and he pulled back a fraction, but James chased his mouth with his own.
“Is this okay?” James asked between two kisses.
Regulus opened his eyes—when had he closed them?
“Yes,” he whispered. “Keep going. Please.”
The last word caused James’ pupils to blow up until the brown of his irises disappeared nearly entirely.
It seemed obvious that the top button of Regulus’ shirt had to come off first, and that James’ shirt had to follow. Touching the junction where James’ shoulders met his collarbone was only the logical conclusion to every thought he’d had since they’d met.
Every breath he’d taken since, every step he’d walked toward him, every beat of his heart had propelled him into this moment, into James and the vortex of light that he found himself drawn into during every second they were together.
In this moment, it was easy to forget all the things he didn’t want James to know, all the parts he’d kept hidden and the evidence he’d buried. But when Regulus’ shirt slipped off his shoulders and revealed his torso and bare arms, all the evidence was plainly visible for James to see.
The white scars could almost pass for lightning, if they were in the sky. The uneven marks had grown over the course of years. Some had been caused by fire, others by blades.
Some had been cleaned and patched up, stitched together with unspoken love, others had been ignored.
All had been hidden by long sleeves and loose shirts.
Regulus crossed his arms in front of his chest in a futile attempt to hide what James had already seen.
The expression on James’ face was impossibly soft, as if Regulus were made of glass and might shatter at any moment.
“How did you—”
James’ voice faded halfway through the question.
Regulus screwed his eyes shut.
He hated his parents for doing this to him, he hated Sirius for leaving him alone with them, and himself most of all for giving them a reason in the first place. If only he were a better son, if only he weren’t weak and selfish, they didn’t have to fix him.
“It’s for your own good,” his father had always said before he’d begun.
He’d repeated the words while he’d run blades across Regulus’ skin and snapped a belt against his back until the waistline of his trousers was soaked with blood.
He opened his eyes again and tried to rid himself of the mental image. He wasn’t that boy anymore. He was stronger now. And lonelier.
“I’m sorry,” Regulus tried, “I should’ve—”
James let go of his hips and retreated an inch or two. It was barely noticeable, but it felt like miles.
“It’s okay,” he said, not taking his eyes off Regulus. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
The tears came without warning, and one slipped past Regulus’ defense and ran down his cheek. He was still laying on the mattress, so it disappeared down his jaw just below his ear.
“It seems that I have. Otherwise you wouldn’t have stopped. I’m sorry about the scars, I know that they’re ugly and horrible and I shouldn’t have let you see them, and I should’ve told you sooner and—”
James cut off his rambling with his hand. He cupped Regulus’ cheek and swiped his thumb across his cheekbone to wipe away a second tear that Regulus hadn’t been able to contain.
“Hey,” he said, “this doesn’t change how I feel about you. If anything, it makes you more beautiful because they show that you survived, whatever it is.”
Regulus was sure that James knew exactly who was responsible for the scars, and that the only reason why he didn’t openly acknowledge it was out of respect for Regulus. How did he still consider Regulus someone worth staying for after everything he’d seen?
If the roles were reversed, Regulus would have surely bolted by now.
More proof that James was too good for him, and that every second was borrowed time.
“Can I touch you?”
The question lodged itself between Regulus’ ribs and protruded into his heart.
“Yes,” he said, barely above a whisper.
The first touch was feather-light, and James’ fingertips grazed the curve of his ribcage.
Goosebumps broke out across Regulus’ skin and he went still without meaning to, just in case he shattered the fragile moment if he moved at all.
James traced the scars on Regulus’ ribs, faded with time, but still a vivid reminder of his parents’ power, and he transformed them into something alive, something brimming with desire and something that felt dangerously close to love.
Regulus shifted under James’ gaze.
“Please stop looking,” he pleaded.
James lifted his gaze to his face, and used one hand to cradle Regulus’ cheek again. Regulus leaned into the touch.
“You’re beautiful,” James said, “scars and all.”
It hit him like a freight train—just as unprepared as the first time he’d said it to him. It knocked the breath out of his lungs and the tension out of his bones.
Regulus dropped his eyes. He couldn’t maintain eye contact, in case James didn’t mean it.
“You don’t have to say that, just because,” Regulus told him. He was giving him an out.
“I’m saying it because I mean it,” James said, “you’re beautiful.”
He leaned down and looked up at Regulus, a silent question. Regulus held his breath. James pressed a kiss to the most prominent scar, light and barely noticeable if Regulus hadn’t seen it happen.
“You’re beautiful,” he repeated, then kissed another scar.
The trail of kisses snaked its way around Regulus’ chest, and Regulus relished it.
With the way James touched him, he could pretend that the scars had been his choice, a tattoo he’d gotten as a reminder. He ran his fingers along the lines of his body like one traced brushstrokes of a painting just to convince oneself that it was real.
Underneath his hands and mouth, Regulus’ body felt like it truly belonged to him.
James touched every inch of his skin until his touch was burned into him, until his devotion was written across his heart and etched into his bones, until every cell in his body hummed to the tune of James’ breath in the otherwise silent room.
***
“I want to take you to the Louvre,” Regulus said, with a certainty that surprised even him. “One day.”
They were sprawled across the bed, legs tangled and Regulus’ head on James’ chest. Listening to his heartbeat, steady and strong. They’d thrown the windows open and the wind let the curtains dance.
The air smelled of salt—both from the sea outside and their sweat.
“Tell me about it,” James mumbled, and Regulus could tell by the way the edges of the words blurred together that his eyes were closed.
Regulus closed his, too, and imagined the Glass Pyramid above him instead of the pale blue ceiling.
“We’ll enter through the main entrance,” Regulus said, voice bordering on dreamily, “and get to the room below the Glass Pyramid. That’s on an underground level. I’ll take your hand and we’ll walk up the Daru staircase.
“You’ll keep asking me why it has to be that specific staircase and I’ll tell you to trust me. And then you’ll freeze and stop breathing when you see her for the first time.”
“The Mona Lisa?” James asked drowsily.
“No,” Regulus smiled. “The Winged Victory of Samothrace. It’s a Greek statue that dates back to the early second century BC, and she’s standing on the bow of a ship at the top of this white staircase, and her wings are spread wide. She’s missing arms and a head, but she’s the most beautiful statue I’ve ever seen.”
“She sounds beautiful,” James agreed.
“Yes—I guess that’s part of why I like her so much. She’s a reminder that you don’t have to be perfect or complete or whole to be beautiful.”
James’ arm found its way to Regulus’ hip and his fingers curled around the jut of the bone. Regulus had come to think of it as belonging to James now. His hand fit there perfectly, and Regulus couldn’t imagine a more perfect place for his hand to go.
“For what it’s worth,” James said, “I have yet to see a statue that can compare to your imperfect, incomplete beauty.”
***
Regulus woke to the sound of waves crashing into the cliff below. He kept his eyes closed and listened to James’ breathing, not ready for reality to catch up with them.
He was curled into him, his face tucked into the crook of his neck, and James’ bare skin was radiating warmth.
He intended to savour the moment—let the threads wrap around them and tether him to James until not even his parents could separate them.
The universe, in all its cruelty, granted the three more minutes.
When his phone started ringing several rooms away, Regulus’ first instinct was to burrow his face deeper into James’ throat and ignore it, but James woke from the distant sound. He pried his eyes open and struggled to focus on Regulus without his glasses.
Regulus wished for a camera to capture this version of James—rumpled from sleep and entirely unguarded. Not that Regulus had ever run into any walls that James had put up, on the contrary, he appeared to be an open book, wearing his heart on his sleeve and a smile on his face, a joke and a genuine compliment on the tip of his tongue.
“You should probably answer that.”
James voice was raspy, and he lifted his head off the pillow to get a proper look at Regulus.
“Don’t want to,” Regulus protested, turning his head and wrapping his arms around James’ chest like a koala bear. “Want to stay here with you.”
The ghost of a smile turned the corners of James’ mouth upward.
“It could be important, sweetheart. You should go.”
Regulus’ heart broke at the term of endearment.
James should have saved it for someone else—someone who could love him the way he deserved it, someone who didn’t have to keep himself from flinching at the slam of a door, someone who didn’t put on an armour of lies to leave the house.
Someone who could be honest with him.
He held the tears back while he scrambled to disentangle himself from James. He flew down the stairs and pressed the answer button just before the voicemail jumped into effect.
“Hello?”
He must have looked ridiculous. Standing in the kitchen in James’ shirt—stolen at some point during the night—curls probably sticking up into odd directions, and panting into a phone.
“This is Pandora—I just wanted to let you know that I’ve found the accountholder of one of the major players in Voldemort’s business.”
“Who is it?” Regulus demanded.
“Lucius Malfoy.”
Regulus cursed.
Notes:
this week i was supposed to write two chapters—i ended up writing half of a chapter (and it wasn’t even the one i wanted to write). in my defense, i am four days into an argument about the pros and cons of L-shaped planets that is primarily conducted through pdf-documents consisting of weird sketches and calculations. space nerd stuff, i guess.
as always, be kind to yourself, and drink some water <3
Chapter 8: but i swore hands were made for fighting (i swore eyes were made to cry)
Notes:
life is very messy right now, i just wanted you to know—i'm still writing. just, maybe, perhaps, a different things than i should be writing. whatever.
chapter title from alley rose by conan gray (an alternate title would have been "i can run but i can't hide (from my family line)" from family line by conan gray. that man really knows how to write about messed-up family dynamics.)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
In a way, Narcissa’s dinner invitation had come at the perfect time.
The entire Black and Malfoy families gathered at Malfoy Manor the following Thursday—but since many members of the two families had gotten married to people who ran in the same circles, a large portion of the Notts, Lestranges, Zabinis and Goyles was present as well.
Regulus arrived just on time—thanks to his driver, who by now was used to Regulus taking a few minutes longer for everything because he was busy daydreaming about James. He wasn’t eager to mingle with his cousins once-removed and in-laws due to marriages that were a result of business deals rather than love, so he made his way into the small library in the hope of catching a minute of peace and quiet. He didn’t like Lucius, or the woman he’d transformed Cissy into. His cousin—the girl who had sat at the piano for hours, taking requests, and who could barely be convinced to come to the dinner table—had faded in favour of a woman whose posture was never anything other than impeccable. These days, he only caught glimpses of her bright laughter and sparkling eyes, and he loathed Lucius for taking his cousin away from him—and Malfoy Manor reminded him too much of his parents’ mansion, with its high ceilings and walls covered in wooden panels and gold-threaded tapestries in rich shades of emerald and leaf green.
But he’d always found comfort in the library.
Most of the books were expensive leather-bound volumes that had likely gone untouched for decades, if not centuries, and Regulus liked to run his finger along the spines, if only to feel the ridges of the letters and leave his fingerprints on something that had already withstood the test of time for much longer than he had. The cackling stone fireplace provided just enough warmth for the secluded room to keep it on the right side of cozy, and one of the chairs—a wingback chair with intricately carved wooden legs that looked like it had come straight out of a black-and-white detective movie—had cushioning so thick and overstuffed that one could sink into it like a cloud.
Halfway to the library, he passed through the salon—a room he’d dreaded ever since he’d born witness to an argument between Lucius and Narcissa after the former had had one too many glasses of whiskey to impress none other than Thomas Riddle. His hand had found Narcissa’s cheek and Regulus had been angry enough to bolt through the door, land a punch in Lucius’ face, and flee the country with Narcissa in tow.
Back then, he’d envisioned himself pushing Lucius against the wall and taking Narcissa to safety—but he’d played it all the way through, and all the outcomes had entailed their return forced by their family sooner or later, one way or another. However, he’d realized two important things—one, he had to get out, out of the house, out of the city, out of his family’s iron grasp, and two, he had to do it gradually by finding the right domino that would eventually bring the entire structure down around them.
The salon was, objectively, a perfectly nice room. Spacious, and sparsely decorated, though not without aesthetic in mind.
Regulus’s gaze passed over the painting that hung in the centre of the wall—and paused.
Up until now, a dramatic impression of the scenery of the French countryside had commanded the room, but it had been replaced with none other than René Magritte’s The Lovers.
Of course.
Of course Lucius would want this painting to hang in the salon, the most important room for any social gathering he might host. The expensive whiskey glasses on the side table told stories of business deals sealed on the Chesterfield sofa, of men in dark suits and threats wrapped in promises of wealth. The sofas were positioned perfectly—anyone who sat there had a perfect line of sight to the painting.
Everyone who sat there would know that Lucius owned something that had once belonged to Thomas Riddle—it was up to them to respect or fear him for it.
Regulus stepped closer.
The painting didn’t make him respect Lucius any more—if anything, it added to his disdain. True power wasn’t acquired through the purchase of an object that belonged to someone more powerful—it was earned.
As far as Regulus was concerned, Lucius had never done anything except cower in front of Riddle. He’d collected the crumbs that had been left for him and prided himself on it.
But he couldn’t deny that the painting itself was beautiful—even if he didn’t like what meaning it carried.
The two people in the painting were depicted mid-kiss, and when he ran his eyes along the lines of their faces, hidden by cloth, his lips prickled with the reminder of James’ kisses.
“You know,” a voice said from behind him, “I’ve always thought this painting was incredibly sad—but true. Melancholic.”
Regulus turned in time to see Narcissa slot into place beside him and gaze at the painting with the same admiration he’d seen in her eyes the first time she’d heard Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude at a live concert.
“I think it’s comforting, Regulus said, studying Narcissa’ expression carefully, “to know that love doesn’t need a face. The lovers have a connection even though they’re not actually touching. Isn’t that true love? To not have to see face to face to love someone?”
Narcissa shook her head, but she couldn’t ban the smile from her delicate features entirely.
“You’ve always been the romantic.”
“Guilty as charged.”
It was a weak attempt at humour—too many things stood between them, spoken and silent, accusations and scattered blame, mutual guilt and words they couldn’t take back—but they were still the same cousins that played the piano together while Sirius, Bella and Andy preferred to run around outside. Though Regulus had never been able to match Cissy’s grace and dedication, he’d been a decent player and committed enough to be satisfied with playing chords while she created—for lack of a better word—magic with her fingers.
“To me,” Narcissa said, after taking a breath, “it means that you can never truly know the person you love, no matter how close you seem to be.”
Regulus wondered whether she was talking about Lucius. Even if she did, he couldn’t force her to leave. Freedom had to be a choice, and he couldn’t choose for her.
“That’s awfully pessimistic,” Regulus commented instead, trying to draw her out of the reserve.
Narcissa’s eyebrows knitted together just the tiniest bit—she was trying to hide her true feelings.
“Realistic,” she corrected. “I’m a realist.”
Regulus gave her the gift of silence. She must have known what he was thinking—they were standing so close to each other that she must have heard the thoughts that echoed through his mind—yet she chose to accept the gift.
Ever since the day Narcissa had stood next to Lucius in a white dress and declared herself his wife, she and Regulus hadn’t agreed on the semantics of anything.
But they agreed that the painting was beautiful—and maybe that thread could be enough to tie them together.
Narcissa glanced at the clock.
“We should go to the dining room. Dinner is about to start, and we don’t want to keep the others waiting.”
We can’t shatter the illusion of the picture-perfect wife, was what Regulus understood.
***
Dinner was predictably tense.
Despite it being a family function, every person in attendance was dressed in tailored suits and evening gowns. Diamonds, gold, silver, and jewels of too many names adorned necks, arms, fingers and ears.
Conversation kept circling back and forth between the same topics—the various family businesses, recent developments regarding people they knew but had not cared enough to invite, and Thomas Riddle.
How had the man managed to invade virtually every part of Regulus’ life?
He couldn’t go twenty-four hours without running into a mention of him. Even his time with James was tainted by Riddle’s presence, looming over them like a dark cloud about to erupt into a downpour of biblical dimensions. Riddle was the man at the centre of the illegal happenings at the Black Corporation, Regulus was sure of it, therefore he was the reason he couldn’t leave—yet.
Regulus was going to take him and his empire down, even if it cost him—
A jab in his ribs startled him out of his thoughts.
Upon looking to his right, he discovered that the elbow in question belonged to none other than Bella in all her curly glory. Her hair had been put up on top of her head, but strands had escaped and were framing her face, creating the impression of a madwoman on the run.
“Huh?” he asked, face blank.
“I asked you,” another voice declared from across the table, “what you thought about the new direction your family’s foundation is moving into.”
The question had come from Lucius—and Regulus realized too late that everyone was listening.
He set down his cutlery and readied himself for battle.
“I don’t know what direction you’re referring to,” he said. “We’re dedicated to the same causes as before, namely education of the less privileged and—”
“We all know the text from the website,” Lucius waved him off. “However, I’d like to know more about your sudden interest in art.”
Regulus fought to keep his expression even to keep up the pretense that he knew anything about what was happening inches in front of his face.
“The auction at the charity gala?” he finally asked.
A murmur rose among the other guests—less from conversation, and more out of a collective holding of breaths. The Black family was more important than the Malfoys—but the marriage between Lucius and Narcissa had raised his status. This was as close to an open challenge, nearly a confrontation, as they’d ever come.
One spark was all it would take, and the blast radius would engulf them all.
To them, it was the best kind of entertainment.
Lucius held Regulus’ gaze for a moment longer, and Regulus cursed himself for not being able to read any emotion in his eyes. He shook his head.
“No, I’m referring to one of the foundation’s lawyers—I believe it was a certain Miss Rosier—made some unsettling inquiries about the origins of the Malfoy art collection.”
Regulus held his breath.
Did Pandora think the paintings were some kind of money trail? If she did, she should have been more careful—tested the waters before plunging in head-first and alerting everyone of their presence.
What had she been thinking?
He was left with no choice but to run with it.
“Perhaps she was preparing another auction like the one where you purchased Magritte’s Lovers,” Regulus invented, “you are of course aware that the money was put to good use in—”
“Yes, of course,” Lucius said, apparently insistent on not letting Regulus finish a single statement. Regulus was growing annoyed. There was only so much he could take before he’d start saying things he was going to regret sooner or later—likely the second they made it out of his mouth. “I’m merely wondering why she is moving forward with this before we are involved in any kind of planning.”
“It’s still in the early planning stage,” Regulus explained, curling his fingers around his wine glass and taking a small sip, slowly, to appear relaxed and in control. “Were there any particular works or artists she showed interest in? Perhaps I might be able to shed some light on the proceedings.”
Lucius smiled thinly while Regulus swirled the wine around the glass.
“Miss Rosier had the good grace to request information about several paintings, seemingly without having anything in common, in an attempt to obscure her true target.”
Regulus sat the wine back down after taking another sip.
“I assure you, my dear Lucius, that Miss Rosier was acting in the best interest of the foundation and harboured absolutely no ulterior moves regarding you collection of art.”
An obvious lie—but nobody present could call him out on it without facing consequences. He might hate the weight his name carried and put on his shoulders, but he couldn’t deny the cage he was trapped in also provided protection.
The silence filled the room until Regulus could hear his heartbeat—and he made a choice.
“Narcissa,” he said, lifting the napkin to dab at his lips, “I’m afraid I can’t stay for dessert. I have got important business to take care of—I’m sure you understand.”
They all would—after the scene Lucius had staged, Regulus had the benefit of the doubt.
He rose from the chair, nodded to several people, felt a pang of regret at the shadow in Narcissa’s eyes, and left.
***
As soon as he was in the car and had made sure the driver wasn’t paying attention to him, he punched Pandora’s number into his phone.
It rang twice, and Regulus counted the streetlights on the Malfoy’s driveway. Just as they’d made it past the gate, Pandora picked up.
“Pandora Rosier.”
“What the hell were you thinking?” Regulus spoke low, but his words cut like a blade. “Going around asking questions about the Malfoy’s art collection? If they were careful before, they’re actively suspicous now.”
“Suspicion is good,” Pandora argued, “suspicion lets people make mistakes they usually wouldn’t.”
“What if they’re on our tail before they make one? What if it’s not enough time? What if they get rid of all the evidence and leave us out in the rain?”
Pandora’s end of the line was quiet, as if she knew that he wasn’t done just yet.
She was right—he wasn’t.
“I know that you’re helping me out of some sense of righteousness, or duty, or because you think you owe me a favor, I couldn’t care less, as long as you’re on my side, but at the end of the day, you can go home. You can make a choice and walk away from this, but I can’t, because this is the very thing I’m coming home to every night.”
A few beats of silence followed, and Regulus filled them with the trees and blurred houses the car sped past. At some point during the short drive, it had started to rain, and Regulus watches the drops race down the window until they dipped too low for his gaze to follow them.
“I should have told you,” Pandora finally conceded.
“Why didn’t you?”
Perhaps he hadn’t meant for the words to come out as harshly, but his pulse was still thumping loudly in his ears and he didn’t want to take the back, now that he’d said them.
“I wanted to protect you—give you plausible deniability.”
“You made me look like I don’t know what the people who work for me are doing, that’s what you did,” he said, and Pandora didn’t argue with the accusation.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and Regulus found a trace of real regret in her voice. Another pause, shorter this time. “And you’re wrong—I’m not doing this for you, or for me and my conscience.” She sucked in a breath.
Regulus ran through the short list he’d compiled about her, all the things he guessed she didn’t want people to know immediately, and came up empty. Perhaps, if they’d sat opposite each other, he might have been able to read the answer in her expression, found clues in the crease between her brows and the pale freckles on her cheeks.
“I’m doing this for my brother,” Pandora said, and Regulus could have hit his head against a wall.
Of course—it was the piece of the puzzle that hadn’t quite fit before. While Sirius had cut his losses and left without a word to Regulus, Evan had slipped deeper into Riddle’s network and quickly gained importance and status among his trusted companions.
“He’s in too deep, and I don’t think he really knows what’s going on. I don’t know if Riddle is manipulating or blackmailing him, but I have to get him out of there. Taking the entire organisation down seems like a efficient way to do so—even if he hates me after we’ve done it.”
Regulus’ words froze on his tongue. His heart skipped a beat, and his hand uncurled he dropped the phone.
He’d never thought to ask the question—until now.
Did Sirius hate him?
Notes:
as always, be kind to yourself, listen to a song you like, drink some water, and do that thing you're supposed to. it's not as hard as you think, and you'll feel better afterwards.
love you xx
Chapter 9: how evergreen, our group of friends (don't think we'll say that word again)
Notes:
i decided i needed this chapter on a whim, but i think it works. anyway, i'm on a different continent right now than i usually am which is very exciting!! i've slept about four hours in the last 56 hours and it's showing, but oh well.
chapter title from champagne problems by taylor swift
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Had Sirius chosen to leave him behind because he hated him?
Had he only left because he’d started hating Regulus the way he hated their parents?
Had he tried to save himself from their parents’ hate or had his own hate made him selfish?
Variations of the same questions tumbled around Regulus’ mind, and all the answers were out of reach. He felt a sharp jab to his heart at the thought of returning to his too-big, too-quiet, too-perfect flat—it might have been loneliness, or longing, they were too close to tell them apart, so he ordered the driver to him off two blocks away from James’ flat.
He should have paid attention to the slideshow his mind provided—all the reasons why he shouldn’t, ranging from the fact that he didn’t even know if James was presently home, to the suspicion that the driver could follow him to James’ door and report back to his parents—but the void in his heart was wider and colder than usual.
The string of fate that had led him into the flower shop was coiled around his heart like barbed wire. Every motion, every beat drove the blades deeper into the flesh, but it was the good kind of hurt—the kind that proved he was still alive to feel the pain.
So, he allowed the string to pull him down yellow-lit sidewalks and into James’ building. One occupant of the highest floor was blasting Lana Del Rey so loudly that the sound poured into the stairwell and overshadowed the squeaking of Regulus’ patent leather shoes.
In front of James’ door, his feet became leaden and froze on the spot.
Over the outro of Young and Beautiful, he could barely make out muffled laughter on the other side of the door. His hand, fisted and raised to knock, uncurled and dropped to his side.
James didn’t need him to be happy.
He had friends who loved him like family, and didn’t have to worry about laughing at the wrong time or not sitting up straight at the dinner table. His fridge was covered in photos of people who hadn’t been posing for hours to get a perfect shot, and his phone was full of people he could call at any time and still trust that they would pick up. They didn’t second-guess every comment or hide accusations in the margins and didn’t calculate their friends’ importance by wealth.
Nothing Regulus offered him—museum visits, vacations, money—inevitably came at the price of sneaking looks over his shoulder and testing the floor tiles before stepping on them just in case they wouldn’t hold his weight. And they didn’t split the bill evenly—Regulus was used to being watched and always being on guard, but it might just cost James everything he was to do the same.
What came easily to one person wrecked another beyond repair.
The door swung inward and Regulus found himself face to face with James. He wore washed-out jeans and mismatched socks, and a shirt that depicted Pluto, judging by the script underneath. Never forget. 1930 - 2006.
As soon as he recognized Regulus, James’ entire face lit up and a smile broke out that stretched all the way from his eyes to his cheeks. Involuntarily, Regulus smiled too.
“Reg!” James quipped, “I’m so glad to see you, come on in! We just queued the presentations, and the popcorn’ll be ready soon.”
He pulled the door all the way open and Regulus crossed the threshold without considering the implications of the we James just referred to. His shoes found a spot between a bright red converse that belonged to James and a brown converse covered in various drawings—he counted at least three moons, a vast array of stars, and four words Regulus guessed were nicknames but couldn’t otherwise place that snaked their way around the sole.
Moony, Wormtail, Doe, and Prongs.
The laughter increased in volume when Regulus closed the door behind him, shutting off Lana Del Rey and replacing her with a heated argument about Dead Poets Society.
Lily was nearly shouting something Regulus couldn’t begin to guess the meaning of—“Of course the lakes is their song, where else do poets die? Besides, this is me trying is about Neil—”
She was sprawled out across the brightly colored sofa, curls falling over her shoulders, arguing. Next to her was a sturdy man, tucked into himself. His short, pale hair fell over his forehead in thin strands and his hands were wrought together in his lap.
“Stop talking about folklore!” the last remaining person in the room demanded. He was tall and lanky, and standing next to the television, which was showing a slide from a PowerPoint presentation—the title of the slide was “Anderperry explained through songs” and there was indeed a picture of Neil and Todd from the 1989 movie that depicted them side by side.
“This conversation is not about Taylor—stop making everything about her!”
Lily crossed her arms in front of her chest and shot him a glare, nearly planting an elbow in the ribs of the man who was squished beside her.
“It’s not my fault she wrote a brilliant album full of songs that fit them—”
Her argument was drowned out by the other man, who was still desperate to make his case.
Regulus stood helplessly, unsure what he’d stumbled upon.
A familiar presence joined him moments later—James.
He cradled a giant bowl of popcorn in his arm and used the other one to pull Regulus in by his waist.
“This is Remus,” he nodded toward the man who was standing and not about to back down against Lily, “that’s Peter, and you’ve already met Lily.”
“The friends of yours that have the bookshop next door?” Regulus guessed.
James responded with a kiss pressed to his temple.
“Yesterday, they got into an argument about whether Dead Poets Society should be sold at the bookstore—I have no idea why they’re arguing, actually, they agree on the actual issue—anyway, Remus is convinced that he has to support his case with our sacred tradition of PowerPoint presentations and Lily—well, she loves to argue. And to talk about Taylor Swift. Don’t even mention ABBA in her presence—you will regret it.”
His shoulders were relaxed and the smile never really left his face when he talked about his friends.
“I’ll be sure to remember it,” Regulus said.
He was still staring at the spectacle unfolding in front of him, but James tugged him by his hand.
“Come on,” he said, and steered toward the armchair that was certainly meant for one person.
“Are you sure—” Regulus began.
James stopped him right then and there. “Yes, I’m sure.”
He took another step and addressed his friends.
“Everyone, this is Regulus, my—” a reassuring squeeze of his hand “—boyfriend.”
Lily stopped mid-sentence to nod approvingly at Regulus, while the man beside her—Peter—extended one hand in a shy wave.
“Hi, Regulus,” Remus said, caught mid-gesture. The slide behind him had changed to a different picture of Todd and the headline was “Why Todd would love crime mysteries.” “Have you seen Dead Poets Society?”
Regulus nodded, too shocked for a proper answer.
“And you agree that not only should Neil not have killed himself but he should also have kissed Todd?”
Another nod.
Remus crossed his arms in front of his chest and looked at James in triumph.
“I like this one,” he decided, and Regulus felt a pang of marvel and regret at gaining the approval of James’ friends. They didn’t know about the inevitable impending heartbreak.
In the meantime, James had planted himself onto the airmchair and was now beckoning Regulus to sit down on the armrest—half on his lap. He found himself leaning precariously off to one side. James noticed and secured him with an arm around his waist.
“Popcorn?”
The question came unexpectedly, but Regulus nonetheless reached into the bowl and retrieved two flakes.
They watched Remus’ presentation in silence for a few seconds—he’d moved on to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and how it could be compared to Dead Poets Society—“The symbolism, Lily, the symbolism!”
“Are they always like this?” Regulus turned his head back to James.
“Like what? Too much? Absolutely insufferable at times?”
Regulus’ eyes widened.
“No,” he spluttered, “I didn’t mean—”
An easy laugh spread over James’ face.
“I know you didn’t, but they are—and that’s okay. They’re still my people. None of us are easy to get along with, but we have each other’s backs, no matter what.”
Chosen family, Regulus thought.
His family had only ever been defined by blood and marriage, not choice. It had to be nice to be able to choose who you wanted to spend your life with—and who you didn’t.
He was silent—too caught up in his head—while Remus continued his presentation, though to James’ friends, presentation seemed to mean everyone was allowed to comment on anything at any time, which led to good-natured arguments and valuable insight into the group’s dynamic.
Lily was always on the move, on the cusp of a quick-witted remark or a point Regulus hadn’t even considered the direction of. She was whip-smart and her dark humor did nothing to make Regulus like her any less.
Remus was calm but passionate—all of them knew queer history like the back of their hand, but Remus’ analytical way of explaining appealed to Regulus. Remus wasn’t the kind of person to jump head-first into things, he took a moment to consider his words, and when he spoke, they carried weight and he was listened to.
Peter had seemed passive at first, but it quickly shone through that he’d earned his rightful place through his steadiness. Regulus pictured him as the kind of person one might call to bail them out of jail—quietly reliable.
And James—James was the beating heart of the group. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face when he was near them, and he made sure everyone was included—even Regulus. And he wasn’t ashamed to introduce him to his friends.
On the contrary, he was constantly touching Regulus in one way or another, as if to brand him as his. It was a nice thought to indulge in for a second—until reality kicked in through the muted sounds of sirens outside and the stomping of an upstairs neighbour.
This bubble they lived in was exactly that—a bubble.
The world didn’t stop moving because two people wanted it to. All they could do was carve out a small space in this flat and hope they wouldn’t be found until they were ready.
They passed the bowl of popcorn around until their fingers touched the floor, and shared a bottle of cheap wine—poured into a wild mixture of glasses, none of which were supposed to hold anything stronger than juice.
As the fuzzy blanket of slight intoxication wrapped around the edges of Regulus’ mind and vision, he found himself losing his inhibitions and he melted into James’ embrace. It was too easy to listen to the conversation with one ear while James’ heartbeat echoed in his other.
“The moon is so pretty,” Remus mused. He was sprawled out in front of the television, lanky limbs pointing in all directions.
Lily released a groan and rolled over until she dropped to the floor in a thump.
“Pretty sure that’s a regular lamp,” she said.
That sent Remus into a fit of giggles, which was contagious enough to pull all of them in one by one until they were all laughing in some way or another. James’ chest shook against Regulus’ cheek and he closed his eyes to burrow deeper into the fabric of his shirt.
“I want to see a penguin,” Peter announced.
Regulus snuck a glance at him and wasn’t as suprised as he should have been to discover that he was on the couch upside down, legs dangling off the back.
The music from upstairs had switched to Paramore, though he didn’t recognize the song.
It was loud and bold, and exactly how he wanted his love for James to be.
“Do you think penguins know they can’t fly?” Peter asked. “What if they never know they can’t fly? Isn’t that incredibly sad?”
James shifted under Regulus’ monkey-like embrace.
“Don’t think so,” he slurred, “can’t miss what you never had.”
“Good point,” Lily perked up. “We should got to Arctica and visit some penguins.”
“Antarctica,” Remus corrected, slurring the words until they bled into each other.
“Whatever.”
The Paramore song ended and was replaced with a low, haunting melody that barely dripped through the ceiling.
“The Ancient Greeks named Arctica Arktos,” Regulus mumbled into James’ chest. “‘t means bear, ‘cause of Ursa Major, y’know. And they named Antarctica the opposite because the bear isn’t there and they had the audacity to be right about it. How dare they? How dare they, James?”
James pulled him in tighter.
Lily released a long sigh.
“I wish I were in love,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” Remus argued. “‘s just pain.”
“Bad choices, in your case,” Peter commented.
“Unfair. Entirely unjustified. Without any precent—”
Lily cut him off.
“The guy you only dated because he said he read Austen and it turned out he lied?”
“The guy with the constellation tattoo that convinced you he was your soulmate?” Peter added helpfully.
“The peppermint tea guy,” James suggested, “the one with the purple striped socks with the yellow polka dots,” and Regulus cracked wide open. Laughter spilled out over the edges of his mind and into his lungs, and they couldn’t contain it.
It bubbled to the surface and out of him like reverse raindrops, the pattern as unpredictable as thunder on a summer night. The tears that mixed with the laughter and spilled out of his eyes might have been rain, too, because Lily described a guy Remus had liked because his hands were beautiful, and James threw in an anecdote about a coffee shop date that had ended with Remus’ date getting the barista’s number, and Regulus didn’t have anything to add.
He hadn’t spent the night on Remus’ bathroom floor after he’d found out peppermint tea guy was cheating with a wedding planner and Hobnobs had been the only things able to cheer him up.
No matter what slivers and slideshows James had let him see—he didn’t know James the way his friends did and never would. They were loving on borrowed time, and the hourglass was running out. He would always have a piece of James—but James would never even catch a glimpse of the whole picture.
This couldn’t be love—at least not the version of it he’d come to discover.
This love was a single lit candle in a cathedral, whispered worship and promises meant to be broken, but it wasn’t cruelty and power plays. They were supposed to meet each other on equal footing, but could they even say the words?
Would the words break the dam Regulus had carefully built and drown them in the tidal wave?
James’ heart kept beating steadily under his touch.
The dim lights of the room painted washed-out shadows across the walls and the muted conversation faded in and out of Regulus’ stream of consciousness. A jab of laughter cut straight to his heart and the blood dripped until it merged with his silent tears.
Lorde started blaring loud enough to overshadow his thoughts, and for the moment, it was enough.
Remus’ voice cut through the haze.
“I’m sure the Dead Poets would’ve loved Richard Siken.”
Notes:
as always, drink some water, and change the world a little<3
lots of love from boston this week<3
freezrbriide on Chapter 3 Mon 28 Jul 2025 11:10AM UTC
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thearoaceplantmom on Chapter 3 Tue 29 Jul 2025 06:04PM UTC
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