Loss of my life

by jaderuby

Summary:

"I'm scared."

The facade, so carefully constructed over weeks of quiet suffering, shattered with a single sentence. He'd made jokes about the hospital food and complained about daytime television and treated his deteriorating condition like a minor inconvenience rather than a death sentence.

"Of dying?" James asked gently.

"Of you forgetting me."

James memorized every flicker, every buzz, every way the harsh white light carved shadows across Regulus's gaunt cheekbones. Room 394 had transformed from a sterile medical space into something that felt almost like home—if home could smell like antiseptic and carry the constant undertone of machinery keeping someone you love tethered to life.

"You don't have to stay," Regulus whispered, his voice barely audible above the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor. His fingers, once strong enough to grip a rugby ball or trace patterns across James's chest in the dark, now trembled against the white hospital sheets.

James adjusted his position in the uncomfortable plastic chair he'd claimed as his own weeks ago. The nursing staff had stopped trying to enforce visiting hours after the first week, when they'd found him curled up on the floor beside Regulus's bed at three in the morning, unwilling to leave even when unconscious.

"Where else would I be?" James asked, reaching for Regulus's hand. The skin felt papery beneath his fingers, translucent enough that he could see the network of veins beneath. When had Regulus become so fragile? The change had been gradual, then sudden—the way autumn leaves cling to branches until one day they simply don't.

Regulus's laugh was more of a breath than sound. "Anywhere. Living your life. You're twenty-six, James. You should be out there drinking overpriced coffee and—"

"And missing every moment I could have with you?" James's thumb traced circles against Regulus's palm. "Not happening."

The disease had a name—acute myeloid leukemia—but James had stopped thinking of it in clinical terms weeks ago. Now it was simply the thing that had crept into their lives like smoke, invisible at first, then choking. The thing that had stolen Regulus's appetite, his energy, his color. The thing that made him sleep twenty hours a day and still wake up exhausted.

Dr. Vance had been kind but clear during their last conversation in her office, with its degrees on the wall and box of tissues strategically placed on the desk. The experimental treatments hadn't worked. The chemotherapy had been too aggressive for Regulus's body to handle. They were talking about comfort measures now, about making the time he had left as peaceful as possible.

James hadn't cried in that office. He couldn't.

"Tell me about the flat," Regulus said now, pulling James from the memory. It was their ritual—James describing the life Regulus couldn't see anymore, painting pictures with words of the world beyond these four walls.

"Mrs. Smith from downstairs left another casserole," James began, settling into the familiar rhythm. "Tuna noodle this time. I think she's working through every recipe from 1987."

"Did you eat it?"

"Some of it." The truth was that food had lost most of its taste sometime around the third week, when it became clear that the treatments weren't working. Everything felt like ash in his mouth, but Regulus worried when he didn't eat, so James made the effort.

"Liar." Regulus's eyes remained closed, but the corner of his mouth lifted slightly. "You've been living on hospital vending machine coffee and whatever Sirius forces you to eat when he visits."

"He brought Chinese food yesterday," James admitted. "From that place on Diagon Street you like."

A knock at the door interrupted the moment. Sarah, the night nurse, poked her head in. She'd been working this ward for fifteen years and had perfected the art of being professional while still treating her patients like human beings instead of room numbers.

"Pain level?" she asked Regulus, already reaching for the medication cart.

"Four," Regulus said, though James could see the lie in the tension around his eyes. It was probably closer to seven, but Regulus had always been stubborn about admitting weakness.

Sarah adjusted something in his IV line with practiced efficiency. "This should help. Try to get some rest."

After she left, Regulus was quiet for so long that James thought he'd fallen asleep. The morphine often pulled him under quickly these days. But then his voice came, small and uncertain in the darkness.

"I'm scared."

The facade, so carefully constructed over weeks of quiet suffering, shattered with a single sentence. He'd made jokes about the hospital food and complained about daytime television and treated his deteriorating condition like a minor inconvenience rather than a death sentence.

"Of dying?" James asked gently.

"Of you forgetting me."

James felt something crack inside his chest. He stood up, ignoring the protest from muscles that had been cramped in the same position for hours, and carefully climbed onto the narrow hospital bed. The mattress was too small for both of them, but Regulus shifted over to make room, and Jmes settled beside him with practiced care, mindful of the IV lines and monitoring wires.

"That's not going to happen," James said into the darkness. "It's literally impossible."

"People forget. Time passes. I know it's probably selfish but—"

"Reg." James's voice was firm. "Look at me."

Regulus turned his head, and in the dim light from the hallway, James could see the fear there—raw and honest and so unlike the careful composure Regulus usually maintained.

"I have loved you for four years," James said. "I loved you when you were healthy and driving me crazy by leaving your books all over the flat. I loved you when you got food poisoning from that sketchy street vendor and spent three days convinced you were dying. I loved you through your thesis defense and that terrible haircut you got from Pandora and every morning when you stole the covers and every night when you talked in your sleep. You think I'm going to stop now?"

"It's different now—"

"It's not." James's hand found Regulus's face, thumb brushing across his cheekbone. "You're still you. Sick, but still you. Still the love of my life."

Regulus was crying now—silent tears that tracked down his temples into the pillow. "I don't want to leave you."

"I know. I don't want you to go."

They lay in the semi-darkness of the room, listening to the sounds of the nightly medical routine coming from the corridor. Somewhere at the end of the corridor, another monitor beeped insistently. The phone rang at the nurses' station. Life continued to move forward while their lives were reduced to this - a small hospital room.

"What will you do?" Regulus asked eventually. "After."

It was a question James had been avoiding, pushing away every time it surfaced in his mind. The future felt impossible to imagine without Regulus in it.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Probably make a mess of things for a while."

"Good," Regulus said. "You're too responsible sometimes. Make some terrible decisions. Date someone completely inappropriate. Get a motorcycle."

"You hate motorcycles."

"I won't be around to disapprove."

The casual way he said it—like discussing weekend plans—somehow made it worse. James pressed his face into Regulus's shoulder, breathing in the smell of hospital soap and medication and underneath it all, faintly, the bergamot scent that had always been purely Regulus.

 

Days blurred together after that. Regulus slept more and more, the periods of lucidity becoming shorter and more precious. James read to him—trashy novels and newspaper articles and old text messages from their phones, anything to fill the silence with the sound of living.

 

Sirius brought flowers one day, massive sunflowers that looked absurd in the sterile room but made Regulus smile for the first time in days. A steady stream of visitors began to fill the quiet room. With each familiar face, each worried glance that softened at the sight of him, Regulus felt a humbling truth settle in his bones: he was profoundly, and unquestionably, loved.

It was Saturday. James was reading aloud from one of Regulus's favorite books—a worn paperback copy of poetry they'd discovered together in a secondhand shop years ago. The pages were dog-eared from countless readings, and James could recite some of the verses from memory.

"I am free from love's tender sway, From enmity's grip, and the rumors' play.'" James read softly, his voice carrying the familiar cadence they both loved. "From the fate that was foretold to me."

"But I am chained by one chain, It's riveted to the wall by a mighty ring, And that ring is anchored deep in me". Regulus whispered along with him, though his voice was barely audible now.

They'd made it through three more poems when Regulus's hand, which had been loosely holding James's, went slack. His breathing had grown more labored over the past hour, each inhale requiring visible effort.

"James," Regulus said, his eyes still closed. "I'm so tired."

This was a tiredness that sleep couldn't cure, a weariness that had settled into his bones and wouldn't lift.

"I know," James said, closing the book and setting it aside. "You can rest."

"Will you stay?"

"Of course." James shifted carefully onto the narrow bed, pulling Regulus gently into his arms. The younger man felt impossibly fragile, all sharp angles and hollow spaces where strength used to live.

"I'll be right here when you wake up."

Regulus settled against James's chest with a soft sigh, his breathing gradually evening out as the morphine and exhaustion pulled him under. James held him close, one hand smoothing through dark hair that had grown back softer after the chemotherapy, the other resting protectively over Regulus's heart where he could feel its steady but weakening rhythm.

The night passed in a haze of half-sleep. James dozed fitfully, waking every hour or so to check on Regulus, to adjust his position, to whisper quiet reassurances. The nursing staff checked on them periodically but didn't disturb the cocoon of peace they'd created in the narrow hospital bed.

As dawn broke gray and gentle through the window, James became aware that something had changed. The room was too quiet. Regulus's breathing stoped.

For a moment, James didn't move. Couldn't move. He lay there holding the person he loved most in the world, feeling the terrible stillness where life had been just moments before. Regulus looked peaceful, younger somehow, as if sleep had smoothed away the lines that pain and illness had carved into his features.

The silence was a living thing, a weight that pressed down on James’s chest, crushing the air from his own lungs. He didn’t need to check for a pulse. He knew. The universe, which had for so long been held in a precarious, trembling balance by the simple rhythm of Regulus’s inhale and exhale, had simply… stopped.

"Reg?" James whispered, though he already knew there would be no answer. His hand found Regulus's face, thumb tracing across his cheekbone one last time. The skin was still warm.

It was 6:23 AM on a Wednesday in March when James Potter realized he was alone.

No more beeping monitors—they'd been turned off the night before. No more labored breathing. Just quiet, and the weight of a life ended, and the beginning of learning how to exist in a world that no longer contained the person who had been its center.

James stayed there for a long time, holding Regulus long after the nurses had come and gone, long after Sirius had stepped out to make the necessary phone calls. He stayed until the afternoon light slanted differently through the windows and someone gently told him it was time to go home.

 

Go home.

 

Which home? The one that awaited him was no longer a home. It was a museum. A tomb. A collection of evidence that life had once lived here, violently interrupted.

He saw himself entering the apartment with terrifying, crystal clarity. 

He opened the door, and the first thing that struck him was the smell — not the smell of illness, not here. Here, it still smelled like Regulus. Expensive sandalwood soap, and the bergamot cologne he preferred, and the faint metallic smell of ink from the vintage fountain pen he always lost. James stood in the hallway, suffocating from the smell.

There, on the floor by the sofa, lay his slippers. The worn velvet slippers that James had bought him two Christmases ago lay exactly where he had taken them off before his last trip in the ambulance. One of them was turned on its side. 

In the kitchen, there was a single mug on the drying rack. Black, with a chipped handle, which, according to Regulus, made the tea taste better. Inside, at the bottom, there would still be a ghost of tea leaves stuck to it. James would see it, and his body would turn to stone. He would have to make tea. He would have to fill the kettle, and the thought of its whistle—the sound—would be unbearable.

Their bed. God, their bed. It will be unmade, as they left it in haste and panic. The pillow will still have the dent from Regulus's head. The book he was reading, the biography of some little-known writer, will still be on the nightstand, with a bookmark in the page. Chapter Twelve. He would never finish it. James would lie on his side, motionless, staring at the empty space, at the cold sheets, and he would know, with a certainty worse than any pain, that he would never again feel the warmth of another body next to him. He will never again wake up to a cold foot nudging his calf or a hand casually thrown across his chest in sleep.

Every corner, every object will be a mine. A scratch on the floor from when they moved the table while arguing. A faint water stain on the ceiling from a leak in the apartment above, which they were going to complain about. A picture on the refrigerator of them, smiling and waving in the wind, standing on the beach in Greece. Two men, forever young, forever happy.

How was he supposed to go home?

But James did go to their flat. Eventually.

Sirius drove him, though neither of them spoke during the twenty-minute journey through London traffic that felt like crossing an ocean. The keys felt foreign in James's hand—too heavy, too cold. He stood outside the door for what felt like hours, listening to the familiar sounds of their building: Mrs. Chen practicing piano upstairs, the radiator clanking in the walls, the distant hum of traffic.

James stood in the hallway and understood, with perfect clarity, that he was going to break apart. Not metaphorically. Literally. His molecules were going to separate, scatter across the flat like dust, because there wasn't enough of him left to maintain the fiction of being a whole person.

"James." Sirius's voice came from somewhere far away. "Sit down."

James found himself on the sofa without remembering how he'd gotten there. Sirius was moving around the kitchen, making tea. The kettle whistled—that sound James had dreaded—and he didn't turn to stone. He just sat there, empty.

"Lily's coming over later," Sirius said, settling beside him with two steaming mugs. "And Remus. We don't have to talk. They just want to be here."

James nodded without really hearing. He was looking at the bookshelf across the room.

The flat filled with people over the next few days. Lily brought soup and stayed to wash dishes. Remus arrived with groceries and restocked the refrigerator. Marlene showed up with flowers—not the funeral kind, but bright gerberas that looked aggressively alive in the subdued atmosphere.

They were kind. They were careful. They spoke in soft voices and offered to help with arrangements, and James moved through it all like he was underwater, hearing everything from a great distance.

The funeral was on a Friday. 

The service was held at a small chapel in Hampstead, chosen because Regulus had always liked the stained glass windows there. James sat in the front row, surrounded by faces he recognized but couldn't quite focus on James was supposed to say something, but when the moment came, he couldn't stand.

The words were there—four years of love condensed into a few paragraphs he'd written and rewritten a dozen times. But sitting there, looking at the casket covered in white roses, James realized that anything he said would be hollow . How do you summarize a person? How do you capture the way someone made you laugh, or the precise tone of their voice when they called your name

So he stayed seated, and Sirius squeezed his hand, and the service continued without his eulogy.

Afterward, people gathered at their flat—his flat now, though James couldn't think of it that way yet. 

James found himself standing by the window, watching the street below where life continued with brutal normalcy. Cars passed. People walked by with shopping bags and phone conversations and all the small concerns of the living.

By evening, the flat was quiet again. Sirius lingered after the others left, loading the dishwasher and putting away the folding chairs they'd borrowed from the neighbors. James sat at the kitchen table, staring at a sympathy crds from neighbors.

 

"You should stay at mine tonight," Sirius said, hanging up the tea towel with careful precision. "Just for tonight."

James shook his head. "I need to be here."

"James—"

"I need to be here," he repeated, more firmly.

Sirius studied his face for a moment, then nodded. "All right. But I'm staying too. Couch is fine."

They didn't argue about it. James was too tired to fight, and they both knew he shouldn't be alone. Not yet.

That night, James lay in their bed—*his* bed—staring at the ceiling. He'd changed the sheets earlier, unable to bear sleeping in the same linens where Regulus had spent his last night at home. But even with everything washed and fresh, the space felt haunted. .

Three months later, James returned to work. His colleagues were kind but awkward, unsure whether to mention Regulus or pretend nothing had changed. His assistant, Penny, had kept his office exactly as he'd left it.

"How are you doing?" everyone asked, and James learned to say "Better, thanks" with enough conviction to end the conversation.

He wasn't better. He was functioning, which wasn't the same thing. He got up each morning because staying in bed all day made Sirius worry. He ate because Lily had started showing up with prepared meals. He went through the motions of living because the alternative—the void he could feel waiting at the edges of his awareness—was too terrifying to contemplate.

Six months after the funeral, James found himself standing in Regulus personal room.

James had avoided this. He came here alone, three days before Regulus' death, and only to put his laptop back in its place. Since Regulus' condition no longer allowed him to use it properly. Of all the spaces in the flat, this one felt most like Regulus was just temporarily absent, about to walk through the door asking if James had seen his reading glasses.

But today, something had shifted. Maybe it was the way the afternoon light fell across the desk, or maybe he'd finally gathered enough courage. James sat down in Regulus's chair and opened the laptop.

The screen flickered to life, password-protected. James typed in Regulus's birthday, then their anniversary, then the name of the street where they'd first met. None of them worked. He was about to give up when he tried one more: The Heart of Lion.

The desktop opened.

James's breath caught. 

There were folders labeled with course names, and documents full of lecture notes, and a browser bookmark folder labeled "Gift Ideas for James" that made his throat close up. But it was the document in the middle of the screen that stopped him cold.

 

For James - Read if you find this 

 

James's hand hovered over the mouse. He wasn't sure he was ready for this, wasn't sure he could handle whatever Regulus had wanted to tell him. But after a moment, he clicked.

 

My love,

If you're reading this, then you've figured out my password (of course you did). I'm writing this on one of those nights when you've fallen asleep in the hospital chair and I can't sleep because of the steroids they keep pumping into me. You look uncomfortable, but you refuse to go home, stubborn man. 

I don't know when you'll find this, or what kind of headspace you'll be in, but I have things I need to say to you. Things I couldn't say while I was dying because you needed me to be brave, and I needed to pretend I wasn't terrified.

First: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry for leaving you. I'm sorry for getting sick, and I'm sorry for all the plans we made that we'll never get to finish. I'm sorry about the house we were looking at in Hampstead, and the holiday to Italy we booked for next summer, and the conversation we never had about children. I'm sorry about all of it.

Second: Thank you. Thank you for loving me when I was healthy and insufferable, and thank you for loving me when I was sick and definitely more insufferable. Thank you for sleeping in that horrible chair and reading to me and never once making me feel like I was a burden. Thank you for four years of being happier than I ever thought possible.

Third: Live. Please, James. I know it doesn't feel possible right now, but live. Make new memories. Fall in love again—yes, again. 

Don't let loving me stop you from living. Promise me that. Promise me you won't turn our flat into a shrine, or our relationship into something so sacred that it prevents you from finding joy again. I want you to be happy, James. It's the only thing I want now.

I love you, I love you so much.

 

James read the letter three times before the words fully penetrated the fog of grief that had wrapped around him for weeks. By the third reading, he was crying again, but these tears felt different. Cleaner somehow. Like rain after a long drought.

Notes:

english it's not my first language, sorry for mistakes, I'm trying to get better in this😔