Work Text:
One might say the Black family were indeed quite the dysfunctional family. On this single point, the Black brothers would likely have agreed.
But then again, that was an open secret whispered among Mayfair ballrooms and Pall Mall clubs, mentioned in low tones over vintage port, yet carefully omitted from the society pages that lauded their philanthropic ventures and corporate triumphs.
Beyond that, consensus evaporated. When it came to their current lives, they agreed on little. For Sirius, Grimmauld Place was no masterpiece of Gothic Revival; it was a mausoleum, the evidence of wealth so entrenched it had curdled into obsession.
And fine, Regulus might even concede the obsession part, but he saw it as a gift, not sickness.
Privilege.
Sirius called it a curse, a chain. And yes, it was that too, a suffocating garment of duty. But Regulus thought of the undisputed power their name commanded, and the fact that Sirius had simply incinerated it all. He hadn't just abandoned his title and duties; he had abandoned Regulus.
It stung.
But Regulus would sooner face a firing squad than admit the gaping hole Sirius’s departure had left behind.
And still, Sirius had the absolute gall to scream that Regulus was the spoiled brat, the little yes-man who obeyed.
Please. That was rich. Sirius was the true spoiled brat, the one who took everything for granted then threw a tantrum the moment their mother suggested a career in something that actually required commitment.
Sirius hadn't earned his so-called freedom; he had merely squandered his entire inheritance on cheap, teen rebellion, for the right to live in some peeling flat that smelled of stale beer and poor decisions. And worst of all, those tattoos.
Don't even get Regulus started on the stupid tattoos.
They were an embarrassment. The winged beast on Sirius’s forearm? And the others? A ridiculous cluster of stars trailing up his neck in a way that was just… vulgar. He had probably got even more since the last time Regulus saw him.
And the piercing.
The fucking tongue stud he’d clicked against his teeth all through Aunt Walburga’s Christmas dinner last year. Over and over, a tiny, insistent tic-tic-tic cutting through the polite clink of silverware. Sirius had leaned back in Walburga’s heirloom chair, a smirk playing on his lips, his eyes fixed on their mother across the expanse of starched linen and crystal. He’d done it until the veins in her temple throbbed a furious rhythm. Purely to give her a coronary.
Every single thing he did, every stupid, self-destructive act, was just another brick in that pathetic, attention-seeking monument he was building to “screw all of you”.
So be it. If that’s how Sirius saw it, if that was the grand narrative of his glorious rebellion, Sirius the Martyr, Regulus the Pawn, then fine. Let it be true.
Regulus didn’t usually look at his brother when they were at school. It was a rule. A necessary one for maintaining the fragile ice over his thoughts.
But it was the end of December, a brittle, painfully bright Tuesday afternoon. Term was coming to an end, the frantic energy of mock exams giving way to a drowsy, anticipatory stillness.
Soon, the sleek family car would glide up the main drive, and Regulus would go home to Grimmauld Place for the winter break. To the echoing halls, the portrait of Phineas Nigellus with his accusing stare, and Mother’s thin, expectant silence. And for the first time, it would be a Christmas without him.
Regulus was in the library, the ancient, cathedral-like Old Library with its soaring stained-glass window depicting St. Augustine. His gaze, meant to be tracing a passage about the Cursus Honorum, drifted instead to the snow-covered inner yard below.
They were crossing it. Potter, Lupin, Pettigrew, and his stupid brother. But not just walking. They were a blizzard of their own making.
Potter, also known as king of everything, had packed a snowball with the ruthless efficiency of a seasoned fly-half. He didn't throw it, he fired it. It caught Pettigrew square in the chest with thwump, making the smaller boy yelp and nearly topple over backwards into a drift.
They howled with laughter.
Regulus’s rules were strict.
Don’t look at them in the Great Hall, where they held court like barbarian princes at a Roman feast. Don’t acknowledge the way Amina Shafiq tracked Sirius with her dark, liquid gaze, or how Eloise Midgen would giggle too loudly at his jokes. They all looked at him like he was some tortured romantic hero stepped out of a punk album cover.
Please.
Regulus’s lip curled. Sirius with his stupid, tragic-hero hair. It wasn’t artfully tousled; it was unkempt. He’d let the loose black curls grow past his shoulders, a deliberate slap in the face to the school’s grooming standards, and the bangs fell in his eyes in a way that was surely just inconvenient. And yet, all the girls sighed over it.
Three catastrophic things ruined the Christmas holiday.
Regulus liked to think he wasn’t the sort of person to exaggerate with words like ‘catastrophic’. He preferred precision. So perhaps, upon sober reflection, it was two badly timed misfortunes and one private, fucking, catastrophically unfair situation.
The first ill-timed thing: A week before term ended, a crisply worded letter from his father’s private secretary, Edwin, arrived by breakfast, forwarded without comment by his mother.
Master Regulus,
Please be advised that Mr. Black senior and Mrs. Black will be travelling to Zürich on the 16th to attend to your uncle, Mr. Alphard Black. His condition at the Privatklinik Bethanien has become critical. The situation is distressing and unsuitable for a young man. Your father feels strongly that your studies, particularly in preparation for your A-Level modules, must not be disrupted. You are to remain at Fallowmere until the close of term on the 22nd, after which you will proceed directly to the London house. Arrangements with the staff have been made. A car will collect you. We anticipate Mr. and Mrs. Black’s return on the 2nd of January.
Yours,
Edwin
Regulus had even drafted a careful reply, asking if he might fly out after his last exam on the 21st. His father’s one-line response had come via Edwin the following Friday:
Your presence is not required.
Uncle Alphard smelled of a pungent, Balkan blend of pipe tobacco, the kind that smelled like a burnt forest. He chased the ghost of it with a sharp, medicinal lemon cologne.
The old man was, by all accounts, a bit of a grumpy old bastard. But, he was also the quiet, dry-crackle of cellophane on a new book left on the hall table. And he had good taste.
When Regulus was eleven, desperately lonely in his first term at Fallowmere, the book had been The Sword in the Stone, the old edition with the quirky illustrations.
So it was a bit sad, yes. Regulus would be alone at Grimmauld Place for the entirety of the break. It wasn’t without its silver linings. The staff would be there to cook him food. The silence, the immense, engulfing silence of the house without his parents, could be a tool. He could spread his books across the entire Chippendale desk in the morning room. He could get a proper head start on his Herodotus commentary, really drill into the intricacies of the Peloponnesian League. He could use the time. He was, as Sirius would sneer, a swot.
The fact that he could be home alone was a relief. Until, of course, the second ill-timed thing happened.
A letter from his mother:
Regulus,
You will spend the holiday at the Potters’ estate in Surrey. This has been arranged. Given the circumstances, it is the most practical course of action. There will be no one in residence at Grimmauld Place; I have instructed the staff to take leave for the duration.
You will comport yourself with appropriate dignity. Do not trouble your father with any queries regarding this matter.
You are to travel directly from school to Surrey on the 22nd. The Potters will send a car at 11:00.
Orion sends his regards for your continued diligence in your studies.
Yours,
Walburga Black
The bitter irony was that his father didn’t even particularly dislike the Potters. Orion Black, in his detached way, rather respected Fleamont Potter. He’d once remarked over port that the man had “a shrewd head for business”.
The Potters weren't nouveau riche. The family name went back centuries, with a respectable, if not spectacular, history of landholdings in the West Country. Their fortune, however, had been utterly transformed two generations back by a shrewd ancestor who saw the future in patents and consumer goods. The Potter family now sat atop a global empire of haircare, skincare, and cosmetics, from the iconic ‘Sleekeazy’ brand.
James Potter himself had never been truly mean to Regulus. At school, Potter’s treatment of Regulus was a study in benign, oblivious neutrality. He didn’t sneer like Severus did or go out of his way to make cutting remarks, or shove him into walls. He simply… didn’t see him. Regulus could just as likely have been a piece of the furniture.
So, the calculus of this forced holiday was grim but simple. He could hide in the library, he was sure they’d have. He could treat it as an awkward but manageable diplomatic visit to a friendly foreign power.
He almost had himself convinced he could survive it. He had a plan. Be a ghost. Be polite. Be gone.
But that all evaporated with the private, fucking, catastrophically unfair situation.
The morning of the 22nd dawned brittle and bright. At 10:50 precisely, Regulus stood on the frozen gravel drive of Fallowmere’s main entrance, a single, neat figure against the grand stone façade. His black leather weekend bag sat at his polished shoes. He wore a pristine black cashmere jumper, tailored grey trousers, a dark wool coat, leather gloves, and black boots. Snow began to fall in soft, languid flakes, dusting his shoulders.
A sleek, dark car pulled up at 10:55. The driver, a man in a simple suit and cap, got out.
“Master Black?”
Regulus gave a curt nod. The man loaded his bag into the boot and held the rear door open. Regulus slid onto the cool leather seat. He arranged his coat beside him.
The driver got back in the front. And did not start the car.
After a minute of this suspended silence, a fissure of unease cracked his composure.
Regulus leaned forward slightly. “Is there a delay?”
The driver glanced at him in the mirror, looking mildly apologetic. “Just waiting on Master Potter, sir. He’s to be collected as well. Won’t be a tick. I’ll just pop in and let reception know we’re here, he might have… overslept.”
Before Regulus could fully process this, (Potter hadn’t left already?) the driver was out, striding towards the school’s great oak doors.
But of course.
Yesterday had been Thursday. The end-of-term rugby sevens tournament. Potter was Captain. They’d won, obviously. Which meant there would have been a celebration. An against-all-rules party with cans of terrible lager pilfered from God-knows-where. Potter would have got absolutely wankered.
So now, the great James Potter, hero of the First XV, was lying in a darkened room somewhere, probably still in his kit, head pounding, completely incapable of basic timekeeping. Couldn’t even manage to be ready for his own car in time. The absolute lack of consideration.
Regulus stared straight ahead, his hands clenched in his lap, the leather of his gloves creaking softly. Another five minutes crawled by.
A vintage Bentley purred to a stop further down the drive, and a girl from the Upper Sixth, Eloise Midgen, he recognized, was enveloped in a hug by a woman in a shearling coat.
Regulus looked away.
Then, the main gates swung open.
And they appeared. James Potter, in a ridiculously bright red hoodie, a matching beanie shoved onto his riotous dark hair. A huge, battered duffel bag was slung over one shoulder, and a smaller black leather one on the other. He was gesticulating wildly with his hand, probably replaying some move from the match or the party.
Beside him, Sirius. He wore a battered motorcycle jacket over a thin, faded grey t-shirt for some obscure band. His jeans were ripped at the knee. His hair was a wild, dark mane whipping around his face in the cold wind, and he was laughing, head thrown back, completely absorbed in Potter’s story.
Regulus froze. A deer caught in sudden, blinding headlights.
Potter reached the car first, yanking open the rear door with his usual, unthinking force. "Alright, Henry? Sorry, we’re late, had to drag this one out of bed. He was face-down in his–oh."
Potter stopped dead.
His eyes, behind his slightly round spectacles, were wide. He was staring directly at Regulus, who sat rigidly in the very seat Potter had clearly, unquestioningly expected to be empty.
Sirius came up behind him, still grinning, shivering exaggeratedly. "Move it, Prongs, I'm freezing my bollocks—"
He leaned in, peering over Potter’s shoulder to see what the holdup was.
The grin vanished.
His grey eyes, so like Regulus’s own, widened quickly, before they hardened into icy, hostile shards.
"Er…" said Potter, intelligently.
Sirius recovered first. He shoved Potter aside.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Regulus felt the heat of humiliation rise up his neck, but he willed it into a different fuel: disdain.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" he said, his voice dripping with a bored, withering sarcasm. “I'm sitting in a car, Sirius.”
Regulus knew how to tug at his brother’s strings. He knew the exact, subtle shift in Sirius’s expression that preceded violence, the slight flaring of his nostrils, the way the skin around his eyes tightened a fraction of a second before the storm broke. He saw it now, clear as a warning flare. He’d meant to.
In one violent motion, Sirius lunged into the car. Before Regulus could brace himself, cold, strong fingers knotted in the pristine front of his navy cashmere jumper, twisting the fine wool into a brutal fist right over his breastbone.
“You smug little—“
He yanked.
Regulus was ripped from the leather seat. He spilled out of the car in a graceless stumble, his expensive boots slipping on the frosty gravel. He would have landed on his hands and knees if Sirius hadn’t used his grip to shove him back a step, slamming his shoulders against the cold metal of the car door instead.
Sirius crowded into the space, his face inches away.
His eyes were wild.
They were both tall and lanky, but Sirius, two years older, had the upper hand in both height and the build. He’d always been the more physical one, the one who climbed trees when they were children.
Regulus, meanwhile, was the kind of skinny that came from a lifelong, quiet war with his dinner plate, a hatred of claggy food consistencies, and a deep-seated aversion to anything resembling organized sport. He avoided physical exertion like it was a social disease, preferring the contained, cerebral battle of academics.
“Why the fuck are you in Potter’s car?”
“Why do you think?” he shot back, his voice tighter than he wanted. “I wasn’t aware you’d been appointed the official gatekeeper of the Potter motor pool. Should I have applied for a permit?”
“You think this is a fucking joke?” Sirius snarled. His fist, still bunched in Regulus’s jumper, gave him a hard shake.
The present blurred, and Regulus was fifteen again, pinned against the damask wallpaper of the Grimmauld Place hallway.
It hadn’t started with the shove. It had started with Regulus, a statue in pajamas, drawn by the muffled sounds from the study below.
Not shouts, their father never shouted. Then the sharp, distinctive crack. Not once. A pause. Then again, and again, and again. Regulus’s fingers had turned numb on the banister.
He’d stood there, frozen, until the study door opened and Sirius had stumbled out, his face a careful, practiced blank, but his eyes glazed with pain.
A hot, sour guilt had risen in his throat. But a colder, more terrifying thought had overridden it:
Sirius would just go on and do it again.
He thought he was invincible, that the rules were suggestions to be broken for fun.
So, the next morning, when his mother’s gimlet eyes had fixed on him over her tea, Regulus thought he had done the right thing.
“Your brother claims he was in his room all evening. Is that correct, Regulus?”
He’d looked down at his congealing eggs.
He didn’t describe the fake bottom in Sirius’s school trunk, or how Regulus always made sure to wipe away the boot-prints on the sill of the library window, the one Sirius used to climb down the old wisteria. He didn’t mention Mickey’s name. He didn’t say he’d heard the lies being planned.
He simply gave one small shake of his head.
But to Sirius, that didn’t matter. There was only the core, unforgivable truth: Regulus had chosen the side of the jailers.
That evening, Sirius cornered him in the shadowy hallway.
“You little snitch,” Sirius breathed. The word was viscous with hate. He didn’t wait for an answer. He slammed Regulus back against the wall, the impact punching the air from his lungs. His hands weren’t fists; they were vices, digging into the tender sockets of Regulus’s shoulders with a pain that promised bruises. “You're a treacherous little worm. A spineless, boot-licking clerk. You’re not my fucking brother. Do you get that? Don’t you ever speak to me again.”
He gave Regulus one last, brutal shake, then shoved him away with such force that Regulus’s legs buckled. He hit the polished floor hard, the shock a bright, white burst up his spine.
By the time his vision cleared, stinging with the hot, humiliating press of tears, Sirius was gone. The hallway was empty, silent but for the ragged, hitching sounds of his breathing that he couldn’t seem to control.
The next morning, he already knew what to expect before he pushed open the door to Sirius’s room.
The past and present slammed together, and for a dizzying second, Regulus couldn’t tell which pain was which.
"Oi! Get off him, you bloody idiot!"
Potter was a head taller than Sirius and built like someone who considered a scrum a nice way to pass the time. He dropped both bags, got a shoulder into Sirius's chest and an arm around his neck in tackle-hug.
Sirius, caught mid-shake, was yanked off-balance. His grip on Regulus's jumper slipped with a little rip of expensive wool as Potter hauled him backwards. Regulus stumbled forward, freed so suddenly he almost fell. He caught himself on the cold bonnet of the car, his breath coming in sharp, silent gasps.
"Prongs, let go of me!" Sirius snarled, bucking against the hold.
"Not until you stop trying to see if your brother's head is harder than Henry's walnut trim!" Potter grunted, tightening his arm. He managed to shove Sirius back a full step, putting more distance between them.
He opened his mouth to say more, but then he froze. His furious gaze, which had been locked on Regulus, snapped back to Potter. The frantic anger in his eyes cooled into betrayal.
“You,” Sirius said, his voice dropping to a deadly quiet. “You knew he’d be here.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.
Potter’s exasperated expression faltered, replaced by genuine confusion. “What? No, I—“
Sirius ripped himself from Potter’s grip.
“Don’t,” Sirius cut him off, the word a whip-crack. He stared, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “Don’t lie to me. You knew. You didn’t even look surprised. You knew.”
Regulus braced himself, knees locking, certain Sirius would launch himself across the gravel and start swinging at him again. But Sirius didn't move towards Regulus. Instead, he took a sudden, aggressive step into Potter’s space, shoving him hard in the chest.
Potter stumbled back, more from shock than force. His hands came up, palms out. “Whoa— Sirius, no! I didn’t! I swear!”
“Don’t fucking lie to me!”
“I’m not!” Potter’s voice rose, frayed with desperation. He gestured wildly towards Regulus, who stood like a ghost by the car. “No, it’s just… Mum didn’t… I mean, she didn’t say! She sent a letter on Monday! She said she’d ‘sorted something’ with your mum! I thought it was about you, I didn’t think it meant him just materializing in the back of Henry’s car!”
On cue, as if summoned, Henry emerged from the school's front gates. He was buttoning his coat, a cheerful, oblivious smile on his face.
“Ah! There you all are,” Henry said and clapped his gloved hands together once, the sound absurdly loud in the tense silence. “Splendid. All… present and accounted for, then?”
No one answered. The wind picked up, swirling a flurry of snow between them.
Henry’s brows rose slightly, his cheerful expression slipping.
Potter cleared his throat, the sound rough. He took a hesitant step towards Sirius, who was standing rigidly, staring at the ground. “C’mon, Pads,” he said, his voice low, reaching out to tentatively grasp Sirius’s forearm. “Let’s just… get in. We’ll sit in the back. It’s fine.”
Sirius yanked his arm away as if burned. “Don’t touch me,” he spat, not looking at him. The words were brittle, cold.
Potter’s hand fell back to his side. He looked like a kicked puppy, all his usual swagger gone, replaced by a confused, wounded deflation.
Sirius shouldered past him, then walked past Regulus, who held his breath, bracing for another shove or a hissed insult that didn’t come.
Sirius didn’t even look at him.
He wrenched the door open and threw himself inside, slamming it shut. The bang echoed across the quiet drive.
Potter scrubbed a hand over his face, then turned to Henry with a weak, apologetic grimace. “Sorry, Henry. Bit of a… family thing.”
“Right you are, Master James,” Henry said, his tone carefully neutral. He nodded towards the two duffel bags lying abandoned on the gravel where Potter had dropped them during the scuffle.
Potter moved to pick them up. He slung the larger one over one shoulder and reached for the smaller leather one.
“Here, let me,” Henry said, stepping forward.
“It’s fine, I’ve got it,” Potter muttered, hoisting the second bag.
Henry, ever the professional, gently insisted. “Please, sir. Part of the service.”
Potter relented with a sigh. He handed over the smaller of the two. “You can take Sirius’s. I’ll take mine.” He gave the larger, misshapen duffel a resigned pat. “It’s mostly just muddy kit and what I suspect is a decomposing sandwich. Hazardous materials. I’m trained for it.”
A smile touched Henry’s lips. “Very considerate. Health and safety first.”
He took the proffered bag and moved to the boot, stowing it with quiet efficiency.
Potter dumped his heavy bag in after it, then straightened.
Regulus stood, a silent, pale statue by the front wing of the car. The cold was beginning to seep through his jumper. He lifted a gloved hand and discreetly wiped his nose, which was starting to run from the frigid air, or perhaps from the sheer, strung-out tension of the last five minutes.
Potter walked over to Regulus, and leaned into the open back door of the car.
He pulled out Regulus’s folded wool coat and held it out, an offering without a word, his expression unreadable.
Regulus looked at the coat, then up at Potter’s face. He’d pulled off the red beanie.
In the flat, grey winter light, his features were sharp. His dark hair was a hopeless, windswept tangle, perpetually looking as if he’d just come in from a gale. Behind his slightly crooked glasses, his eyes were a warm hazel, and his skin was smooth and tanned even in December.
“Thank you,” Regulus said quietly, his voice barely audible. He took the coat, his cold fingers accidentally brushing against Potter’s.
Potter just gave a short, almost imperceptible nod.
Feeling like he was entering a cell, Regulus opened the front door and slid into the seat beside the driver.
A second later, Potter got in, collapsing into the seat directly behind the Regulus. The layout meant Sirius was diagonally behind Regulus.
The doors thunked shut, sealing them in.
The silence was immediate and absolute, a vacuum broken only by the soft, expensive purr of the engine and the click of the seatbelts. They pulled onto the motorway, the world outside blurring into a slurry of grey sky.
Five minutes of this pressurized quiet stretched into eternity. Potter finally cleared his throat, the sound jagged in the stillness.
“Henry, could you put the radio on? “
“Of course, Master James,” Henry said, his voice relieved. He jabbed a button. The car was instantly filled with the aggressively cheerful jingle of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’.
Otherwise, no one spoke.
Regulus stared fixedly out the window at the bleak service stations and skeletal trees, but he could feel it, the heat of a gaze boring into the back of his head. It was a physical pressure, a laser of pure, undiluted contempt.
He wouldn’t have been surprised to look in the vanity mirror and see two actual, smoking burn marks seared into his cheek from the force of Sirius’s hatred.
The car sped on, carrying its cargo of hostile silence towards the promised land of mince pies, cracker jokes, and forced, blisteringly awkward festive cheer.
The car turned off the main road and onto a winding, tree-lined lane, the skeletal branches of ancient oaks forming a tunnel that softened the grey afternoon light. Regulus kept his gaze fixed on the passing high hedges and the occasional glimpse of a gabled roof through the trees.
They passed through a set of open wrought-iron gates, the Potter family crest, a stylized griffin, wrought into the design. The gravel drive curved through immaculate, snow-dusted lawns, and then the house came into view. A sprawling, honey-colored Victorian manor with vast bay windows that glowed with warm, golden light. Smoke curled from several of the chimneys on the roof.
Festive wreaths of holly and pine hung on the heavy oak front door, and glittering strings of white lights were wound through the railings.
The car crunched to a halt. Henry killed the engine, and with it, the offending music.
"Here we are," Henry announced, with a forced brightness that fooled no one.
Before the words had fully left his mouth, the rear passenger door was wrenched open. Sirius practically exploded from the car, a blur of leather and fury. He slammed the door with a force that made the vehicle shudder and stormed up the front steps, his boots thumping on the stone. He didn't ring the bell or knock; he simply turned the handle, the door was unlocked, and shouldered his way inside, disappearing into the warm, glowing interior like a storm cloud rolling into an empty chapel.
Henry cleared his throat. "Master James, your parents mentioned they might be out finishing the shopping when I spoke with Mrs. Potter this morning. Should be back shortly."
"Yeah," Potter muttered, dragging a hand through his hair. "Figured." He shoved his own door open and got out.
Henry got out and busied himself with the boot, the metallic clunk of the latch loud in the quiet.
Regulus, still sat in the car, pulled on the wool jacket Potter had handed him earlier and shrugged it on. He opened his door just as Henry was lifting the bags onto the gravel.
"Your bag, Master Regulus," Henry said, turning and presenting the leather weekend case with a slight, formal incline of his head.
Regulus took it. "Thank you," he said, his voice quiet but clear.
Potter had already hoisted the two larger duffels.
"Coming?" Potter asked, the word clipped. It wasn't really a question.
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and started trudging towards the front steps.
Henry gave Regulus a brief, encouraging nod that felt more like a sympathetic wince, before heading to the driver's side to close up the car.
Left with no other option, Regulus followed, his own footsteps silent on the snow-dusted gravel. He ascended the wide, shallow steps of Portland stone, noting the intricate wrought-iron boot scrapers shaped like sleeping lions on either side of the top step.
He crossed the threshold Potter had left agape and entered the hall.
It was a great hall, really. A vast, flagstoned space soared two stories high, dominated by a sweeping oak staircase that bifurcated gracefully halfway up. A massive chandelier, dripping with crystal teardrops, hung unlit, but the room was bathed in the warm, honeyed glow from an enormous stone fireplace where a small pyre of logs crackled and spat. The walls were hung with a gallery of oil paintings in heavy gilt frames. One, directly opposite, was a dramatic, storm-tossed seascape, a three-masted ship battling waves the colour of slate and bile.
Potter was already halfway up the left fork of the polished staircase. He paused on the landing, one hand braced against the balustrade.
“Last door on the left down that corridor,” he called down, jerking his chin towards the west wing. His voice echoed slightly in the cavernous space. “Bathroom’s opposite. Help yourself to anything. Just… don’t wander into the east wing.”
Before Regulus could form a response, not that he had one, Potter disappeared down the east wing corridor, his footsteps muffled by a runner.
Regulus stood frozen in the cavernous hall.
His throat tightened. A hot, stupid pressure built behind his eyes.
Crying would be breaking rule number one.
His gloved fingers tightened around the handle of his leather bag until the fine leather creaked in protest. He was sixteen. He was a prefect. He was not some snivelling child who broke down in tears because his brother was a colossal prick and his parents had fucked off to Switzerland. The hot, humiliating sting was forced back, wrestled into submission, and flash-frozen into a solid block of pure dread in the pit of his stomach. It sat there now, heavy and cold as a tombstone.
This was a nice place. Objectively.
It was everything Grimmauld Place was not.
But he would have been perfectly, utterly fine alone at Grimmauld Place. More than fine, actually. He would have been in his element. The echoing halls would have been a cathedral to his concentration. He could have moved through those familiar, sombre rooms like a ghost. The silence wouldn’t have screamed insults at him or pinned him against a stupid car.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity, Regulus made himself move. The burgundy runner on the stairs swallowed the sound of his footsteps.
He reached the landing where Potter had stood. To the left, the west wing corridor stretched, plush and silent. To the right, the east wing, where Potter, and likely Sirius, had vanished.
Under no fucking circumstances would Regulus venture down that corridor during his stay. That was a new rule. He wouldn’t go down it even if the house was on fire, and it was the only escape route. He’d rather burn, thanks.
The west wing corridor stretched, lined with portraits of people, landscapes and sporting scenes: a grouse moor at dawn, a spaniel with a pheasant in its mouth.
Regulus reached the last door. The brass handle was cold, polished to a high, shine. He turned it, pushed the door open, and stepped inside, closing it behind him with a quiet, precise snick.
The room was, he supposed, objectively, also very nice. It was large. A bay window, framed by heavy damask curtains the colour of clotted cream, formed a deep alcove with a plush, cushioned seat. Beyond the leaded glass, the snow-blanketed back gardens rolled down to a slate-grey frozen lake, where a small, snow-piled dock jutted out.
Dominating the centre of the room was a double bed. Its posts were carved from dark, honeyed oak, not the black walnut of home. The curtains were the same cream as the window dressings, tied back with thick, gold silk cords. The duvet was a deep, rich burgundy, and it was piled with an almost comical number of cushions in shades of gold, crimson, and forest green.
To his right was a writing desk, to his left, a wingback armchair sat beside a small, marble-faced fireplace. It was swept clean and laid with fresh kindling and a neat pyramid of logs, waiting for a match.
And on the mantelpiece: a vase of fresh holly, its leaves a waxy, vigorous green, the berries like drops of sealing wax, violently red against the pale stone.
Regulus hesitated.
For a long, suspended moment, he stood motionless on the thick carpet, a dark figure in the centre of the dark room.
How was he supposed to survive this?
Throwing a tantrum would do him no good. Writing his parents would be an exercise in humiliation, a plea they would neither hear nor heed. And to snivel to the Potters, was an unthinkable abdication of the last shred of dignity he possessed.
Part of him wished that his uncle would just die.
A clean, swift end to this crisis in Zürich, so his parents could fly home and release him from this purgatory. The thought was immediately followed by a wave of cold self-disgust.
Uncle Alphard, for all his grumpy remoteness, had been kind too. And besides, his parents probably had other business on the continent, other Black relatives to see, assets to manage. His personal inconvenience would not alter their itinerary. They wouldn't fly home for him. The wish was just another useless, childish fantasy.
Regulus methodically unpacked his bag, arranging his books on the desk, hanging his shirts, and trousers in the wardrobe. He worked for a while on his Herodotus at the desk.
At half-past seven, a soft knock at the door made him start, his pen skidding a tiny, jagged line across the page. Regulus closed the book with a quiet snap.
The woman who stood in the corridor was in her fifties, with kind brown eyes and a sensible plait of dark red hair over one shoulder. She wore a neat, calf-length tweed skirt and a soft cream cardigan. Her smile was warm.
“Mr. Black?” she said, her voice gentle. “Mr. and Mrs. Potter have returned from their errands, and dinner is about to be served in the breakfast room.” She paused, her head tilting slightly. “It’s just a casual supper tonight, nothing formal. They did want me to ask, though, would you prefer to join them, or would you be more comfortable if I brought a tray up for you here? There’s no trouble at all either way.”
For a fleeting, tempting second, Regulus imagined the safety of this room, a tray on the desk, the door shut against the world. But the social calculus was instant and damning. To refuse his hosts’ first invitation, it would be a profound discourtesy.
Regulus summoned a polite smile on his face.
“I would be pleased to join Mr. and Mrs. Potter for supper.”
Her smile widened.
“Of course. They’ll be very glad. If you’d like to follow me?”
The “breakfast room” was a sun-filled space even at night, with pale yellow walls and windows that would look over the gardens. A round table was laid not with the stark, formal linen of Grimmauld Place, but with a soft, crimson tablecloth embroidered with tiny holly sprigs. A low centrepiece held a cluster of candles nestled among pine cones and more of the violently red berries.
The air smelled richly of roasted chicken, thyme, and golden, buttery pastry.
Fleamont and Euphemia Potter were already there. Fleamont stood by the sideboard, pouring water from a cut-glass jug. He was a tall man with a kind, lived-in face, James’s hazel eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, and a head of hair that was more salt than pepper but still thick and unruly.
Euphemia was small and elegant, her dark hair swept into a soft chignon.
“Monty, you’ve overfilled that one again,” Euphemia said, not looking up from the basket of warm, flour-dusted rolls she was arranging on a napkin.
“Ah, so I have. Anticipating a mighty thirst, I suppose.” He tipped a little out into a nearby potted plant. Euphemia shook her head, a soft smile playing on her lips.
They both looked up as Regulus entered.
“Ah, Regulus,” Fleamont said, his voice a pleasant baritone. “There you are. Come in, come in.”
“We’re so very glad you could join us,” Euphemia added, her smile deepening the lines around her eyes. “It must have been such a last-minute upheaval for you. We were so sorry to hear about your uncle.”
Regulus gave a stiff, minimal bow of his head. “Thank you for having me, Mr. and Mrs. Potter. It’s very kind.”
“Nonsense, not kind at all,” Fleamont said, waving a hand dismissively. “Any brother of Sirius’s is family here. Sit, please, make yourself at home.”
The B-word.
Brother.
Regulus felt his jaw tighten infinitesimally. They weren’t brothers. Not in any way that mattered now.
He managed a tight, non-committal nod and took the indicated chair, its wooden legs scraping softly on the tiled floor.
As they sat, Euphemia passed him the basket. “These are freshly baked. Do help yourself. We’re keeping it simple tonight, just the three of us. The boys have… well, they’ve elected to have a tray upstairs.”
“Yes,” Fleamont said, carving the chicken with practised ease. He didn’t elaborate more.
Did they know Sirius had dragged him from the car?
More crucially, did they know why Sirius had run away from home?
Had Sirius sat at this very table, bathed in this unbearable kindness, and spilled it all? Had he painted their parents as monsters for these nice, normal people to cluck over?
The idea was a violation.
It was one thing for Sirius to burn his own life down; it was another to scatter the embers of their private shame onto this pristine lawn. If he had… then he was worse than a traitor.
He got to play the wounded exile, while Regulus was left in the gutted mansion, sweeping up the ashes and propping up the walls, expected to pretend the fire wasn't all Sirius’s fucking fault.
Fleamont placed a generous portion on Regulus’s plate without asking.
“So, Regulus,” he began, settling back into his own chair with a kind of robust comfort. “Your mother’s letter mentioned you’re in the thick of your A-Levels. Classics, History, and Politics, is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” Regulus replied, his voice carefully neutral.
“A formidable combination,” Euphemia said, nudging the bowl of buttery peas toward him. “Monty here was a Classics man at Oxford, back in the Dark Ages. Weren’t you, darling? Drove me spare.”
Fleamont grinned, unrepentant. “You found it intellectually charming, you mean. Admit it.” He turned his warm gaze on Regulus. “There’s nothing quite like the puzzle of it, is there? Are you enjoying it?”
“It’s interesting,” he said, his tone carefully polite. “I like history.” He didn’t say he found tracing the rise and fall of empires in his room more interesting than his own life. “My father thinks it’s good preparation. For law, or… that sort of thing.”
It was the kind of thing Sirius would have seized on with savage glee. ‘That sort of thing?’ he’d mimic, voice dripping with scorn. ‘Going to be a dusty little Parliamentarian, are we, Reggie? Because what this family needs is another sanctimonious prick in a wig, defending the rights of the rich to get richer. You’ll be brilliant at it, you’ve spent your whole life practicing being a boring, obedient tool.’
The conversation continued in this vein, a gentle but persistent stream of questions about his coursework, his opinions on the school's rugby season, the food in the dining hall. They listened, they asked follow-ups. But soon the well of safe, impersonal topics ran dry. Regulus was a master of polite deflection, offering minimal, correct answers that gave nothing away and sparked no reciprocal interest. He didn't ask about Monty's or Euphemia's work. The silences between exchanges began to stretch, thin and awkward.
Euphemia, whose warmth was matched by a sharp perception, seemed to sense the fortified wall behind his polite answers. She watched him for a moment as Regulus meticulously dissected a piece of chicken, carefully scraping away the herby seasoning and peeling the skin from the flesh, leaving a small, plain pile of white meat on his plate. She didn’t comment. His mother would have: ‘Eat it properly or do not eat at all.’ .
Euphemia steered the conversation onto entirely new, safer ground.
“It’s a shame about this cold snap for the holidays,” she said, her tone lightening. “We’d so hoped to get everyone out for a good long walk tomorrow. But with this deep freeze, I suppose the silver lining is the lake. James was up in the attic this afternoon, making a dreadful racket. He’s convinced it’s solid enough to skate on and was demanding we unearth the old skates.”
“Perhaps you’d like to join?” Fleamont asked, “There are always extra pairs. Of skates, I mean. If you fancied it.”
Regulus had finished with his food, or rather, he had finished dealing with it. The generous portion was now a landscape of polite ruin: a mound of left over chicken; a heap of peas pushed to the periphery; the crisp skin and all the herby, buttery sauce scraped into a congealed, rejected pile at one edge. He placed his knife and fork together with a soft, definitive clink, aligning them perfectly at a ten-past-four angle on the rim.
“I’m not very proficient,” he said, which was a polite understatement. He had been taught, of course. The memory was a blur of cold, searing humiliation, and the terrifying, uncontrollable slide of the blades. He’d hated the loss of dignity, the public vulnerability of a fall.
And to do it here?
No, thank you. Not ever. And absolutely not with Sirius and Potter.
A ludicrously dark scenario bloomed in his mind: Sirius, cutting a fierce, elegant arc across the ice, would “lose his balance” in a feigned pratfall designed to send him careening into Regulus’s path, the lethal steel of his skate flashing up in a tragic, “accidental” slice across the throat. He’d bleed out spectacularly onto the virgin snow at the lake’s edge.
It was ridiculous, but the visceral sense of threat felt entirely real.
“Neither is Peter,” Euphemia said with a warm laugh, utterly unaware of the ice-bound murder fantasy unfolding across the table. “He spends more time on his backside than on his blades, bless him. It’s all part of the fun.”
Regulus gave the smallest, most polite shake of his head.
“Thank you, but I should probably decline. I’ve a rather backlogged Herodotus commentary to tackle.” He paused, then added a layer of justification, the lie smooth and practised on his tongue. “I was under the weather last week and fell behind. I wouldn’t want to get any further adrift before term resumes.”
A look passed between Fleamont and Euphemia.
“Of course,” Euphemia said, her smile never wavering, though it held a tinge of something like sympathy now. “The library is at your disposal anytime. It’s just through the green baize door off the main hall. You’ll find it quiet, and there’s an excellent reading lamp by the far window.”
“Thank you,” Regulus said, the words automatic. “You’ve been very… accommodating.”
A brief silence fell.
Fleamont and Euphemia exchanged another look, this one more complicated.
Then, Fleamont cleared his throat, the sound rough in the quiet room. He leaned forward slightly, his kind face earnest. “Regulus, your brother. He’s had a hard time of it. Finding his feet. He’s… well, he’s fiercely loyal. And he feels things. Very deeply. Sometimes it… comes out sideways.”
He didn't need them to explain Sirius to him.
Regulus fixed his gaze on the smudge of congealed sauce on his plate, his jaw set.
Euphemia reached out as if to touch his hand, but stopped herself, folding her own in her lap. “We’re so glad he has James,” she said, her voice soft but firm. “And we want you to know, Regulus, that you are welcome here. Not as an obligation, or a… courtesy. But as a guest. This is a house for friends and for family.”
They were so wonderfully, painfully fucking nice.
But to be welcomed here as an honorary member of the Potter sanctuary felt like being asked to admire the sturdy timbers of the lifeboat his brother had swanned off in.
The Potters were entirely missing that Regulus was still down in the belly of the Titanic, listening to the groan of stressed metal, the icy seep of black water across the Persian carpets of the smoking room, the distant, frantic scramble for the boats he’d never reach. He was still shackled by duty and name to the grand, doomed vessel, watching the lights dip beneath the dark, freezing waves.
Regulus’s survival strategy was one of meticulous evasion.
Had he been an animal, a subject he knew far more about than most people, thanks to long hours spent with nature documentaries narrated by David Attenborough, he would most likely have been a particularly neurotic meerkat.
The one perpetually assigned to the rear, who twitches at every rustle and is convinced the shadow of a passing cloud is an eagle. His entire routine was governed by predator-avoidance logic: Regulus was only ‘out’ when the main predators (Sirius, and by extension, Potter) were guaranteed to be sleeping. Which was until at least half ten.
He was up at the crack of dawn, the winter sun a feeble grey smudge on the horizon. The immense house was silent, the fire in the great hall reduced to a nest of glowing embers.
Regulus navigated the corridors like a ghost in his socks, the fine wool of his dark jumper and the soft cotton of his slacks his only armour against the morning chill. His hair was still damp from a hurried, silent shower.
Every floorboard creak was a seismic event, his entire frame braced for the sound of a slamming door or his brother’s sleep-hoarse voice cursing him from the shadows.
Finally, Regulus slipped into the warm, tile-floored kitchen, startling the red-haired woman, Fiona, Mrs. Potter had said yesterday, who was kneading dough at the central table with a rhythmic, thumping vigour.
“Oh, my stars!” she exclaimed, pressing a flour-dusted hand to her ample bosom with a chuckle. “You nearly sent me through the ceiling, love, creeping in like that. Everything all right?
“Perfectly,” he said, his voice clipped. “I’m an early riser. I… hoped I might trouble you for some tea.” He didn’t mention that his early rising was a tactical necessity, that eating breakfast before Sirius stumbled down, sleep-tousled and volatile, was the difference between a meal and a potential battlefield. The memory of a shattered marmalade pot, hurled in a fit of pique at Grimmauld Place, was still vivid.
“Of course, no trouble at all,” Fiona said, her kind face settling into a smile. “Kettle’s just boiled, so you’ve timed it perfectly. Have a seat, love, I’ll get you a pot. There’s porridge on the hob, or I can do eggs? We’ve got sausages in the larder too. Can’t have a growing lad starting the day on just tea.”
Before he could formulate a polite refusal to the egg or porridge interrogation, the very thought of the slippery, gelatinous texture of a poached egg, or the rubbery curds of scrambled, made his throat constrict, the back door blew open, letting in a gust of freezing air that smelled of frost and earth.
A younger woman breezed in, stomping her boots on the mat. She looked to be in her twenties, with a short, stubby blonde plait that reached just past her shoulders and cheeks glowing pink from the cold. She carried a basket of eggs.
“Fiona, the hens have finally forgiven me for the— oh!” She stopped short, her brown eyes landing on Regulus’s lanky frame perched on the stool.
A wide, delighted grin spread across her face.
“Hullo,” she said, drawing the word out. “You must be the mystery guest.” She plucked an egg from the basket and held it up, inspecting him. “I’m Daisy. And you, look like a stiff breeze off the Surrey Hills would snap you in two. You’d better have a couple of these.”
“Daisy,” Fiona chided, but she was smiling too.
Regulus felt a familiar, icy scowl settle on his features. It was a reflex, a defence against such brazen, cheerful impertinence.
Terribly rude, he thought.
Then a more pragmatic, irritable thought followed: he couldn’t very well scold the help, not when he was a charity case himself, and certainly not before he’d secured his tea. His expression smoothed into one of strained neutrality.
“Regulus Black,” he said, the name feeling overly formal. “And I… appreciate the offer, but I don’t really eat eggs.”
Daisy’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t eat eggs? What, never? Not even scrambled on toast? That’s practically a national right.”
“Don't like the texture,” he muttered, looking away, his ears growing hot. It sounded so childish when said aloud.
From the Aga, Fiona turned, wiping her hands. “Porridge, then, love?”
He couldn’t suppress a slight, instinctive wince.
“Right,” Fiona said, undeterred. “We’ll find you something. What about a grilled bacon? Nice and crisp.”
“Um,” Regulus ventured, feeling besieged. “You don’t… have toast? I like cheese, too.”
Daisy let out a short, delighted laugh. “Toast and cheese! Now we’re getting somewhere. A man of refined tastes.” She went to the pantry and emerged with a loaf of crusty white bread. “Will this do, Your Majesty?” she asked, holding it aloft. “And how shall we present it? Hm? Do you require the crusts meticulously removed? Perhaps cut into elegant triangles? Or are we in a squares mood?”
Regulus, against all odds, felt the ghost of a smile tug at his lips.
“Triangles are acceptable, with the crusts.”
“A purist!” Daisy declared, clapping her hands once. “I respect it. Mum, you have your orders: triangles with the best cheddar this side of the River Wey. Coming right up.”
The library was a revelation. Grimmauld Place had books, of course. The Black family library was a magnificent tomb of knowledge, filled with rare first editions, gilt-edged grimoires of dubious provenance, and dense philosophical treatises in languages no one had spoken for a millennium.
This library at the Potter’s was something else entirely. It was larger, for one. The shelves were a warm, honeyed oak, not dark walnut, and they were full of rare works. They even bowed slightly in the middle under the weight of their contents.
Regulus stood in the centre of the room, his earlier anxiety momentarily suspended by a wave of pure, avaricious delight. He had never seen so many books he needed to read. It felt like a feast laid out just for him.
But a limited feast.
The cold clock of logistics ticked in the back of his mind. Today being the 23rd, meant he had ten days. The number felt both awfully long and terrifyingly short for the task at hand.
Regulus would never be back here. Which was, of course, good. Brilliant, even. No more forced proximity to Sirius. But it was also terrible because this family library was a slice of heaven he’d never known he needed.
Therefore, a plan. A military campaign. He had to extract maximum value. Every hour spent not reading in this perfect, fire-crackling silence was a criminal waste of a finite resource. The pressure was entirely self-imposed, but it felt more vital than any exam revision.
He must have entirely lost track of time, buried deep in a dense analysis of the Roman conquest of Gaul, because the next thing he knew, a voice shattered the library’s sacred quiet.
“Alright there, Black?”
Regulus startled violently, the heavy book slipping from his hands and thumping onto the hearthrug. He looked up, his heart hammering against his ribs. James Potter stood just two paces away, leaning casually against a bookcase as if he owned the place, which, Regulus supposed bitterly, he did.
Potter was wearing a white t-shirt with a sun-bleached graphic of a cartoon wombat surfing a wave, above the words ‘SURF’S UP, BYRON BAY’. A pair of grey sweatpants completed the look.
His hair was an even more spectacular disaster than usual, a dark vortex of cowlicks and tufts that suggested he’d either just woken up or had been dragged backwards through several hedges.
“Sorry,” Potter said, though he didn’t sound particularly sorry. His voice was indeed a bit raspy from sleep.
Regulus’s eyes darted past him to the hallway beyond, scanning instinctively for a flash of black curls, a shorter, angrier shadow.
The coast seemed clear.
Regulus slowly bent to retrieve his book from where it had fallen, using the movement to hide his face and compose his expression into something less like a startled deer. “I was reading,” he said, his voice flat.
“Yeah, I got that,” Potter said, a hint of that familiar, lazy amusement in his tone. He nodded at the thick book in Regulus’s grip. “Christ. What’s the plan, Black? That thing’s thicker than my head. And that’s saying something, according to Mr. Sanders. Is there a story in there, or did they just bind the entire Oxford Dictionary in a single go?”
“It’s a commentary on Julius Caesar’s campaign strategies, focusing on his use of rapid mobility and engineered supply lines to destabilize larger, entrenched forces.” Regulus corrected automatically, then wished he hadn’t. It made him sound like the utter swot Sirius always accused him of being.
To his surprise, Potter didn’t sneer. He just nodded, a faint, considering look on his face. “Caesar, huh? The ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ bloke. So, what’s the big takeaway? Any tips for staging a coup? Say, hypothetically, a deeply hierarchical English boarding school? Asking for a friend who might want to depose a particularly tyrannical head of house.”
Potter grinned, a quick, lopsided thing that was more playful than mocking.
Regulus stared up at him from the armchair, momentarily thrown.
Then, to his surprise, he heard his own voice:
“If Caesar had to take down Professor Fortescue?” Regulus mused, tapping the book. “First, reconnaissance. The head of the Classics department who adores him, the groundskeeper who provides him intelligence, the senior matron who controls access to the sanatorium. Then, sever his lines of intelligence and supply. Finally, with celeritas, swiftness. A rapid, coordinated coup of the institutions: Take over the Debating Society, the school paper, the Prefects in one fell swoop. Fortescue would wake up one morning to find he’s the head of a country that’s already surrendered.”
Potter stared down at him, his mouth slightly agape. Then a snort escaped him, followed by him bracing his hands on his knees as a wave of laughter took him. It was a loud, unselfconscious sound that seemed to warm the room.
“I had no idea you were a troublemaker, Black.” he chuckled, straightening up and swiping at his eyes, his grin wide and utterly disarming. “I am in awe. Genuinely. I feel I should be taking notes, or perhaps pledging you my fealty.”
Regulus felt a strange, defensive pride bristle. “I’m not a troublemaker,” he corrected. “I’m a strategist. There’s a difference.”
Potter’s grin, if possible, widened. “A strategist?” he repeated, full of delighted discovery.
“Yes.”
“Alright then, Strategist,” Potter said, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial hush as he took a step closer. He was now one step away from the armchair, and Regulus was acutely aware of it, of the sheer physical presence of James Potter.
This was the boy whose shout could rally a losing side to victory on a muddy pitch in the sleet, whose laughter echoed down Fallowmere’s corridors. Girls tracked him with liquid-dark eyes, and even the sternest professors softened when he flashed them an apologetic, charming smile.
He was golden, he was the sun.
And now, this sun was looking directly at Regulus. Not through him, or past him as part of the furniture, but at him.
“Talk to me,” Potter urged, leaning a hand on the back of the armchair, his tanned forearm just inches from Regulus’s shoulder. “If you were going to orchestrate something… say, for a bloke who maybe wants to make a point, but doesn’t want to spend his last summer holiday in detention scrubbing trophies… what’s the play?”
Of course Sirius had chosen James.
There hadn’t been the slightest contest.
James Potter was Sirius’s everything.
His real brother.
Who would choose Regulus when they could have this? This easy confidence, this magnetic warmth that made you feel like you were the only person in the room? Who would choose the living reminder of a cold, dark house, of silent meals and sharper, quieter punishments, when they could have a brother who brought the sun with him everywhere he went?
Regulus couldn’t even blame him.
He felt the allure of it himself, a terrifying, dizzying pull towards that golden, simple light. It would be so easy to let himself be charmed, to become another satellite in this boy’s orbit.
But he wasn’t Sirius.
The pleasant warmth of the library turned suffocating.
The heat was in his cheeks, a humiliating prickling behind his eyes. He was very close to break rule number one.
Regulus stood up from the armchair so abruptly the book tumbled from his lap. He didn’t retrieve it. He couldn’t look at Potter.
“Black? Hey, wait—” Potter’s voice followed him, laced with genuine concern.
But Regulus was already moving, a desperate flight towards the door. He didn’t run in the hall, that would be a loss of control, but his walk was a furious, precise march.
He needed the four walls of the guest room, the lock on the door, the familiar, safe pressure of solitude. He needed to not feel like he was about to shatter into a million shameful pieces over a tiny bit of attention from his brother’s golden sun.
Regulus reached the sanctuary of the guest room, his fingers fumbling with the cold brass key before he managed to lock the door and slump against it. His chest felt too tight, his eyes hot and stupid.
The silence didn’t last.
Within thirty seconds, hurried, heavy footsteps pounded down the corridor, and stopped right outside. A firm, rhythmic knock.
“Black? Regulus?” Potter’s concerned voice, came through the wood. “Hey, come on. What was that? Are you alright?”
Regulus pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, willing himself to be stone.
“Look, I’m sorry, alright?” Potter tried again, his voice dropping, closer to the door. Regulus could almost picture him leaning against the wood. “If I… overstepped. Said something. I didn’t mean to, Mum just sent me to get you for lunch, and I… I was just trying to be friendly, Black. Genuinely.”
Regulus hugged his arms around himself.
He felt a searing wave of humiliation, at his bolt from the library, at him locking himself in the room. He was acting like a child.
After a long moment, Potter’s voice came again, quieter, flattened. “Right. Okay. Message received.” A pause. “Lunch is in the morning room until half one, if you want it.”
The footsteps retreated.
Regulus listened to them fade, each step a nail in the coffin of the fragile, strange truce they’d almost forged over Roman battle tactics. He’d won his isolation. It felt like the worst defeat imaginable.
About fifteen minutes later, he’d been staring at the grain of the oak floorboards, a softer knock sounded.
“Regulus? It’s Fiona. I’ve brought you up a little tray.”
He couldn’t ignore her. It would be a profound breach of decorum, and she had been kind. That simple decency felt like a debt.
Regulus pushed himself off the door, his legs stiff from sitting on the floor. He smoothed the front of his cashmere jumper, a nervous, fussy gesture, took a shaky breath that did nothing to calm him, and unlocked the door.
He opened it just a crack, his body tensed for a confrontation. The irrational part of him was certain James Potter would be looming right behind her.
But it was only Fiona. She stood alone in the corridor, holding a large wooden tray laden with a covered plate, a brown teapot with a knitted cosy shaped like a robin, several slices of plain bread and cheese on a separate plate, and a tiny dish of butter.
“Mr. James said you’d probably not be coming down for lunch,” she said, her tone carefully neutral, devoid of judgment. But the words were a spark to tinder. A hot spike of anger, sharp and bitter, lanced through Regulus’s gut.
He told her.
Of course he had. He’d run back to the kitchen and to his parents to announce that the weird Black brother had thrown a silent wobbly and locked himself in his room. They were probably all discussing it right now over lunch, perfectly normal people trying to puzzle out the perfectly abnormal, broken guest. The humiliation was a physical burn.
He avoided her eyes, looking fixedly at a point just past her shoulder, at a rather bland watercolour of a hay wain on the corridor wall. “I got a dreadful headache,” he explained. “It came on quite suddenly. In the library. And… nausea. I think I may be coming down with something. The travel, perhaps.” He sounded wan and pathetic, which was precisely the point, but it made his skin crawl with self-loathing.
“Oh, you poor lamb,” Fiona clucked, her face softening further. “I thought you looked a bit peaky this morning in the kitchen, if you don’t mind me saying. All drawn and pale. Not a spot of colour in your cheeks. It’s this bitter weather.”
She didn’t wait for an invitation; with the unassailable authority of a woman who has spent a lifetime caring for people in big houses, she gently pushed the door wider and swept into the room.
Fiona sat down the tray down on the small table by the armchair with practised efficiency. “Gets into the bones. It’s no wonder it’s knocked you sideways.” She straightened the napkin, her movements quiet and sure. “You get this inside you, what you can manage, and have a proper rest. Pull the curtains. Shall I let Mrs. Potter know you’re under the weather?”
“Yes, please,” Regulus mumbled, the fight gone out of him, replaced by a weary surrender to the role he’d cast himself in. “Thank you, Fiona. This is… very kind.”
“Not at all. It’s what we’re here for.” She gave him one last, searching look, “There’s a bell-pull just by the fireplace, the tassel is a bit faded but it works a treat. You need anything at all, more food, a hot water bottle, an aspirin, you give it a tug. Day or night.” With a final, maternal nod she turned and left.
Regulus stood staring at the closed door for a long time. Then his eyes fell to the tray. The robin on the teapot seemed to mock him with its cheerful embroidered eye.
A hot, violent surge of frustration boiled up in his chest. Regulus lunged forward, snatched the cosy off the pot, and hurled it across the room. It hit the wall with a soft, pathetic thump and slid to the floor, the robin now staring blankly at the skirting board.
Regulus couldn’t go back to the library now, not after that. He’d have to stay in this room, pretending to be ill.
He was a prisoner, and the worst part was, he had no one to blame but his own pathetic, overreacting self.
Regulus didn’t touch the food on the tray.
As the afternoon faded, a deeper, more immobilizing inertia set in. Regulus didn’t read. He didn’t work. He simply lay under the burgundy duvet, still fully dressed in his jumper and trousers, staring at the intricate plasterwork of the ceiling rose.
He’d slept a bit, too.
A soft knock heralded Fiona’s return at dusk. He didn’t answer, but she nudged the door open with her hip, balancing a dinner tray. Her kind face was etched with concern in the low light. “Brought you a bit of supper, pet. Some proper chicken soup, see if that’ll stay down.”
Seeing him lying there, so rigid and pale against the dark fabric, she made a soft, sympathetic tsking sound. She set the tray down on the bedside table with a quiet clatter and, without preamble or asking permission, crossed to the bed. Her hand, warm and rough from a lifetime of work, came to rest on his forehead, gently brushing back the cropped, glossy black curls that had fallen across his brow.
Regulus froze. Every muscle in his body locked rigid.
He couldn’t recall the last time anyone had touched his skin.
His mind, usually a precise, ordered archive, scrabbled backwards through a chillingly sparse catalogue. At school, he was a prefect. But he never touched anyone. He also had no friends to clap him on the back. Perhaps a handshake last summer with a relative?
Orion Black never touched him with his hands.
Regulus would be summoned, would stand before the Chippendale desk, would be told to un-tuck his shirt. He would kneel, facing the leather chair, and bend forward, resting his forearms on the desk.
He would stare at the intricate pattern of the Persian rug between his knees, focusing on a single, twisted blue vine in the design.
He would hear the soft, deliberate sounds behind him: the creak of his father’s chair, the whisper of fine wool as he stood, the metallic clink of the belt buckle being undone, the soft slide of leather through loops. There was never a word of anger, never a shouted accusation. Just the terrible, focused quiet.
Then the crack. A sound like a gunshot in the silent room. A line of pure, white-hot fire would explode across his back.
Regulus would bite the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper, his fingers gripping the wood. Sometimes there was a pause. Sometimes not. A second crack. A third. The pain would build into a solid, throbbing sheet.
But his father’s hands never made contact with his skin.
When it was over, there would be the sound of the belt being threaded back through the loops, the click of the buckle.
“You may go.”
Regulus would stand, his legs trembling. He would tuck his shirt back in with clumsy, shaking fingers, the fabric already sticking to the welts. He would give a single, stiff nod, and leave the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Fiona removed her hand, and the sudden absence of its warmth was a small, shocking loss. “You’re not terribly warm,” she murmured, more to herself than to him, her brow furrowed. Her fingers lingered for a moment, brushing lightly over his temples. “No fever to speak of. Just a bit clammy. All the colour’s gone from you.” She straightened up, looking down at him with pity. “Your system’s had a nasty turn, that’s all. It needs rest, and a bit of something on your stomach.”
“It’s… it’s nothing. Just a headache.”
“It’s something, love, or you wouldn’t be laid up here,” she said, her tone gentle but brooking no nonsense. She smoothed the duvet beside him with a firm pat. “You’ll be right as rain in no time. It’s a proper shame, though,” she sighed, “Of all the days to be poorly. Christmas Eve tomorrow. The house is all a-bustle downstairs.”
“Right as rain,” he echoed hollowly, the phrase tasting like dust.
“That’s the spirit. Now,” she turned to the tray and lifted the lid from a small, floral-patterned bowl, releasing a cloud of fragrant steam. “You see if you can manage a few spoonfuls of this. It’s my grandmother’s recipe. It’ll put the heart back in you.” She placed the spoon neatly beside the bowl. “I’ll pop back for the tray later. You ring if you need anything. Anything at all.”
And with that, she was gone.
There were once two brothers.
The elder was named Sirius, for the brightest star, the Dog Star, the Scorcher. The Black family crest bore a pair of rampant black hounds, and in him, the symbolism had taken fierce, living root. He had a loyalty that was a physical force, a bleeding, ungovernable heart that beat with the ferocity of a guard dog. It was a loyalty that, at eight years old, had no worthy object save for his smaller shadow, a fact that would later become the central tragedy of their story. His hair was a wild, dark storm even then, and his grey eyes held a challenging light, as if daring the world to try and leash him.
The younger was named Regulus, for the heart of the lion. Alpha Leonis. The Little King. It was a name heavy with expectation, of courage, of royalty, of Roman generals famed for stoic sacrifice. But the boy who bore it, at six, was not terribly brave. You see, he was a child of finely-strung nerves and a stomach that turned at the sight of lumpy porridge. He had terribly knobbly knees that seemed too large for his spindly legs, and the same bright, sharp grey eyes as his brother, though his often held a look of watchful anxiety, as if he were constantly waiting for a shelf of fine china to topple. The lion’s heart, in him, was a timid, fluttering thing, more prone to retreat than to roar.
Their world was a series of grand, cold rooms. One afternoon, a particular silence had fallen, the dangerous, weighty kind that meant the adults were occupied elsewhere. The youngest was drawn by the forbidden allure of the still-room, where the housekeeper kept jars of glistening preserves.
His eyes, wide, and the colour of winter rain, skipped over the jams and fixed on a small, crystalline dish left on the scrubbed wooden sideboard. In it lay a treasure of hard sweats, each one a perfect, pale pastel coin, smooth and cool to the touch.
This was a private mission.
Sirius, his brother, was elsewhere, likely in the garden, being a pirate or a dragon-tamer, occupations that involved shouting and dirt, things Regulus found overwhelming.
Using the careful pincer grip he’d been taught for holding a pen, he selected one perfect coin and deposited it into the deep pocket of his grey shorts. Another followed. Then another. The pocket began to bulge satisfyingly, a secret hoard. A fortress of sweetness against the foods presented at the dining table.
Look what I have, the bulging pocket would say to Sirius. Look what I got for us.
He imagined his brother's face, the brilliant, approving grin he reserved for true, shared triumphs. Regulus, the provider of illicit treasure. The thought was intoxicating. He took two more, his small fingers moving faster now, less curator, more conspirator.
The right pocket was his treasury. The left pocket, he decided, would be Sirius's share. He partitioned the loot with the grave seriousness of a quartermaster.
When both pockets were heavy and lumpy with their sugary contraband, he finally took one for immediate consumption.
He was, of course, caught.
Not in the act, but by its aftermath.
He’d managed to stumble back up to the nursery, his lion’s heart hammering, and had hidden the hoard in the hollow behind a loose piece of skirting board he’d discovered months ago, a secret cache for secret things. But in his nervous flight, one pale coin must have slipped from his overstuffed pocket and rolled, a damning little emerald, across the black-and-white marble of the main hall.
The housekeeper found it.
The brothers were summoned to the study.
Orion Black stood before the fireplace, a silhouette against the warm light. He was named for the hunter, one of the most prominent and recognizable constellations, a giant of a man immortalised in the stars with a raised club and a belt of three brilliant gems. Myth painted him as a great, boastful hunter, eternally pursuing the Pleiades across the celestial sphere, flanked by his two faithful hunting dogs.
The elder son, Sirius, was named for the alpha star of Canis Major, the Greater Dog, the brightest, most loyal companion in the hunter’s retinue. He was the heir, the first hound, the blazing centre of his own destiny.
Regulus, the younger, was not the other hound. He was something else entirely, orbiting this familial drama from a more distant point in the galaxy.
“Thieving,” Orion said, the word a flat, final judgment. “Pilfering, even from our own larder. It demonstrates a profound lack of discipline. Of control.”
Sirius, the Scorcher, lifted his chin. His small hands were clenched. The loyalty in him was a wildfire, and it burned now in defence of his little brother. “It was my idea. I told him to do it. Reg didn’t even want to. He was just following me.”
It was a lie.
Regulus had conceived the mission, executed it alone, and hadn’t uttered a word to Sirius about the glittering treasure now hidden behind the skirting board.
Orion’s gaze, like slate, shifted to Regulus. “Is that so, Regulus?”
The little king stood on his knobbly knees, the two pockets, now empty but for a dusting of sugar, feeling like gaping, accusatory mouths. It felt like they were screaming his guilt.
Regulus looked at his brother’s defiant, blazing face, then at his father’s impassive one. The lion’s heart did not roar. It cramped, a tight, painful fist in his chest. The bravery required was not the kind to take sweets. He couldn’t find it. The fear was colder, sharper.
His throat worked. He dropped his eyes from his father’s gaze to the carpet.
A tiny, choked sound escaped him. It was meant to be a word. It emerged as a strangled, “Yeh-ss.”
The room grew colder.
“Very well,” Orion said, his voice devoid of all warmth. “Regulus, you may leave. Sirius. You will learn the consequences of leading your brother into dishonour. Come here.”
Regulus didn’t need telling twice. He fled up the stairs, pressing his hands over his ears as he ran, trying to block out the world. He didn’t want to hear the sounds that followed.
Later, in the deep, swallowing silence of the nursery night, two narrow beds lay parallel under the shadowed ceiling. The space between them felt wider than the Channel. No furtive flashlight beams crossed the gap. No whispered plans about tomorrow’s adventures. The air was thick with a gluey quiet.
Regulus could hear Sirius breathing, a careful, measured sound that spoke of held-in pain.
Regulus lay stiffly on his back, staring at the dark shapes of the ceiling beams. A coiled spring of misery. The treasure in its hiding place felt like a bag of live spiders.
He couldn’t bear it.
Slipping from his bed, his bare feet silent on the icy floorboards, he padded across the no-man’s-land. He didn’t ask. He simply lifted the heavy wool counterpane, and slithered in beside his brother, a cold, bony lump against Sirius’s side.
Sirius didn’t say anything. He didn’t push him away. He just lay there.
After a minute that felt like an hour, Regulus whispered into the darkness. “I’m sorry.”
Another silence stretched, thin and brittle.
Then, Sirius let out a shaky breath that hitched in the middle. “It really hurt, Reggie.”
That did it. The dam broke. A hot, silent tear escaped Regulus’s eye and tracked a wet path into his hairline. Then another. A small, hiccuping sob escaped him, and he pressed his face into the pillow to muffle it.
It was all wrong.
Sirius was the one who had the right to cry. But here Regulus was, the stupid, cowardly boy, the one who’d looked at the floor, weeping as if he were the injured party.
For a while, they just lay there, two small bodies curled towards each other in the dark. Regulus’s silent tears slowly subsided into shaky, hiccuping breaths.
Finally, Sirius sniffled. “Your feet are freezing, Reg”
“Sorry,” Regulus whispered, his voice clogged. He pulled his feet back.
“S’alright.” Sirius shifted slightly, wincing. “Just… don’t go pressing them right into my shins, you little icicle.”
“I won’t.”
Regulus hadn't so much slept as been submerged. The exhaustion of shame and the warmth of Fiona's broth had pulled him under into a deep, dreamless void. He didn't toss or turn; he was a stone at the bottom of a deep, dark lake.
He surfaced slowly, groggily, in the flat, pale light of late morning.
It was into this thick silence that the soft, hesitant knock came.
“Regulus?” It was Euphemia Potter’s voice, calm and low, filtering through the wood. “It’s Euphemia. Are you awake?”
Regulus lay perfectly still, contemplating. He could answer. He could push back the covers, swing his legs over the side, and re-enter the world of the living, of polite conversation and kind, searching eyes. The thought was exhausting. It required a performance he didn't have the energy for.
The door creaked open, just a sliver.
Panic, sharp and sour, shot through him. Without thinking, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, his body going rigid beneath the duvet.
A pause.
Regulus then heard the soft shush of the door opening wider.
He forced his breathing into a slow, deep rhythm, the kind he imagined a peacefully sleeping person would have.
In… two… three… Out… two… three…
He could feel her presence in the room, a gentle disruption of the air. He kept his eyes closed, every muscle in his face relaxed in a fake slumber.
Light footsteps approached the bed. They stopped. He could smell her perfume now, something floral and clean. He felt the slight dip in the mattress near his feet as she sat carefully on the very edge.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of his own carefully measured breath and the distant, sonorous tock… tock… tock of a longcase clock from further down the corridor.
He waited for her to say his name, to pierce the fragile bubble of his pretence with a gentle, knowing, “Regulus, I know you’re awake.”
But she didn't.
Instead, he felt a gentle, fleeting touch, the lightest brush of her fingers against his forehead, smoothing back his hair exactly as Fiona had done, but somehow softer, more tentative. It was over before he could even process the shock of it.
Then he heard the soft clink of ceramic on wood. She had set something down on the bedside table.
She stood, the mattress sighing in relief. The footsteps retreated, soft on the carpet. The door clicked shut, leaving him once again in self-imposed exile.
Only then, in the new, profound quiet, did he dare open his eyes. He did not move his head, only his gaze, sliding sideways.
On the table sat a small tray. A cup of steaming tea, the steam curling in a frail grey plume. A crystal tumbler of water, beading with condensation. Two plain digestives, two neat triangles of cheese-topped bread. And a single, perfect tangerine.
There was also a note.
Dread lanced through Regulus’s gut.
Had his mother written? Had the news of his ridiculous behaviour, his locking himself away in a stranger’s house, already reached Zürich?
‘You have embarrassed the family. Your conduct is unacceptable.’
Regulus shot upright in bed, the duvet falling away, and snatched the card from the tray. His eyes scanned the elegant slopes.
It took a second for the panic to recede and the actual message to filter through.
Dear Regulus,
I hope you’re feeling a little better. If you’re up to it later, you’d be very welcome to join us. This evening, we’ll be having a simple supper and listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on the wireless from King’s College, Cambridge, as is our tradition on Christmas Eve. Monty turns it up terribly loud, I’m afraid. You’d be most welcome to join us for that, too, even if just to listen from an armchair with a blanket. It’s rather lovely, even if you’re not particularly religious.
But only if you feel like it. No expectations.
With very best wishes for a peaceful day,
Euphemia
He read it twice. The panic bled away, leaving a hollow, aching confusion.
No expectations.
The phrase echoed in his mind, a puzzle he couldn't solve. Did it mean it wouldn't be terribly rude for him to stay up here, cocooned in this safe, miserable inertia? That he could legitimately skip the ordeal of facing James Potter’s confused, probably pitying looks, and the searing, certain contempt from Sirius across a room full of festive cheer? That he could avoid the terrifying intimacy of a family tradition that wasn't his?
At home, all expectations were explicit, brutal, and binary.
Obey or be punished.
He imagined descending the stairs. The conversation halting. Sirius’s cold shoulder. James’s awkward attempt at normalcy. The sheer, exhausting effort of pretending he wasn’t dying inside.
Regulus lay back, the note crumpling slightly in his hand, and stared at the tangerine as if it held the answer.
It just sat there.
“Well?” he whispered to it, the word barely more than a breath.
The tangerine, of course, said nothing. It continued to sit in its serene, spherical smugness.
Regulus snatched it up. His thumbs dug into the bright skin, piercing the zest with a sharp, citrusy spray. For the tangerine’s failure to provide any answers, Regulus sentenced it to death. He peeled it alive and ate its segments.
There.
He had dealt with the tangerine. Executed it for contempt of court. It was gone. The problem of the note, the invitation, the entire wretched, stretching hours of Christmas, however, remained infuriatingly intact.
The decision, when it came, was of course the cowardly one. The only one he seemed capable of.
He took a shower instead.
The bathroom was across the hall. Leaving the sanctuary of the bedroom for this small mission felt like a manageable sortie compared to the full-scale invasion of the downstairs. He cracked the door open. The distant murmur of voices punctuated the quiet. The corridor was a long, blessedly empty canyon of deep shadow and pools of soft light from wall sconces. The runner, a swirl of burgundy and navy, stretched into dimness. The coast was clear.
He darted across the corridor, a silent, pyjama-clad shadow, and slipped into the bathroom, locking the door behind him with a soft, definitive click.
The room was large, high-ceilinged, done in glossy white subway tiles and gleaming chrome. A massive, lion-footed tub stood proudly on a black-and-white chequered floor. There was also a separate shower stall, encased in thick, frosted glass.
Regulus stripped off his clothes, and let them fall to the tiles in a small, forlorn heap.
He turned the shower dials. The pipes groaned and shuddered a protest somewhere in the walls before surrendering with a gush.
A cascade erupted into the stall.
Regulus turned it hotter.
He liked it hot. Not comfortably warm, but punishingly, almost unbearably hot, the kind that turned his skin pink and made his scalp tingle. It felt like a purge.
He stepped under the blistering spray. He stood there, head bowed, shoulders hunched, letting the water drum against his neck and back, a punishing, cleansing rain. He wanted it to scour him clean. Of everything.
Preferably, it would just burn him off. Melt the whole sorry, cowardly mess of Regulus Black into a lukewarm, greasy puddle and let him slip, silent and unnoticed, down the drain. No more decisions. Just… gone. A faint, soapy residue to be rinsed away.
But the water remained just water, and his skin remained stubbornly, painfully attached to his bones.
Regulus washed mechanically, using the expensive, herbal-scented soap from the dish. It lathered richly, smelling of pine forests and something clean and bitter.
When he finally stepped out, pink-skinned and shrouded in steam, the room was a warm, clouded vault. He toweled off. Wrapping the towel snugly around his narrow waist, he approached the mirror, a ghost in the mist. He wiped a clear circle on the fogged glass.
A boy looked back.
A pale, black-haired boy with droplets of water clinging to his dark eyelashes. His hair, a cascade of inky, perfect curls, clung damply to his temples and the elegant line of his neck.
The Black features were there, undeniable and fine: the high, sharp cheekbones that gave his face a sculpted, almost delicate quality; the full, well-shaped mouth that on Sirius was so often twisted in a smirk or a snarl, but on him was set in a tense, neutral line; the straight, aristocratic nose; the dark, winged brows.
Objectively, Regulus was pretty. He could admit that. It was a clinical fact, like the square root of sixty-four. He looked very much like Sirius, and Sirius, for all his delinquency, had always got a lot of a certain kind of attention. Love letters could be gathered from his locker by the handful. Amina Shafiq would giggle herself breathless at his stupidest jokes.
Regulus had the same raw materials. The same canvas. But where Sirius had painted a vibrant, chaotic masterpiece of charm and rebellion, Regulus had produced a mean, cold engraving.
So, he was pretty, but… But what?
He looked down his perfect nose at everyone. He was a prickly, superior little shit who thought he was better than you because he could decline Latin verbs.
And anyway, maybe his face was one thing, but his body was another matter. It was ruined.
Regulus stood there, half-naked and dripping. He refused to turn around in the mirror. That was another rule, an unbreakable one.
He didn’t need to see it to know it was there. He could feel the landscape of it under his fingertips when he washed, the ridges of silvery scars, the slightly tougher patches of skin where wounds had healed badly.
His inheritance.
But he was not just a passive recipient of the family debt. Regulus was a meticulous banker of his own misery. The rules were strict, born of a cold logic: nothing visible. Nothing that a short-sleeved school shirt, or the hem of his pyjamas, might reveal. The canvas for his private work was therefore limited to the territories forever under occupation: his inner thighs, pale and sensitive; the soft flesh of his hips, just above the waistband; the untouched skin of his ribs and sides. Places no one would ever see because Regulus would never, ever take off his shirt in public, and he lived in a world of long trousers and layered jumpers.
The cuts were not messy, hysterical slashes. They were precise. Calculated. Performed with the sterile tip of a razor blade extracted from a pencil sharpener, wiped clean with surgical spirit.
It proved he could feel something, even if it was only this.
The decision to leave his room at dawn again was not born of courage, but of a different, more pragmatic dread. The idea of emerging later, when the house was fully awake and bustling with festive activity, was unimaginable. The silent, grey pre-dawn was his natural habitat.
He pushed open the green baize door to the kitchen, expecting Fiona.
Instead, he was met with a blast of arctic air and Daisy.
She was standing at the open back door, breathing in the frosty morning, a cigarette smouldering between her fingers. A thick, cable-knit cardigan was thrown over what appeared to be flannel pyjamas covered in cartoon hedgehogs. Her short blonde plait was fraying at the edges, and she held a steaming mug of tea in her other hand.
She turned at the sound of the door, her face breaking into an immediate, delighted grin.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in at the arse-crack of dawn,” she said, her voice a smoky, morning rasp. “The patient rises. Or is this a daring escape? Should I sound the alarm? I think there’s a bell for that somewhere.”
Regulus froze in the doorway, wrong-footed. “I… I was just… seeking tea.”
“Course you were.” She took a sip from her mug, studying him over the rim. “You look less like death warmed up. Marginally.” She took a final, deep drag from her cigarette, then flicked it expertly out into the pristine snow, where it died with a faint hiss. Daisy used her foot to nudge the door shut against the cold.
“I didn’t expect… I thought Fiona…”
“Mum’s in the laundry, wrestling with a tablecloth the size of Surrey. I’m just… loitering with intent. Mainly the intent to steal the last of the honey.” She leaned back against the scrubbed pine table, crossing her ankles.
“Oh, right.”
“Are you always up with the worms, or is this a special holiday neurosis?”
Regulus realized that Daisy had no intention of playing housemaid for him. It was a relief, oddly. He busied himself sheepishly with the teapot. “I’ve always been an early riser.”
“Right. And I only smoke at dawn for the sophisticated aroma,” she said dryly, plucking the packet of cigarettes from her cardigan pocket and waving them. “Bad habit. Picked it up at uni trying to look profound at parties. Now I’m just a cliché. Mum despairs.” She shrugged, unbothered. “What about you? Any vices? Or are you just tragically, perfectly pure?”
Vices?
An obsessive need for order.
A propensity for cowardice.
A private, meticulous catalogue of his failings.
Razor blades?
“Er… no,” he managed, his voice tight. He turned away to hide the flush he could feel creeping up his neck, focusing intently on the stream of water filling the pot.
“Liar,” Daisy said cheerfully, not missing a beat. She pushed the honey pot towards him across the table. “Everyone’s got something. Yours is probably… I dunno.” She tapped her chin, pretending to think deeply. “An unhealthy attachment to a particular brand of ink. Secret midnight feasts of… what, dry toast? A hidden stash of incredibly depressing poetry. No, wait!” She snapped her fingers. “No, that’s not right. You’ve got a tattoo! The family crest… on your bum.”
Regulus, who had just taken a sip of tea, choked. He coughed, spluttering into his mug, his ears burning. The image was so ludicrous, so violently at odds with everything he was, that it short-circuited his usual defences.
Daisy cackled, delighted by his reaction. “Got it, didn’t I? Oh, don’t look so horrified. I’m joking. Probably.” She winked. “Though if you do have a tattoo of a grumpy-looking dog on your left buttock, my respect for you just went up several notches.”
“I do not—” he began, his voice strangled, rising in pitch. A hot, fury surged through him, mingling with the humiliation.
How dare this… this girl in hedgehog pyjamas joke about something so… so vulgar?
“Your secret’s safe with me,” she said, holding up her hands in mock surrender, still grinning.
Regulus could feel the words boiling up, old, precise, cutting words that would put her in her place, that would slice through her cheerful impertinence and leave her as silent and chastened as he felt. He could yell. He could wake the whole damned house. It would serve her right.
But as he met her eyes, still sparkling with laughter, but now holding a flicker of watchful curiosity, not malice, the rage hit a wall. She wasn’t being cruel. She was being… silly.
Regulus forced the anger down, swallowing it like a bitter pill. “That is… an exceptionally crude hypothesis.”
Daisy chuckled, unfazed. “I could’ve said something truly horrifying, you know. Like that you’d gone and got the same ridiculous tattoos as your brother. There’s this quote on his left arm: 'I declare I don't care no more.' “
Regulus froze, the mug halfway to his lips. He didn’t know about that one. It must be new. He hadn’t seen Sirius up close in over a year. He was a stranger now, a catalogued exhibit of defiance he could no longer keep track of.
“I am not my brother.”
“No kidding,” Daisy said. “I did notice the distinct lack of eyeliner. And you’re significantly worse at accepting a joke.” She gave him an appraising look. “You two do have the dramatic scowls in common, though. It appears to be genetic. But yours is more ‘I’ve detected a logical fallacy in your festive garland’. His is more ‘I’m going to set your festive garland on fire’.”
Unconsciously, Regulus had been scowling, a deep, troubled furrow between his brows as he processed the new information about the tattoo.
At her words, he caught himself. He stopped, his expression smoothing into one of forced neutrality with an audible, dismissive scoff. It was a poor cover. He felt exposed.
“I don’t scowl,” he muttered, looking into his tea.
“Right. And I don’t eat too many biscuits,” Daisy said, deadpan. She pushed off the table. “Anyway. My point is, your secret buttock-tattoo is safe with me. You have my word.”
This time, he couldn’t stop it. A short, sharp sound, almost a snort, escaped him before he could clamp down on it.
Daisy’s face lit up with a triumphant, brilliant smile. “Aha! A crack in the armour! I knew there was a human in there somewhere.” She leaned her hip against the table, crossing her arms. “Right, now you’re confirmed to not be an alien, I can ask the important questions. What, in the name of all that’s holy, do you actually eat? Aside from cheese on toast.”
He shrugged a small, stiff gesture. “I like… a lot of stuff. Normal stuff.”
“Oh, brilliant. ‘Stuff’. Very descriptive.” She ticked off on her fingers. “So far on the Regulus-approved menu we have: cheese, toast, and… ‘stuff’.”
He felt his ears grow warm. “I eat pasta,” he mumbled defensively.
“What on it?”
“Butter and–”
“Right. So beige paste on beige strands. Thrilling.” She was grinning, not unkindly. “Crisps? Everyone likes crisps. Salt and vinegar? Prawn cocktail? Or are you a plain salted purist?”
“I like all types of crisps,” he admitted because it was true, and it was a safe, normal thing.
“Progress! We have a snack food. Okay, what about… chocolate. Dark? Milk? White, no, don’t tell me you like white chocolate, that’s not chocolate, that’s sweetened wax.”
“I don’t really like chocolate,” he admitted.
Daisy’s blonde eyebrows shot up. “You don’t… like chocolate?” She said it as if he’d confessed to not believing in gravity. “Okay, alien suspicions are back on the table. What’s wrong with it? Too… chocolatey?”
“It’s not… nice,” he said, struggling for the right word. “It coats your mouth.”
She shook her head, still grinning.
“I like hard sweets.”
“Progress!” she declared, as if he’d unlocked a major achievement. “So we’ve got beige carbs, cheese, hard candy, and… what else? There must be something. A rogue vegetable? A sanctioned fruit?”
He thought for a moment, surprised to find he wanted to give a proper answer. “Apples,” he said. “But they have to be crisp. Not mealy. And seedless grapes. The green ones. Not red. The red ones taste different.”
Regulus watched her face, a trained observer of micro-expressions, waiting for the subtle curl of the lip that would reveal this was all a joke at the weird guest’s expense. But it didn’t come. Her interest appeared authentic, a kind of cheerful anthropological study.
Emboldened, and disarmed by her lack of judgment, he found himself continuing. He admitted he liked almost all forms of bread, and potatoes. Mashed potatoes, however, were denounced as a textural abomination. Carrots were permissible in their solid, roasted form, but not puréed. He liked grilled white fish, chicken without the skin or thick sauce. He could eat red meat, too, but it had to be cooked. But it was generally avoided. Mince, however, in a well-browned state, was sometimes acceptable, as it offered a uniform consistency.
“So, no sauce?” Daisy clarified, her head tilted. “No je ne sais quoi? No… gravy?”
“I can eat… a reduction. If it’s smooth.”
“You’d have hated growing up in my house. Mum’s philosophy was ‘you’ll eat what’s put in front of you or you’ll go hungry’. Lots of mystery stews.”
A bolt of pure, cold horror shot through Regulus. His face must have shown it because Daisy’s expression softened from amusement to reassurance.
“Oh, no, not here! Don’t look so panicked.” She waved a hand. “I don’t live here. Not in the main house. God, no. Can you imagine? Mum’s the housekeeper. We’ve got the gardener’s cottage down by the old stables. I’m just lurking here because a) it’s about twenty degrees warmer than our place, and b) the biscuit selection is vastly superior.” She grinned. “I’m just home for the vac. University. Bristol. Archaeology.”
She wasn’t staff like Fiona was.
“Archaeology,” he echoed, for lack of anything else to say.
“Yep. Digging up dead things. It’s brilliant. You’d probably hate the European digs,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “All mud and rain and surprise slugs. Very texturally challenging. But if you go somewhere properly arid, the Middle East, North Africa, it’s a different story. All clear, dry stratigraphy. Beautiful, clean lines in the dust.”
He felt a faint, unexpected smile touch his lips. “It sounds… logical.”
“That’s me. A regular portrait of logic in mismatched pyjamas.” She pushed off the table. “Right, I’m for another slice of toast before the hordes descend. You want one? I, Daisy, First of Her Name, Protector of the Plain Carbohydrate, swear to defend this toast from all textural invaders.”
Regulus let out a soft, exasperated groan that was half-genuine, half-amused. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered. He slid off the stool with a lanky, awkward grace. “I can operate a toaster, you know. I’m not completely useless.” He reached for the bread, his movements decisive.
Daisy held up her hands in surrender, “Alright, alright! Touchy about his toast-making autonomy. Noted. The throne is yours, Your Majesty.” She stepped back, leaning against the counter to watch as he selected two slices, placed them in the slots, and depressed the lever with a firm click.
“See?” he said, a touch defensively. “Perfectly capable.”
“I never doubted it for a second,” Daisy said, pressing a hand to her chest in a gesture of deep reverence. “Your proficiency with spring-loaded browning technology is legendary in nine counties. They sing songs of it. ‘The Ballad of the Boy and the Breville’.” She gave a little bow. “I am not worthy.”
A laugh escaped him. He shook his head, turning to hide the smile tugging at his mouth by pretending to be deeply interested in the progress of the glowing elements. “You’re ridiculous.”
“And you, Your Majesty, are so terribly benevolent with your wonderful compliments,” she said, batting her eyelashes dramatically.
The toaster popped with two perfectly synchronized clunks. “Behold! Your magnum opus.”
Regulus had lost all track of time in the warm, surprising sanctuary of the kitchen. Daisy, after his toast-making triumph, had fetched a thick, well-thumbed textbook from her bag, its cover depicting a cross-section of a burial mound. She’d opened it on the table between them. She was explaining her dissertation prospectus on the trade routes of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, her voice animated, her hands sketching pottery shapes in the air.
“I’m applying for PhD programmes next year. Cambridge, UCL. Try to get paid to keep digging.”
Regulus beamed with something like intellectual camaraderie, when rapid, thunderous footsteps pounded down the main staircase. The door flew open, and Sirius erupted into the room.
He wore a pair of tartan bottoms and a rumpled Ramones t-shirt.
“Daze! Have you seen the sodding scissors, I’ve got a—” he called out, before his storm-grey eyes, sweeping the room, landed not just on Daisy, but on Regulus, sitting across from her, a digestif biscuit halfway to his lips.
Sirius stopped dead.
The air in the warm kitchen seemed to crackle and freeze.
Regulus’s hand froze midair. The fragile, paper-thin sense of peace he’d been cradling evaporated instantly, leaving a cold, hollow dread.
A muscle twitched in Sirius jaw.
But he didn’t say a word. He didn’t acknowledge Regulus’s existence at all. He just turned on his heel, a sharp, violent motion, and strode back out, letting the door slam shut behind him with a force that made the teacups rattle in their saucers.
The silence he left behind was absolute and suffocating.
Daisy let out a slow, controlled breath. “Well,” she said, her voice deliberately light but tinged with sympathy. “Merry Christmas to him too. Full of festive cheer, that one.”
Regulus put the uneaten biscuit down, his appetite gone.
Five minutes could be considered a decent interval for his older brother’s simmering rage to reach its explosive boiling point. Regulus knew the drill. He could map the trajectory in his sleep: the righteous appeal to the high court of James bloody Potter, Sirius’s muffled, furious ranting, and the blistering accusation.
Sure enough, the thunder of footsteps returned. These were not Sirius’s. These were heavier, Potter, summoned to receive the latest indictment. The kitchen door swung open again, admitting a whirlwind of striped pyjama bottoms, dishevelled hair, and palpable, sleep-fogged concern.
“Alright?” he said, his voice a morning rasp. He scrubbed a hand over his face, his hazel eyes scanning the room, taking in Daisy’s raised eyebrows over her textbook, and Regulus’s pale form still frozen at the table.
Daisy let out a slow, expressive sigh, the kind that spoke volumes about enduring years of Black-Potter dramatics. “Just his usual pre-prandial paroxysm. Burst in, demanded scissors, caught sight of the company, and executed a tactical retreat.”
Potter’s expression tightened.
“You…” Potter began, then stopped, clearly choosing his words with uncharacteristic care. “You’re up, then. Feeling… better?”
Regulus couldn’t hold that gaze. He looked down at his hands, folded too tightly in his lap. “I’m fine.”
“Right.” James scrubbed a hand through his hair. He stood there in the doorway, pyjama-clad and broad-shouldered, and Regulus noted, how tall he was. Not like he didn’t already know this, but here, in the quiet of the kitchen, the fact felt newly oppressive. Even slouched in the doorway in rumpled pyjamas, he seemed to command all the air in the room. "You're perfectly fine. Course you are. And I'm the Archbishop of Canterbury." James pushed his glasses up his nose with a knuckle.
A short, sharp laugh escaped Daisy. It wasn’t entirely amused. "Yeah, and as Archbishop, you can tell your lodger I’m not running a prop shop. The scissors are in the utility drawer. Where they’ve been for a decade.”
Potter winced, a pained look crossing his face. “Daze, come on. You know what he’s been through.”
“No, James. I’m serious. And I’m tired.” She closed her textbook with a definitive thud. “I get it. He’s got a lot of feelings. They’re very big and very loud. But he doesn’t have to be such a colossal prick about it.”
James’s jaw tightened, the muscle flickering. “He’s trying,” he said, the words strained. “In his way. It’s just… a really shitty way, sometimes.”
Regulus kept his gaze welded to the wood grain of the table, tracing a dark whorl that looked like a tiny galaxy.
“Look at him, James.” She gestured toward Regulus, who went very still.
A hot, prickling shame crept up his neck. This was worse. Infinitely worse than Sirius’s silent contempt.
Her defence was pity. Soft, suffocating, and utterly misplaced. He didn’t need her fucking pity. She didn’t know a single thing that had happened. She saw a quiet, pale boy and decided to make him her Christmas charity case.
And Potter? Potter probably knew only the story Sirius had told him, the grand tragedy. Sirius’s version, polished by rage and performance, where Regulus was just the cowardly collaborator.
The urge to stand up and scream it at them was a physical pressure in his throat.
“It’s not that simple—” James started, but Daisy cut over him.
"It's really that simple to be decent to your younger brother, I think!" Daisy shot back, her conviction ringing in the tiled room.
"Oh, piss off with the moral high ground, Daze. You don't get it."
"I get that there's a kid sitting here who looks like he's been kicked in the chest, and your best mate is the one making him feel that way!"
"He's not making him feel anything!" James's voice rose.
Regulus stood up.
Both James and Daisy fell silent, turning to him.
He didn't look at James. He looked at Daisy, and his expression was cold. Filled with withering disdain.
"Yeah," he said, his voice flat and hollow. "Potter's right. He's not 'making me feel' anything. It's not his fault, it's mine. And you know what? I don't care. I like it."
Regulus wasn't a victim; he was the villain. It was simpler that way. It was the story everyone already believed. Sirius the glorious rebel, Regulus the spineless collaborator.
Why fight a narrative that fit so neatly?
He gave Daisy a tiny, icy smirk. It didn't reach his eyes. "So you can put your conscience away. There's nothing to defend. I am precisely what he says I am. I chose it. And I really, truly, do not give a single, solitary fuck."
And with that, he walked out.
Regulus sat on the edge of the made-up bed, the burgundy duvet smooth beneath him. He didn’t slump. He sat perfectly straight, his hands resting on his knees.
The look on Daisy’s face played on a horrific loop behind his eyes. Not anger. Not pity. It had been a kind of dawning, sickened understanding. As if she’d pulled back a pretty rock from a river and found the worms writhing beneath.
Regulus was good at being mean. It was easier than being kind, which was a slippery, complicated transaction he never seemed to get right.
It was a relief, in a way. To finally stop pretending there was anything in him worth saving. To align the bleeding mush inside of him, the pathetic, pulsing core that just wouldn’t fucking freeze over, with external reality.
Regulus just wished it didn’t have to feel so goddamn bad.
That was the truly pathetic part. He could do the thing, he could say the words, he could carve his own character into something sharp and hateful, and for a second, it felt powerful. And then… then it just felt like shit. A hot, sick, hollow feeling in his gut, like he’d swallowed a great lump of wet ash.
His father’s voice wasn’t loud. It never was. It was a cold, clean scalpel, and it was in his head now, cutting through the self-pity.
I send you to a respectable house, and you sit there, letting them debate your hurts like you are a wounded fawn. You have made a spectacle of our disgrace. You have shown them the wet, red underbelly of our affairs. You are not a son. You are a leaking wound. And I am sick of the smell.
Regulus squeezed his eyes shut, but the vision came anyway, vivid and nauseating.
He saw his father standing here, in this pretty, sunlit guest room. Orion Black would not touch anything. His hands would be clasped behind his back as he took in the damask curtains, the vase of holly, the plush carpet. His expression would be one of disgust.
You are not even a competent villain, boy. You are not a real Black. You are a stain. A greasy thumbprint on the family silver.
Regulus’s nails bit into his palms.
He wanted to be a block of ice. Smooth. Impenetrable. Feeling nothing, wanting nothing, needing nothing.
It wasn’t fair. He’d done everything right. He’d followed rules. He’d bent himself into the exact, tortured shape of the space they’d allotted him.
And for what?
To sit here, in a stranger’s tastefully appointed guest room, haunted by a ghost who would never, ever be satisfied because satisfaction was not the point.
A soft knock at the door fractured the stillness. His father’s phantom faded.
It wasn’t Daisy.
“Regulus?” Euphemia Potter’s voice, calm and clear, filtered through the oak. “Might I come in for a moment?”
He swallowed. His throat clicked, dry as old parchment.
“Come in,” he said, the words barely audible.
The door opened.
Euphemia Potter was dressed in a simple, elegant dress of deep emerald wool, her dark hair swept back in a soft chignon. A string of pearls lay against her throat.
“May I sit?” she asked, gesturing to the space beside Regulus.
It was her house, her bloody bed, he wanted to say. She could set it on fire if she liked.
But he just gave a stiff nod.
Euphemia sat, the mattress dipping gently with her weight. She smoothed her skirt beneath her, a small, tidy gesture. Then she fell still.
She didn’t look at him, instead studying her hands folded in her lap for a moment. On her left hand, a wedding band sat nestled against a simple engagement ring.
The silence stretched.
“I am not here to pry, or to fix, or to meditate. I am here to tell you two things.” She held up a finger. “First. However long you want to be under this roof, you are part of this family, Regulus.”
“Second.” Euphemia held up a second finger. “You are sixteen years old. I am not telling you this to forgive you for anything, or to excuse anyone else,” she said. “I am telling you because I have a son.” Euphemia paused, and a faint smile touched her lips.
“A son who thinks with his heart first, and his head second. And I know that sometimes, boys, even the cleverest ones, need to hear from someone that what has happened to them is not their fault. That carrying a family’s broken pieces does not make you the one who broke them. And it is not something you deserve.”
Euphemia didn’t touch him. She didn’t try to hug him. She just sat there.
And Regulus broke.
Rule One shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces.
A single, hot tear breached his defences, tracing a scalding path down his cheek. He tried to swallow it back, to blink it away, but it was followed by another. And another.
Regulus turned his head away, trying to hide the humiliating collapse. The tears came silently at first, then in great, heaving waves that shook his frame. He brought his hands up, pressing the heels into his eyes, as if he could physically shove the emotion back in, but it was useless.
He was crying, yes, over the past. Over the trauma. But he was also crying because, on some level, he knew Euphemia Potter’s absolution was a gift he couldn’t accept. The rational part of him was standing to the side, watching with utter contempt.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
Crying over his own choices, mostly. But it was easier, wasn't it, to let the snot and the shuddering take over, to pretend for a bit that it wasn't his choice.
The storm of tears had left him feeling scooped-out and oddly light, like a seashell after the creature inside has retreated or died.
The room held the afternoon's silence like a held breath, and Regulus lay on the deep burgundy comforter, a pale, hollowed-out thing against its rich colour. He’d slept through lunch and most of the afternoon.
He woke to a soft tap on the door.
The room was washed in the cool, crystalline light of a clear Christmas Eve sky just beginning to blush with twilight.
“Regulus? It’s me again. May I come in?”
He cleared his throat. “Yes.”
The door opened, and Euphemia entered. She was still dressed in her elegant emerald wool. She didn’t comment on his appearance, though he knew he must look rumpled, his hair a dark tangle against the pillow.
“I wanted to let you know that dinner will be in about two hours,” she said, her voice warm. “It’s nothing terribly formal. Just the household, and a few close friends, a tradition of ours. It’s always rather loud and terribly messy.” A gentle, conspiratorial smile touched her lips. “Fiona and her daughter Daisy. Henry, our driver, and his wife Marjorie, she makes the most divine trifle. Dear old Mr. Fletcher from the village, who tends the roses. And Remus Lupin, James’s friend from school, is staying with us for the rest of the holiday. It’s a very mixed bag.”
She paused, her gaze steady on him. “I would love it if you felt you could join us. Truly. There’s a place for you at the table. But, if you would prefer a tray up here again, that is perfectly alright.”
Regulus found himself nodding.
“I… I’ll come down. For a bit.”
He was doing it, partly, to please her. It was a compromise with himself. Regulus wasn’t promising the whole evening. Just an appearance. A brief foray into the land of the living. He could always retreat.
Her smile deepened, crinkling the corners of her eyes. “I’m so glad,” she said, and it sounded like she meant it, “Wear whatever you’re most comfortable in.”
With that, she left.
When the door closed, Regulus sat for a moment, half-buried in the bedding. The self-pity was a warm, seductive trap. But instead of getting caught, he pushed himself up, and padded to the bathroom.
Regulus stood under the warm spray in the sower, head bowed, letting the water drum against the tight knot of dread between his shoulder blades. He washed mechanically.
Afterwards, wrapped in a towel that smelled of lavender fabric softener, he stood before the open wardrobe. The formal shirts and tailored trousers he’d packed, hung there, crisp and severe. His fingers settled instead on the soft, dense knit of a black cashmere jumper. He paired it with his black trousers, black socks, black shoes.
The mirror on the wardrobe door showed a lanky, pale column of black. Hair a tousled black halo. His eyes were a bit red, the only vivid colour on him.
This was as good as it was going to get.
Right. For the record, Regulus hadn't shuffled like some kicked puppy, trailing misery in his wake. He'd walked. Like a normal person. Down the stairs and into the cheerful conservatory or garden room with a wall of glass overlooking the grounds.
And he wasn't scowling. He made a point of not scowling. His face was doing a thing, a neutral, polite thing. It might have felt a bit stiff, but that was just because it was his default setting.
When he'd entered the garden room, a blast of warmth and noise hitting him like a physical wall, he'd caught Euphemia's eye. And he'd smiled. A small, tight, but technically correct smile. She’d smiled back, a proper one, warm and encouraging.
Do not look at Sirius.
That was the only rule for this evening.
Looking at Sirius was akin to poking a wasps' nest with a stick while wearing a particularly tempting jam sandwich as a hat.
Sirius loved a scene. He thrived on them. He’d turn a glance into a confrontation, a muttered word into a shouting match. You could see it in his eyes, that bright, manic gleam right before he’d lob a verbal grenade across the dinner table.
He’d push every button. It was about picking the thing that would make their parents’ faces go tight and bloodless. Like when he was fourteen and plastered his walls with wank mags of topless girls, knowing their mother would see.
This was a nice gathering. The Potters were nice people. They didn’t deserve the Black family’s particular brand of radioactive fallout splattered across their tasteful wallpaper. So, Regulus wouldn’t give Sirius the excuse. He would be the bigger person.
Talking to the gardener, Fletcher, was a safe bet.
The man was a unit, built like a weathered tree stump. His most notable feature was a beard the colour of cold fireplace ash. It was impressively thick, and near his mouth, the grey was tinged a permanent, nicotine yellow from the pipe he was currently smoking. When Mr. Fletcher laughed, which was often, the whole beard bristled and shifted like a living creature.
The best part was, Fletcher monologued. Regulus just had to offer the occasional "Mm," or "Right," and look like he was deeply invested in soil compaction. Easy.
Except. The whole time, a part of his brain was like a radio picking up a pirate station. It was tuned to the specific frequency of laughter from across the room. The sound of his voice, cutting through the chatter.
Sod it. Regulus glanced over.
Sirius was talking to Remus Lupin.
Lupin was propped by the big fireplace. He’d got taller, or maybe Regulus had just forgotten. One hand rested lightly on top of a plain wooden cane. He had on a Christmas jumper with slightly crap-looking trees on it, and the sleeves were definitely too short.
He was brown-skinned, and the firelight from the hearth hit the left side of his face funny. Everyone at school knew about the scars. Not like it was announced, but you couldn’t miss it.
The scars were obviously burns. Patchy ones, shiny and tight in some spots, rough in others. They covered most of the left side of his face and neck, pulling at the corner of his mouth so he always looked a bit sceptical. The story that went around, was that there’d been a house fire when he was little. A bad one. That his mum had died in it.
Regulus had seen similar marks on the back of Lupin’s left hand once, before he tugged his sleeve down.
On the scale of Sirius’s terrible friends, he was the least objectionable. He read books. He didn't lob bread rolls or make wanking gestures behind teachers' backs.
Not that Regulus knew a single other thing about him. He was friends with James and Sirius and Peter, which was basically a character indictment in itself.
Sirius had said something, his hands moving in an animated explanation, and Lupin’s smile widened into a grin, showing teeth.
Regulus’s treacherous eyes snapped to his Sirius. He was wearing a thick, cable-knit jumper in a deep red. The jeans were the usual destroyed black ones. His hair was down, a mane of black curls past his shoulders.
Regulus thought it looked objectively awful.
He looked like a girl. A right ponce.
Fallowmere had rules.
Rule 4.b (Personal Presentation): A boy’s hair must be kept neat, tidy, and shall not touch the collar.
Sirius’s solution was to tie his back in a knot. It was, technically, off the collar. Another neat little fuck-you.
And Regulus wasn't about to launch a one-man crusade as a prefect to make his older brother get a haircut. That would be beneath him. It would look like he gave a shit. He didn't. There was a difference between caring and having eyes. And his eyes informed him it looked unkempt.
Daisy was over by the piano. She wasn’t in her hedgehog pyjamas any more, obviously.
Dark, tailored trousers and a black top that was covered in tiny white sequins, so that every time she shifted or laughed, she shimmered. Her hair was loose for once, a short, blonde bob that curled softly at her chin, and she’d put on a dark red lipstick.
James was beside her, in a dark navy jumper, attempting to balance a fork on the bridge of his nose while folding a napkin into something with his hands.
Daisy was laughing.
They’d clearly patched things up after the kitchen showdown this morning.
A sharp, sour twist coiled in his gut. It was shame, hot and sudden.
Regulus hadn’t apologized.
He’d been a prick to her. She’d overstepped, sure, sticking her oar in where it wasn’t wanted, playing the saviour. But Regulus could have just walked away. Instead, he’d gone for the throat. He’d weaponised his own misery to hurt her, to make her feel foolish for caring. It was a cheap, nasty trick.
The guilt sat in him now, a heavy, indigestible lump. Anger was clean. It had direction. This guilt was just… there. A sticky, complicated mess.
Regulus contemplated walking over. Tapping her on the sequined shoulder and apologizing.
Apparently, he was too much of a coward for that. Or maybe he was just too embarrassed. It was easier to let her think he was just an irredeemable little shit. It required less energy from everyone.
So, Regulus wrenched his gaze away from the sparkling, laughing pair by the piano, feeling a hot prickle at the back of his neck.
His escape route presented itself not a moment too soon. Mr. Fletcher, having dispatched another glass of amber-coloured whisky, slapped a calloused hand down on his thigh. “Right,” he announced, “Duty calls. Gotta go see a man about a dog.” He pushed himself up from the armchair.
Regulus seized the window.
He stood, smoothing his jumper. “Probably should head up,” he muttered, not quite looking at anyone. “Still feel a bit rough. Cheers for the chat, Mr. Fletcher. It was interesting.”
Regulus slipped out. The noise shrank to a dull, happy rumble behind the closed door. The main hall was cooler, almost silent, just the tick of a big clock somewhere and the golden glow from the wall lights. He aimed for the stairs. The guest room.
But as he passed the library, his steps faltered. Regulus remembered a book. He’d seen it a couple of days ago, before he’d fled from James like a spooked cat. A heavy, cloth-bound thing on Norse mythology. It had black-and-white illustrations of wolves swallowing the sun and kings drinking mead from the skulls of their enemies. Perfect. Exactly what he needed.
Regulus pushed the library door open. The room was a pit of shadows, the only light the cold, blue wash of moonlight through the big windows. He didn’t bother with the switch. He ghosted across the carpet, beelining for the right bay. His fingers found the thick spine immediately and pulled.
Gods and Monsters of the Northern Wastes.
Book acquired, he turned to execute a clean exit.
A sound from the hallway froze him mid-pivot.
Muffled voices. Low. Private. A soft, breathy laugh.
The door began to swing open.
Shit.
Panic, pure and animal, shot through him. His brain served up the worst option: Potter and Daisy. "Oi. Black. You just ran off again. What's your problem? My mum's been nothing but decent to you. Are you just a fucking prick on principle?"
He'd have to explain why he was lurking in a dark library holding a book about Viking death-cults instead of attending the party.
So Regulus didn't think. He just moved. He took two quick steps back and sideways, melting into the deep black trench between two massive bookcases, and pressed himself flat.
This was so pathetic. What was he, five?
Regulus held his breath anyway.
The door opened fully. A blade of warm, golden light from the hall sliced across the Persian rug, then was extinguished as the door sighed shut.
Darkness. Thick and complete.
It wasn’t Potter.
This was infinitely worse than both Potter and Daisy.
“—told you, it’s fine,” Sirius’s voice, a low murmur, “No one’s looking for us.”
“We shouldn’t be long. They’ll notice.”
“They won’t, Moony. Come here.”
There was a shift in the darkness, the whisper of fabric, the soft creak of a floorboard.
Regulus’s fingers tightened on the book’s cover.
“Your hands are freezing,” Lupin murmured.
“Warm them up, then.”
A beat of silence. Then, a sound.
A soft, wet sound.
A sigh that wasn’t a sigh of frustration. The unmistakable, quiet, intimate sound of a kiss.
No. No, fuck no.
Regulus froze into a block of ice.
“Missed you so much,” Sirius whispered, the words mumbled against Lupin’s mouth.
“You saw me three days ago.” Lupin sounded amused.
“Too long.”
Had Regulus known this was what was required for him to be frozen solid, he would never have fucking wished for it. But this wasn't cool, detached ice. This was the paralysing freeze of a rabbit in headlights, a cold sweat of pure, undiluted horror.
The book in his hands felt like it was made of lead.
A wet, hungry, sucking sound cut the quiet. A sharp, ragged intake of breath—Sirius’s—that hitched and ended in a muffled groan, like he was in pain.
“Easy,” Lupin murmured, but he didn't sound like he meant it. Not one bit.
“Don’t want easy.” Sirius’s voice was a dark, rough, desperate thing Regulus had never heard. “I want you.”
A shaky inhale from Lupin. “Sirius, not here, someone could—”
“Please, Moony. It’s Christmas. Consider it my present.”
“You’re a nightmare.”
“Yes. And I’m horny. Desperately, tragically horny. Have pity on a poor orphan boy at Christmas.”
A soft, incredulous laugh from Lupin. “You're a total muppet. Don't know why I put up with you.” But there was more rustling, the unmistakable, shhk of a zipper being dragged down slowly. The soft clink of a belt buckle.
Regulus squeezed his eyes shut so hard he saw sparks. It was worse. The darkness behind his lids painted the pictures in brutal, hyper-vivid detail.
He heard Lupin murmur something, the words too low to catch, and Sirius’s answering whisper.
Then a sharp, punched-out hiss through teeth.
“Look at you,” Lupin groaned, “Christ, Sirius. You have no idea what you look like…”
Sirius made a muffled keening sound.
This was his brother.
The wet, rhythmic noise that followed was obscene, slick and desperate, punctuated by Sirius’s gasping attempts to breathe.
Regulus felt like he was going to be sick all over the floor. His stomach was a tight, hot knot. He felt unmoored, dizzy. He needed air.
He felt like he was dying, or maybe already dead, just a ghost forced to haunt this specific, horrifying corner of hell.
A sharp, gasped curse from Lupin. “I’m gonna, shit, Pads, I’m coming—”
There was a final, shuddering groan, the slick sounds stopped, replaced by heavy, panting breaths. A low, whimper from Sirius, followed by a soft, wet cough he tried to stifle.
For a minute, there was only the panting. Then, a breathless chuckle from Lupin. “Bloody hell,” he said. “That’s… that’s going to be a tough act for Santa to follow, Pads.”
There was a rustle of clothing, the sound of someone being gathered in, pulled close. "Your leg," Sirius began, his voice suddenly small, tentative. "I didn't... I wasn't too—"
“Shhh. I’m fine. I’m perfect.” Lupin’s voice was soft now, a complete opposite to the animal noises of a minute before. It was worse.
A pause.
The soft sound of another kiss.
“Your hair’s a complete state,” Lupin whispered fondly.
“Your fault.”
“Mmm. I’ll plead guilty. Your honour.” Another kiss. “We should… we really should get back. I think we have officially exceeded the plausible duration of 'needing some air'.”
“I think I need a bit more air,” Sirius murmured, his voice a lazy, satisfied drawl. “James seemed pretty occupied trying to teach Daze—”
“Up. Come on.” There was a grunt of effort. “I’m not having Prong's mother find us. I like my limbs where they are.”
“Alright, alright, I’m vertical. Don’t get bossy.”
The door opened, spilling a thin slice of hall light onto the carpet, and then clicked shut behind them, leaving Regulus alone in the profound, ringing silence and the dark.
Regulus paced in the guest room.
It felt like the only script his body knew for a meltdown. He’d done this same pathetic shuffle in his own bedroom at Grimmauld Place more times than he could count. The same three steps, the same turn on his heel.
Christ, he was a creature of habit even in his own private hysterics.
It wasn’t as if Regulus didn’t know about sex. He was sixteen. He was a virgin, obviously, a fact that was both a choice and an inevitability, like choosing not to jump off a cliff you were biologically incapable of climbing anyway. He didn't desire to be touched, largely due to the logistical nightmare it presented.
Let’s say, hypothetically, someone wanted to get past the fortress of his clothes. They’d be greeted not by smooth, inviting skin, but by a topographical map of his many, many failures. ‘Welcome to Regulus-Land! Points of interest include the Ridge of Paternal Disappointment and the Valley of Self-Loathing.’ The very thought made his skin crawl with a cold, prickling shame.
Regulus could picture some imagined girl recoiling in horror. Not that he had any real interest in girls. Or at least, not in the way the other boys seemed to, with that hungry, jostling energy that reminded him of pigs at a trough.
Amina Shafiq was aesthetically pleasing, he supposed. Regulus could appreciate the theory of her.
The problem wasn't the idea of touching her. It was that she would be touching him. That was the breach in the logic. That was where the whole fantasy collapsed.
To be wanted was to be seen. And to be seen was to be judged. It was about the terrifying possibility of being witnessed in his brokenness. And that was a price he would never, ever pay.
And boys… well, that was simply not a category of thought. He’d rather slit his own throat with a rusty spoon than let someone stick their… junk… anywhere near his person, let alone down his throat.
He couldn’t believe Sirius.
Or, Christ, Regulus could perfectly fucking believe Sirius.
This was the hill his brother chose to die on. Not just the drinking until he puked in the hydrangeas. Not just the cigarettes, or the tattoos, the sneaking out, or the fighting, the detentions, the spectacular, flamboyant failures in every class that mattered.
Not just running away. Not just saying Regulus wasn't his brother. Not just disowning himself from the Black name.
Sirius would always, always choose the thing that looked the worst, that burned the brightest, that would leave the most permanent, ugly stain.
He had to find the one thing that wasn't just rebellion, but desecration. It was about taking the Black name and smearing it in the mud of the most disgusting, low behaviour he could find.
He was doing it to salt the earth. To burn the bridges, the boats, the whole fucking continent behind him so that nothing, not a single blade of respectable grass, could ever grow in his wake again. And he didn't care that Regulus was still standing in the field. He was probably counting on Regulus being there, so he’d have an audience for his glorious immolation.
It was the most Sirius thing Sirius had ever done. It was selfishness refined into an art form. His brother wasn't just a traitor. He wanted to make sure that if Regulus ever tried to step out from the long shadow of his brother’s disgrace, he’d find Sirius had already set the whole world on fire, and the smoke would cling to Regulus too.
The morning of the 26th dawned with a flat, exhausted light.
Regulus lay in bed, running the numbers.
There were, to his current knowledge, seven other permanent or semi-permanent members in the Potter household. Eight, if you counted him, which he did, if only as a statistical anomaly. He had seven days left. He would hopefully leave this hellhole on the 2nd of January. That was 168 hours.
He broke it down further, a prisoner marking the walls of his cell. Mealtimes were the worst, three potential conflict zones per day. That was less than 21 meals remaining. Regulus could survive 21 meals. Probably.
Of the seven other house members, four were effectively radioactive. Handling them required the equivalent of lead-lined gloves and a bloody great deal of distance.
Sirius: The original and most potent source of radiation. Self-explanatory. The core meltdown. Speaking to him was an act of war. Evacuate the immediate area. Do not engage. Do not make eye contact. Survival depended on it.
Lupin: Severely contaminated by secondary radiation. A walking, talking biohazard. Direct exposure risked permanent psychological scarring and involuntary recall of… library sounds.
Potter: A grass. Any interaction was essentially a direct, unsecured line to the core meltdown (Sirius). Speaking to him would also require acknowledging The Library Bolt, The Kitchen Implosion, and the general, catastrophic failure of Regulus’s composure.
Daisy: Classic case of saviour complex. Tried to throw him a life lifeline, so he’d naturally used it to make a noose. Now she was a human monument to his spectacular social ineptitude. Best to give her a wide berth, lest he be forced to confront the evidence of his own dickishness. Out of sight, out of mind. Mostly.
That left three. A manageable number. A tiny, precarious life raft.
Fiona was a DMZ. Neutral territory. The exchange rate was favourable: vague politeness for sustenance. But the zone was unstable, as it bordered Daisy's territory.
Euphemia was kind. But she had seen him cry. Her kindness was a searchlight, and he was a rusty submarine trying to stay submerged.
Fleamont was… well, he was jolly and kind, too. He’d ask about his studies again. Engaging required a pantomime of normalcy he couldn't sustain for very long.
That left the guest room. The kitchen. And the library, a now-contaminated battlefield he’d have to re-enter eventually, if only for supplies, each shelf a potential monument to the enemy’s recent, disgusting victory.
He got up. Showered. Dressed.
Regulus sat on the edge of the bed, stomach a hollow, gnawing pit. He eyed the faded bell-pull by the fireplace, the one Fiona had mentioned. A single tug and a tray would materialize. Toast. Tea. Safety.
But it felt like surrender. Worse, it felt pathetic. Summoning her because he was too cowardly to face the breakfast table? He could already hear Sirius’s sneer. “What’s the matter, Reggie? Mummy’s little prince need his boiled egg brought up on a silver platter?”
Screw that.
Gritting his teeth, Regulus stood. It was early. Sirius was a nocturnal creature; he’d be dead to the world until at least eleven. He could do this. In and out.
Regulus took the stairs two at a time, a show of false bravado that evaporated the second he pushed open the door to the morning room.
It was flooded with weak winter sun. And it was not empty.
James Potter and Remus Lupin were at the table. James was shovelling scrambled eggs onto toast with the focused intensity of an excavator. Lupin was nursing a cup of tea, a book propped open beside his plate. They were both in rumpled jumpers, hair messy.
They looked up.
Regulus froze in the doorway, every muscle locking. The toast mission was now a behind-enemy-lines extraction, with two sentries posted directly over the objective.
“Oh,” said Potter, through a mouthful of egg. He chewed, swallowed. “Uh. Mornin’.”
Lupin offered a small, close-lipped smile. His dark eyes, a calm, placid brown, met Regulus’s for a fraction of a second before flicking back to his book.
Silence. Thick and awkward.
Regulus’s brain scrambled for the socially mandated response. “Morning,” he muttered.
Before the agonizing awkwardness could stretch any further, the door from the kitchen swung open and Fiona bustled in, a whiff of warm bread and lemon polish following her.
“Oh! Morning, Regulus!” she beamed, wiping her hands on her apron. “Lovely to see you up and about. Don’t you worry, I’ve got your sandwiches all ready. Cheese, just how you like, no crusts, cut into triangles. I’ll bring them right in here for you.”
Regulus felt the humiliation settle over him like a lead blanket. Potter’s eyebrows twitched upwards slightly behind his glasses. Lupin’s page-turning paused for a half-second.
“You… you didn’t have to,” Regulus managed, his voice strangled.
“Nonsense! No trouble at all,” Fiona chirped, already heading back to the kitchen. “You just take a seat, love. I’ll be two ticks.”
She vanished, leaving Regulus standing there, utterly exposed. He had two choices: flee the room entirely and make a scene, or sit down at the table with Potter and Lupin and wait for his specially prepared, child-friendly breakfast to be delivered.
Gritting his teeth until his jaw ached, Regulus moved to the round table. He didn't look at them. He pulled out the chair with the most empty space around it, and sat rigidly, a statue of agony.
Potter, having apparently conquered his scrambled eggs, pushed the plate away. He cleared his throat. “So. Sleep alright?”
Regulus stared at his hands. “Fine.”
“Right. Good.” Potter nodded, then reached for the box of cornflakes, giving it a speculative shake. “Er- do you want Cornflakes too, Black? There's just one portion left.”
“No.”
“Right,” Potter said, unperturbed. He poured a mountain of flakes into his bowl. The golden cascade formed a small, crunchy Everest, overflowing onto the tablecloth.
Lupin didn't even look up from his book. “That was not ‘one portion’.”
“It’s a flexible portion!” Potter insisted, starting to scoop the stray flakes from the tablecloth back into his bowl with his bare hand.
Lupin let out a soft chuckle. “Careful, Prongs. At this rate, you won’t just be the star of the rugby team. You’ll be its planet. Gravitational pull and all.”
Potter clutched his chest in mock offence.
“Moony! I’m a growing boy! See, Black?” Potter turned his wounded-puppy eyes on Regulus. “This is the abuse I suffer. I’m persecuted for my hearty appetite. It’s a form of oppression.”
Regulus just stared. He had no script for this.
Undeterred, Potter reached for the milk jug and upended it with a theatrical glug-glug-glug submerging his cereal mountain. “And besides,” he continued, sloshing the jug back onto the table, “you’re one to lecture me. You ate an entire family-sized trifle last night. I saw you.”
Lupin didn’t deny it.
And Regulus knew he also ate his brother’s face in the library.
He didn’t say that, of course.
Potter shovelled cornflakes into his mouth. He swallowed, then looked at Regulus with sudden, bright interest.
“So, Black. Do you like ice skating?”
Fiona chose that moment to sweep in with Regulus’s plate. “Here we are! Two cheese triangles, marching in formation.” She set it down with a smile.
“Thank you, Fiona,” Regulus said quietly.
“Of course, Love.”
Potter leaned forward, his brown eyes gleaming. “So? Skating. It’s decided, then.”
Fiona swatted at Potter with her tea towel. “Leave the poor boy alone, James. Not everyone wants to spend their afternoon on a frozen pond.”
“It’s alright, I’m… not any good at it,” Regulus muttered, which was the understatement of the century.
“Neither is Remus!” Potter announced, as if this were the most compelling argument ever devised. He gestured grandly at Lupin, who looked up from his book with a withering glare. “Aren’t you, Moony? No offence, but you’re proper shite. It’s a miracle you don’t concuss yourself every time.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Lupin said flatly.
Fiona swatted Potter again, a sharp thwack on the shoulder. “Language, and stop bullying your friends.”
“Ow! Christ, Fi! Alright, alright, I’m done!” Potter yelped, rubbing his arm dramatically.
Fiona shot him a look that promised future retribution, then gave Regulus a reassuring smile. “You eat up, love. Don’t let this one bother you.” She headed for the door, shaking her head.
“Sorry, sorry,” Potter called after her, not sounding sorry at all.
The second the door clicked shut, Potter muttered something that sounded like ‘Bloody tyrant’.
He turned his gaze back to Regulus, the momentary irritation replaced by that relentless, sunny focus. “Right. Where were we? Skating. You. Me. Ice. Potential for mild-to-severe injury. It’s happening.”
Lupin sighed, a long-suffering sound. “James, he’s clearly not interested. Stop badgering the poor sod.”
“He hasn’t said no! He’s just being… contemplative. Aren’t you, Black? You’ve got a contemplative face. All thinky.” Potter shovelled the last of his cereal into his mouth. “Look, it’s simple. You come down, you put on skates, you stand there looking disapproving for a bit, and then, if you’re feeling brave, you shuffle about. If you fall, I’ll laugh. If I fall, you can laugh.”
Regulus stared at him. The entire proposition was insane. Voluntarily subjecting himself to physical incompetence in front of Potter?
And yet.
The alternative was another seven hours in the guest room, with only his own circling, toxic thoughts for company. The ghost of library sounds versus the very real, very loud prospect of James Potter falling on his arse.
He found his voice. “I don’t have skates.”
Potter’s face lit up like he’d just announced he’d solved cold fusion. “That’s the spirit! That’s not a ‘no’, that’s a logistical query! We’ve got a whole box of them. Old ones. Some probably have dead spiders in them, but that’s part of the charm. So? Eleven o’clock?”
Regulus felt the decision solidify, heavy and terrifying in his gut. It was a terrible idea. It was possibly the worst idea he’d ever had.
He gave a single, stiff nod.
Potter whooped, banging the table so hard the cornflake box toppled over. “Yes! Knew you’d see sense! Moony, you owe me a fiver! I told you he’d crack!”
Lupin rubbed a hand over his face, the scars pulling taut.
“Sirius is going to murder you. Slowly. With a rusty skate. And then he’s going to use your intestines to strangle me.”
Potter waved a dismissive hand, his grin never slipping. “You’re being dramatic. And you don’t get a vote, Moony. You forfeited your voting rights when you declined membership in the James-and-Regulus Ice Club. J.R.I.C. for short. We’re a forward-thinking enterprise. I’m thinking of getting us matching jackets.”
Lupin just looked at him, then at Regulus. He exhaled slowly.
“James,” Lupin said, “You’re being even more of a tit than usual.”
“I am not a tit,” Potter shot back, crossing his arms. “It’s called diplomacy. Breaking the ice. Literally and figuratively.”
“It’s called being a moron,” Lupin corrected. “But suit yourself.”
Potter turned to Regulus, his expression one of mischief. "See? He's a pessimist. A naysayer. A fun-sponge. Don't let him soak your fun.” He pointed a commanding finger at Regulus’s plate. “Eat your fancy toast. You’ll need your strength for skating.”
James Potter had a way of making you feel like you were the funniest, most brilliant person he’d ever met.
He’d fix you with this look of complete, delighted attention, hazel eyes wide behind his specs, a proper grin splitting his face, and he’d let out this loud, unselfconscious laugh that made you feel, stupidly, like you’d just told the world’s best joke. It was a weapon, that focus, and he used it without even trying.
That’s the only reason Regulus could come up with for why he was now trailing behind said weapon down a snowy path, the day after Boxing Day.
James wore a thick, navy-blue hockey jersey with a faded crest over a thermal shirt, grey track pants, and a beanie pulled down over his riotous hair. Slung over one broad shoulder was a duffel bag, and in his hand, he carried two old-fashioned wooden hockey sticks.
Regulus, wrapped in his black wool coat, gloves and scarf, felt out-of-place. The cold knot of panic tightened in his stomach. This was a terrible idea.
James wasn't just a rugby star at school; he was one of those infuriating people who was effortlessly, obnoxiously good at everything physical. The idea of trying to match him in a game was laughable. He wasn't even sure he’d be able to stand upright on the narrow blades of the skates, let alone handle a stick and a puck.
“I’ve never played hockey.”
James’s grin widened, as if this were the best news he’d heard all week. “Brilliant! Blank slate. I’ll teach you. We’ll start with the basics, just getting you moving. Then we can work on wrist shots. By the end of the day, you’ll be pinging them off the crossbar. Trust me.”
Regulus looked at that open, believing face and felt the familiar walls of his scepticism rise. “I don’t,” he stated flatly, the automatic defence.
But James just laughed, a short, warm sound, and turned to continue down the path.
The path to the lake had been shovelled. The ancient oaks overhead were bowed under the weight of snow, their branches forming a heavy, silent cathedral. James crunched ahead, his energy seemingly boundless. He talked. A constant, easy stream of it that filled the frozen quiet.
“—the ice is proper thick this year, dad checked it with the old auger, reckon it’s a solid foot, last year was total rubbish, we could see the water sloshing under it, bloody terrifying—“
“—this mental game up on Loch Morar with my cousins, right? Freezing our bollocks off, and Alistair—he’s a total nutter—decides we’re playing full-contact, no pads. Mad. Brilliant, though. I scored four—“
James rambled on, and Regulus didn’t try to interject. He listened, his gaze fixed between James’s shoulder blades, watching the way the faded crest on his jersey shifted with his movements.
Then the trees gave way, and the lake appeared. A vast, flawless disc of milky grey ice, framed by frosted reeds and silent, snow-laden firs.
When they reached the edge, Potter dumped the duffel with a solid thud and unzipped it. He tossed a pair of hockey skates at Regulus’s feet.
"Here, these should fit you alright.” James said, already lacing up his own sleek, black Bauers with the ease of long practice. “They’re mine. Well, they were. Had ‘em when I was fifteen. Scored many hat-tricks in games wearing these. They’re lucky.”
Regulus took them with a sense of doom. He sat gingerly on the frozen duffel bag to keep his trousers dry. He managed to get the first skate on, fumbling with the stiff, cold laces.
“Oh, for god’s sake, Black, you’re hopeless,” James said, dropping to his knees in the snow before him without a second thought.
“I’m perfectly capable,” Regulus muttered, pride bristling.
“You really aren’t,” Potter said, his tone matter-of-fact and strangely gentle. He batted Regulus’s hands away. “Give over.”
Before Regulus could protest further, James pulled Regulus’s foot into his lap, settling it between his thighs to hold it steady.
James, completely focused, began to lace the skate with swift, practiced tugs. Regulus stared at the top of his head, at the dark, messy curls escaping the beanie, at the line of his jaw.
“Got to be snug,” Potter murmured, “No wobbles. Ankle support is key.” He gave a final, firm tug, and patted the skate. “One down, one to go, princess. Don’t get used to the royal treatment.”
Regulus offered his other foot, and James repeated the process, his head bent in concentration.
“There,” James said, rising to his feet in one smooth motion. He offered a hand. “Up you get. The ice awaits.”
His grip was strong and warm, and he pulled Regulus up with an effortless strength.
The afternoon spent on the frozen lake with James had been humiliating, exhausting, and strangely… not awful. Back in the house, thawing by the roaring fire, Potter recounted their “epic training session” to anyone who would listen.
“...and then he takes this pass, right, a bullet of a thing, right on the tape, well, near his tape, and he dekes around me, and he’s in all alone, and the composure! The icy veins! He goes shelf, top cheddar, rings it right off the crossbar! Ping! Absolutely sensational. The kid’s a prodigy. We’re talking Olympic trials. I’ve seen the future of British hockey, and it’s named Regulus Black.”
Fleamont had chuckled, sipping his whisky. “Top cheddar, eh?”
Euphemia had smiled, passing them mugs of hot chocolate and tea. “It sounds like you both had a lovely time.”
And the strangest part was, in the distorted funhouse mirror of James Potter’s perception, he had. The humiliation of falling on his arse twice was still there, but it was now laminated over with a glossy layer of shared, absurd accomplishment.
The J.R.I.C. (James-and-Regulus Ice Club) remained a joke, but the principle behind it became James’s unspoken mission. A campaign of forced, cheerful normalcy.
He dragged Regulus into everything.
Was it a provocation? A way to poke the bear that was Sirius?
Maybe it was simpler. Maybe Potter just collected strays. Saw something broken and lonely, and his brain short-circuited any sense of self-preservation or social nuance and went straight to: Must Fix. Must Include. Must Make Play Game. Like a golden retriever finding a wounded bird and trying to nurse it back to health by dropping a slobbery ball in its lap.
That night, it was Cluedo. Regulus was on the long sofa, the worn board a colorful island on the dark wood of the coffee table. The fire murmured to itself, casting darting shadows. Euphemia and Fleamont had been persuaded to play one game. Daisy was curled at the other end of the sofa, a book abandoned for the game, a chunky mug of tea cradled in her hands.
Lupin and Sirius had excused themselves after dinner. "We're gonna go see if we can't get that record player in the east wing to finally work. Moony thinks he's fixed the tone arm, so. Progress.”
Sirius hadn't so much as glanced in Regulus's direction.
Regulus highly doubted they were fixing anything. He felt a hot-cold flush of revulsion just thinking about it.
No one else seemed to bat an eye.
Dinner itself had been… alright. Bearable. With Fiona, Daisy, Lupin, James, and the Potters all seated around the big table, the chatter created a kind of buffer zone. Sirius was on the far side, at least from where Regulus had picked his seat, which meant he didn’t have to look directly at him. He could just keep his head down. He could meticulously push his peas into a neat, defensive wall on his plate and not be a provocation any more than simply existing in the same room.
Fleamont and James were being predictably loud, trading increasingly absurd stories about James's attempts to drive the old tractor and everyone was laughing. It was all so… nice. So easy. Like watching telly in a language he only half-understood.
Sirius, dragged into some argument with James about motorbike engines versus car engines, had actually sounded… into it. Happy, even. His laugh, a real one, cut through the noise. It felt like a theft. Maybe that was the whole point. Maybe Sirius was showing off. Look at me, I'm fine, I'm brilliant, I've got my new family and my new life and my… whatever Lupin was to him.
Regulus focused on dissecting his duck. The meat had to be perfectly free of any gristle or weird bits. It was a manageable task.
Moving to the drawing room, the absence of Sirius and Lupin was a physical relief, like a too-tight belt being loosened. The air itself felt warmer, lighter. He ended up on the sofa next to Daisy as James rummaged violently through the game cupboard, swearing under his breath about missing dice.
The apology for Daisy sat in his throat like a lump of stale bread. It had to be done. He'd been a complete wanker. Regulus stared fixedly at a threadbare patch on the blanket in his lap.
"About the other morning. In the kitchen." His voice came out stiff, robotic. "I… I'm sorry, I was a prick."
He’d braced for a cold shoulder, for a lecture. Instead, Daisy had simply nudged his shoulder with her own, a gentle bump. When he finally glanced at her, she was smiling, a small, understanding thing. “Already forgotten,” she said quietly, then, raising her voice to cut through James’s grumbling: “Oi, Potter! They’re just dice, you tit. Use the ones from the Monopoly box.”
It was that easy. No fanfare, no grand forgiveness. Just a wave of her hand, dismissing the ugliness as if it were nothing.
It was baffling. How could she just… drop it? It made his own constant, churning over-analysis of every social misstep feel like a gross, pathetic overreaction. A disease only he had.
Regulus was scarily good at Cluedo.
He won that first game.
“HA!” James erupted, launching himself off the floor as if he’d won himself. He threw an arm around Regulus’s shoulders in a brief, celebratory squeeze that made Regulus go very still. “See? A natural! A criminal mastermind, right here under our roof! Mum, we should do a full inventory of the silver! Dad, hide the good whisky!”
Euphemia merely smiled, sipping her sherry with an air of amusement. “I’d be far more concerned about a certain someone with a history of ‘sampling’ and a tendency towards enthusiastic poor judgement.” She raised a meaningful eyebrow at her son, her fondness taking the sting out of the words. “Wouldn’t you agree, Jamie?”
James clutched his chest in mock outrage. “Mum! That was one time! And it was for scientific research!”
“You were fourteen, you were sick in a priceless Ming vase,” Fleamont intoned.
“A gross slander!” James cried, but he was laughing. “A campaign of misinformation! Reg, don’t listen to them. They’re trying to poison you against me. I’m a perfect angel.”
It wasn't just board games or ice skating.
It was James sliding into the seat opposite him at breakfast, still damp from the shower, hair a spectacular disaster, and pinching a piece of Regulus's meticulously arranged toast. "Cheers, mate," he'd say around a mouthful, before launching into a rant about the school rugby coach's new training regime. It was him lobbing an apple from the fruit bowl with a casual, "Think fast, Black!" Regulus, startled, had fumbled it horribly, the fruit thumping to the floor and rolling under the table. James just snorted. "Hands like a Sunday league keeper. We'll work on it."
Regulus hadn't had an older brother for a while, not really. Not one that acted like one. Sirius had been disowned for over a year. But mentally, Sirius had checked out years before that. Regulus couldn't pinpoint the exact moment it had happened. It wasn't a single explosion; it was a slow, toxic leak. The raft of their childhood had simply rotted away beneath them.
Maybe it was easier that way. A survival tactic, grim and efficient. At Grimmauld Place, love was a weakness, a vulnerability to be exploited. If Sirius was caught sneaking out, or mouthing off, or failing some obscure test of Black-ness, the punishment didn't always land on him. Sometimes, it was easier for Orion to mete out 'corrective discipline' on the quieter, more biddable son. A locked bedroom door. No food. The belt.
So perhaps Sirius's coldness, his eventual outright hatred, was a fucked-up kind of mercy. If Sirius didn't care about Regulus, then Regulus couldn't be used as a tool to hurt Sirius. It was a horrible logic, but logic nonetheless. Regulus had accepted it. He'd built his life in the shadow of that absence.
Until James.
James, with his easy, unthinking friendliness, was like a sledgehammer to that carefully constructed ice wall. He didn't treat Regulus like a broken thing to be pitied, nor like the pantomime villain in Sirius's tragedy. He treated him like… a person. A slightly weird, quiet, posh git, but one who was now, apparently, part of the plot. Someone to be included, teased, and dragged into hare-brained schemes whether they wanted to go or not. It was profoundly, dangerously disarming.
The dirt bike was the peak of it. James found him in the library.
"Bored?" James asked, wiping his hands on his already-stained jeans.
"Reading," Regulus said, holding up his book on the Fall of Constantinople as if it were a shield.
"Bored," James declared, undeterred. "Come on."
He led Regulus to a tarpaulin-covered shape in one of the stables. With a theatrical yank, he revealed a battered, mud-spattered Yamaha DT 125.
"She's a beauty, isn't she?" James said, patting the leather seat with something like reverence.
Regulus took an instinctive step back. "I don't—"
Sirius had bought a 125cc motorcycle for his seventeenth birthday. A sleek, black thing he'd roared up to Fallowmere on, looking like a complete prat, in Regulus's opinion. The girls had swooned. Regulus had thought it was the height of juvenile self-centeredness. A loud, smelly, dangerous toy for attention-seekers.
"You don't have to drive," James said, as if reading his mind. "Just get on the back. Hold on. It's just down the bridle path to the old quarry and back. Live a little. Unless you're scared." He threw in a challenging grin.
The thought was terrifying. It was also, in some mad, defiant corner of his soul, a direct challenge.
A dare.
Before his better sense could form a proper refusal, James had stepped forward, and pushed a ludicrously oversized helmet in his hands, then swung a leg over the bike.
Potter kicked the starter.
The engine coughed, then erupted into a throaty, spluttering roar that echoed off the stone walls. He settled on the seat, revved it twice, and jerked his head. Get on.
Heart hammering against his ribs, Regulus fumbled with the helmet strap, then climbed awkwardly onto the pillion seat. The bike bucked slightly under his weight, alive and vibrating with a raw, mechanical fury that travelled straight up his spine. He gripped the cold metal bar behind the seat, his knuckles bleaching white.
"Hold on properly, you melt!" James yelled over the deafening noise. He reached back, grabbed one of Regulus's wrists, and yanked it around his own waist. "Round here! Unless you fancy eating a faceful of frozen mud!"
Cursing internally, Regulus tentatively wrapped his other arm around James's torso. It was solid. Unyielding. A core of pure muscle and warmth beneath the layers of fleece and denim. He could feel the engine's pulse through James's body.
Then they were moving. A lurch, a terrifying tilt, and they were out of the stable, bouncing over the rutted yard and onto the frozen mud track that led into the woods. The world dissolved into a violent blur of bare branches, lead-grey sky. The roar was all-consuming. The smell of petrol and damp earth filled his helmet. He clung on for dear life, his face pressed against the rough fabric of James's jacket.
It was, without question, the most physically terrifying experience of his life.
It was also, for five blinding, deafening minutes, completely and utterly brilliant.
There was no room for thought. No space for the usual churning analysis. There was only the need to hold on, the rush of speed, the sheer, stupid aliveness of it. They skidded around a bend, Regulus's stomach lurching, and for a second, he wasn't Regulus Black, heir to a cursed name. He was just a boy on the back of a bike, screaming soundlessly into the wind.
Then they were slowing, bumping to a halt in a clearing by the old chalk quarry, the engine settling into a ragged idle. James killed it, and the sudden silence was a shock.
"See?" James said, turning to look back at Regulus. His hair was flattened on one side, sticking up wildly on the other. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright. "Told you. Bit of alright, isn't it?"
Regulus clumsily got off, his legs feeling like jelly. He fumbled the helmet off. The cold air hit his sweat-damp forehead. He was breathing hard. He looked from James's grinning face to the ugly, beautiful machine, and back again.
He couldn't speak. He just gave a shaky, infinitesimal nod.
James’s grin widened. "Knew you'd love it. Right. Back we go. Fi's doing crumpets."
The ride back was less terrifying, but no less electric.
It was profoundly confusing. Every instinct told him to bat this away. To retreat into his shell of studied disdain. This warmth, this noise, this… fun… it wasn't for him. It was a loan. A trick.
But another part of him, a part that was just a tired, lonely sixteen-year-old boy, was achingly, desperately grateful for it. It was like being offered a thick, warm coat after a lifetime in a draughty tomb. You might hate the garish colour, you might know you didn't deserve it, you might be certain it would be taken away the moment you got used to the warmth, but Christ, it was hard not to just pull it tighter around you and bask in the simple, borrowed heat.
The deep freeze that had gripped the countryside began to loosen its hold. The iron-grey sky softened to a woolly white. The snow, once a crisp, pristine blanket, turned to a soggy, grimy sludge that clung to boots. The icicles outside Regulus’s window wept steady, clear tears, their sharp points melting into blunt, harmless nubs.
And with the thaw, warmth seeped into Regulus’s own frozen core. It was insidious. He found himself listening for the heavy thump of James’s footsteps on the stairs, the sound of his laugh. He’d catch himself lingering in the kitchen after breakfast, because Fiona might offer him a freshly baked biscuit and a bit of gossip about the village. He voluntarily sat in the drawing room one afternoon, reading while Daisy sketched pottery shards and James attempted to solve a Rubik’s cube, swearing colourfully.
It was a counterfeit peace. The clock was ticking in his head. A holiday armistice built on borrowed time and borrowed family. He knew it. But for the first time, the thought of returning to Grimmauld Place’s silent, judgemental halls on the 2nd of January didn’t feel like a return to his natural habitat. It felt like an exile. A sentence to be served in a colder, darker prison than he’d remembered.
The truce, of course, shattered. It was inevitable.
It happened around eleven, the morning of the 30th.
The plan, such as it always was, had been James’s. The slushy melt had left patches of bare, soggy lawn in front of the house. “Perfect for a bit of extreme golf,” James had declared after breakfast, his eyes gleaming with the particular madness that preceded his worst ideas. “Obstacle course. We’ll use the old clubs. The ones in the hall are total crap. My good driver’s up in my room. Be a mate and grab it for me, will you? I’ve got to dig the least mouldy balls out of the shed. It’s a biohazard in there.”
It was a simple errand. A transactional favour. Regulus had been in James’s room a handful of times before, always trailing in James’s boisterous wake, once to fetch a jumper James had insisted he borrow, another time when James had dragged him in to rifle through his vast, disorganised collection of VHS tapes, looking for a specific action film. He knew the territory. The chaos was its own ecosystem: one wall plastered with overlapping posters of the British Lions rugby team, The Clash, and a faded map of the world with pins stuck in places like ‘Bali’ and ‘Colorado’; the smell of boy, sweat, and the expensive cedarwood cologne James inexplicably dabbled in; the permanent landslide of textbooks, and cassette tapes with hand-scrawled labels.
So he didn’t think twice. He just nodded, a soldier accepting a mission, and headed for the east wing. The forbidden corridor felt less charged now, just another part of the house’s geography.
He pushed open James’s door. Light slanted in through the big windows, illuminating the mess.
And illuminating the two figures on the floor.
Regulus stopped dead, one foot over the threshold, brain short-circuiting.
They were on the worn Persian rug between the bed and the desk, a tangle of limbs and dark clothing. Sirius was on top, propped on his elbows, his body straddling Remus’s. They were kissing again. Not a peck. Deep. Unhurried.
Sirius’s head was angled, his curtain of black hair falling to obscure both their faces. Remus’s hands were gripping Sirius’s hips, fingers digging into denim. They were fully clothed, jeans, jumpers, socks. Like this was a regular Tuesday morning activity. Just hanging out, oh, and also trying to swallow each other’s faces.
Sirius’s head snapped up.
His eyes, wide and glassy, found Regulus’s in the doorway. For a split second, there was no anger, no contempt. Just pure, unguarded, shock. His lips were red and swollen.
Then his face transformed. The shock curdled into a rage so hot it seemed to bleach the colour from his skin.
Regulus’s brain finally rebooted with a single, screaming command:
ABORT.
ABORT MISSION.
He slammed the door shut with a force that made the frame rattle and took off down the corridor like a scalded cat.
Regulus got maybe halfway down the corridor, his heart jackhammering against his ribs, before a hand shot out from behind him, grabbing a fistful of his shirt and jumper at the scruff, and he was wrenched backwards and slammed into the wall. The impact was a sickening echo of another hallway, another time.
Deja vu.
Sirius’s face was inches from his own, breathing hard. The details were all wrong, though. Last time, in the grim hallway at Grimmauld Place, Sirius’s eyes had been red-rimmed, swollen from crying. Now, his lips were red and slightly swollen.
“You,” Sirius breathed, the word hot and sour against Regulus’s face. He shoved him harder against the wall, forearm like an iron bar across his chest. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“James— the golf club—” Regulus gasped, trying to pry the iron fingers from his collar.
“Bullshit!” Sirius snarled, his voice a low, ragged thing. He shook him, a quick, violent jerk. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? What’s the play, Reggie? Come to get a good look? Get your evidence?”
“Piss off!” Regulus shot back, mustering all his strength to shove against the solid wall of his brother’s chest. It was pathetic, Sirius had two years, and a lifetime of scrapping on him. He barely moved. “I didn’t want to see a thing! The sight of you makes me sick! You’re revolting!”
“Say that again,” Sirius breathed, the words deadly quiet.
“You heard me!” The retort tore from Regulus’s throat, fuelled by a toxic cocktail of panic, a deep, childish hurt, and a sudden, blinding sense of betrayal. For a few stupid days, he’d had a glimpse of something else, of James’s easy camaraderie. A sketch of what an older brother could be. And here was the real one, all venom and violence and shame. “You’re a disgrace! You and that… that scarred-up freak you’ve latched onto! Doing that… that filth in someone else’s house, in their son’s bedroom! Have you no shame at all? Or is that the whole point? To be as repulsive—”
Sirius’s free hand moved before Regulus could blink. It wasn’t a punch; it was a hard, open-handed slap that cracked across Regulus’s face.
White-hot pain detonated across his cheek, a high-pitched whine filling his left ear. Before he could even cry out, Sirius had both fists knotted in his shirt again, hauling him forward and slamming him back against the wall.
“Don’t,” Sirius hissed, “You ever talk about him like that. Ever.”
The slap seemed to have shocked them both into a momentary, charged stillness.
Sirius’s chest heaved.
“You want to talk about something fucking disgusting? Take a long look in the mirror, Reggie. You’re just like Father.”
The heat of the handprint burned on his face.
You’re just like Father.
He wasn’t. He wasn’t. He’d rather carve his own heart out with a rusty spoon.
Sirius knew that.
The betrayal of the accusation was a cold, separate agony beneath the heat of the slap.
What did Sirius think happened after he’d swanned off to be the tragic, misunderstood prince in the Potters' fairy tale castle.?
That he’d made his big, brave stand, slammed the door on the whole rotten circus, and the curtain just fell? That Regulus got to sit in the empty theatre, enjoying the peaceful silence?
Sirius had wrecked everything. That was the truth of it, childish and furious and stuck deep in Regulus’s gut. If Sirius hadn’t been such a massive prick about everything, if he had simply followed the rules, then maybe their father wouldn’t have been in a permanent state of rage. Maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so completely and utterly fucked.
It was Sirius’s fault.
All of it.
"I hate you," Regulus breathed, the words a venomous hiss.
It didn't even land. Sirius just stared back, his face a mask of bored contempt. Same straight nose, same sharp jaw, same storm-grey eyes that were currently looking at him like he was something unpleasant stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
Regulus’s mind was racing, a frantic scramble through a mental junk drawer of old resentments and sharp words. He needed a weapon. Anything. Something that would actually make a dent.
"You only care about yourself, Sirius.” He fumbled, then lunged for the nuclear option. "Does Remus even know you're just fucking him to piss everyone off? Or is he just that desperate for anyone to touch his messed-up face?"
That got through.
Sirius’s face went blank, then tight, like someone had pulled a wire behind his eyes.
The satisfaction lasted exactly two heartbeats. Then Sirius was on him, not with a fist, but with a forearm slammed across his throat. It hurt.
"Listen to me, you little shit," Sirius growled. His face was inches away. Regulus could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, a tiny scar through his eyebrow. "You think you've got one over on me? Let me fucking spell it out for you."
He leaned in even closer, his breath hot against Regulus's ear.
"I could make one phone call," Sirius murmured, his voice horribly conversational. "To school. To the Housemaster. Have a nice, brotherly chat.’"
A cold, sick dread began to pool in Regulus's stomach, freezing the anger solid.
"I could suggest, ever so politely," Sirius continued, his tone dripping with false concern, "that maybe someone should have a look. The school nurse, perhaps. Or, I dunno… Social Services? Would you like that, Reggie? A nice lady from the council coming to have a chat? Asking you to lift your shirt?"
“You wouldn’t,” Regulus whispered, but it was a lie, and they both knew it.
Sirius’s smile was thin and cruel.
“Wouldn’t I? Try me. You breathe a single fucking word about Remus, to anyone, ever, and I won’t just make the call. I’ll make sure it’s a bloody spectacle. I will burn your world down. And I’ll do it with a smile.” He gave Regulus’s shoulder a final, contemptuous shove, not hard, just enough to make him stumble. “We’re done here.”
I will burn your world down.
He believed him completely.
Regulus didn’t go back downstairs. He didn’t fetch the golf club. He walked, stiff-legged and numb, back to the west wing, to the guest room. He locked the door. The familiar, panicked pacing didn’t come. He just stood in the centre of the room, staring at the cheerful holly on the mantelpiece until his vision blurred.
He hadn’t told anyone.
The injustice of it was a cold, hard knot in his throat. He hadn't told a soul. The secret of the library was a shard of glass he'd swallowed; a private, sickening punctum of horror lodged somewhere behind his sternum.
Why would he?
Who would he tell? James? The idea was grotesque. It would involve dragging that filthy, wet sound into the clean, sunlit space of James Potter's perception.
Tell Daisy?
Tell his parents?
The thought was almost laughable, a hysterical bubble that died in his chest.
Dear Mother and Father,
Having a lovely time at the Potters, ice skating, movies, extreme golf, and nice food. Thought you should know Sirius is engaging in deviant homosexual acts with a disfigured scholarship student in the library. Also, he has a new tattoo that says 'I declare I don't care no more.' I thought you should be apprised.
Yours,
R.A.B.
P.S. Please let me stay until the 5th, I'd like to learn how to drive a motorbike.
It wouldn't hurt Sirius. Not in any way that mattered to Sirius now. Sirius was already disowned. A letter like that would be meaningless to him. If anything, it would be a perverse badge of honour. See how far I've gone? See how disgusting I am?
No, the fallout wouldn't land on Sirius. It would crater directly onto Regulus.
He hadn't told anyone.
He would never tell anyone, thank you very much.
Regulus still didn’t pace. He sat perfectly immovable on the edge of the bed, hands clamped on his knees, staring at a crack in the plaster opposite.
It lasted twenty-three minutes.
Then the peace was shattered by a fist hammering against the oak, three rapid, frustrated bangs that made the frame shudder.
“Black. Open the door.”
James.
Regulus didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
“I know you’re in there. Open up. We need to talk.”
We. There was no ‘we’. There was Regulus, alone in his cell, and there was everyone else in Sirius’s solar system. ‘We’ was a trap.
Silence.
The handle jiggled violently. “For Christ’s sake, Regulus, this is childish! Open the door!”
The banging resumed, more insistent.
“I’m not going away! Sirius is locked in his room too. He won’t speak to me. You are just as irritating as your brother!”
Something in Regulus’s chest curdled.
Just as irritating as your brother.
Regulus didnt have a brother.
He surged to his feet, crossed the room in three strides, unlocked the door, and yanked it open so violently it slammed against the wall with a crack that echoed down the corridor.
“I am nothing like Sirius,” he hissed, his grey eyes blazing directly into James’s startled hazel ones.
For a second, James just stared, dumbfounded. He was haloed by the soft light of the wall sconce behind him, tall and solid in the doorway, his usual animation wiped clean.
Then, as if a circuit reconnected, his gaze, which had been locked on the furious twist of Regulus’s mouth, snapped downward. It landed on his throat.
The colour seemed to drain from James’s face.
“What the fuck,” James growled, his voice low and utterly unlike itself. It was flat. Dangerous. “What the fuck happened?”
Regulus didn’t see the horror in James’s eyes, only the fury. His paranoid, battered logic supplied the only explanation that made sense in his collapsing world: Sirius had sent him to beat Regulus up.
He’d dispatched his attack dog, his golden knight, to finish the job. James’s sudden, violent presence at his door wasn’t concern; it was an escalation. He’d come to make good on the threat, to beat the silence into him physically.
Terror, white and blinding, seized Regulus. He tried to shove the door shut, to put the oak between himself and this new, terrifying iteration of James Potter. But James’s arm was a bar of iron, shooting out to slam his palm flat against the wood.
“Regulus.” The name was a command.
“GET OUT!” he yelled. He threw his whole scrawny weight against the door, a desperate, scrabbling push that accomplished nothing.
Potter lunged forward, not to hit, but to grab his arm. Regulus scrambled backwards just in time.
He was backing away, hands coming up like there was any chance he could ward off Potter. “Just fuck right off! Go on! Tell him he’s won, alright? I’m not saying shit!”
“Regulus, just—” Jame took another step into the room, and closed the door.
But Regulus was gone, lost in the white noise of terror. The sight of James blocking the exit short-circuited every thought. He stumbled backwards until the bedframe caught him behind the knees. His hand slapped out, blind, and closed on the nearest object, a thick, cloth-bound copy of The Iliad from the nightstand. Without thinking, he hurled it at James’s head.
Thwump. James caught it one-handed.
He looked utterly gobsmacked, but beneath the shock was a furious, boiling frustration.
James stared at it, then at Regulus.
“I am not going to hurt you, you absolute nutter!”James yelled, flinging the book onto the bed. “Will you just calm down?!”
“Why? So you can get a clean swing in?!”
“A clean swing at what?” James exploded, “At the fucking fingerprint necklace you’re sporting?”
The words didn’t land right away. Then they clicked. His neck.
He hadn’t looked in a mirror since it happened.
Regulus’s hands flew to his throat, pressing against the skin. He felt the ache, the tender, swollen pressure.
He shook his head violently, his face burning. “No. It’s—it’s nothing. I tripped. On the rug.”
James didn’t look convinced. He looked, if anything, even more angry. “Regulus. Look at me. Did he do that?!”
“No, he didn’t!” Regulus insisted, the lie tumbling out too fast. “I tripped on the stairs.”
A beat of dead silence. James’s eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “You just said it was the rug.”
“The rug at the top of the stairs,” Regulus amended hastily. He could feel his cheeks heating further. “I slipped. It’s nothing.”
James let out a long, slow breath. He scrubbed a hand over his face, then pushed his glasses up. “He did it.”
It wasn’t a question this time.
Regulus shook his head, a sharp, defensive jerk that made his dark, perfect curls sway. "I fell."
“You fell,” James repeated. He took a step closer, invading his space. “You just tripped over your own feet and somehow managed to bruise your own throat in the shape of a hand. What are the odds?”
“I’m clumsy. I told you.”
“You’re lying to my face,” James snapped. Regulus didn’t flinch this time; he locked his knees, forcing himself to stand his ground.
“I’ve told you the truth,” Regulus ground out, his jaw aching from how tightly he was clenching it. "I. Fell."
James' hand reached out, not to strike, but to grip Regulus’s chin, tilting his face up. His fingers were warm and calloused.
Regulus froze.
“Tell me the truth,” James demanded.
“I have,” Regulus whispered. He couldn’t pull away. The grip wasn’t painful, but it was unyielding, holding him in the spotlight of James’s searching gaze.
“Look at this,” James hissed, his thumb sweeping up to press lightly against the worst of the bruise, a blotchy, fingerprint-shaped shadow blooming against the porcelain skin of Regulus’s throat.
Regulus could see the faint freckles scattered across the bridge of James’s nose, the dark sweep of his lashes behind his glasses, the way his lower lip was caught slightly between his teeth in a gesture of intense, frustrated focus.
“He could have really hurt you.”
This?
This was nothing. A bit of pressure.
This was a summer breeze compared to the belt.
Regulus wanted to say it.
But he didn’t.
Because James’s hand was still there, cupping his jaw. The calloused thumb had stopped its probing and now just rested against his cheekbone, a warm, steady point of contact.
James’s other hand came up, hesitantly, and brushed a stray, dark curl back from Regulus’s forehead. The touch was fleeting, whisper-soft, and it sent a shiver down Regulus’s spine that had nothing to do with fear.
This strange, naive concern seeped into him, warm and syrupy and dangerously sweet.
It felt… nice.
It felt like James cared.
And James’s face, so close, was a map of that care, the furrowed brow, the parted lips, the eyes that didn't hold a concern for Sirius, only a deep, liquid worry for him. For Regulus.
James, who was the sun, was burning against him, and Regulus was a cold, dark planet being pulled into a catastrophic, glorious orbit.
His gaze dropped from James’s earnest eyes to his mouth.
He didn’t think.
Regulus closed the infinitesimal distance.
It wasn’t a graceful kiss. It was a clumsy press of his lips against James’s. A sudden, shocking contact. He felt the exact moment of impact: the slight give of James’s lips, the brief, startled catch of his breath against his own mouth.
And then he felt James freeze.
Utterly.
The hand that had been cradling his jaw went rigid.
Panic bloomed in James’s eyes.
He recoiled a fraction, breaking the kiss. But he didn’t shove him away. He was still there, chest to chest, his hand still on Regulus’s face.
Regulus saw the whole scene from a distance: two boys in a pretty guest room, one golden and horrified, the other pale and broken and starved for touch.
The disgust he’d felt in the library, hearing his brother with Lupin, curdled now in his own stomach, but it was directed inward. Look what you did. You’re just as bad. Worse, because you knew better.
So what?
He’d leave this place soon. In a few days, he’d be back in the silent, familiar misery of Grimmauld Place, and then in school.
What happened here couldn’t touch the real world. None of it was real.
Regulus tilted his chin up defiantly. Deliberately, slowly, he ran the tip of his tongue over his own bottom lip, a gesture that felt obscene in the heavy quiet. “See?” he whispered, the words a ghost of breath against James’s stunned mouth. “I told you I fell.”
He didn't mean the bruises. He meant this: the plummet, the vertigo.
And James just stared, paralysed, his gaze darting from Regulus’s defiant, storm-grey eyes to his mouth and back, a war raging behind his round lenses.
Regulus would have to be the one to do it. Of course. James, for all his fearless bluster, was frozen in the headlights of this impossibility.
He brushed his lips against James’s once, twice, then again, slightly firmer, angling his head just so.
He’d never done this, had no idea what he was doing, but he’d seen plenty of people kiss each other before.
He’d also seen James snogging before. In a corridor with some girl. All open mouths and hungry, swallowing sounds, a performative, public consumption. Regulus tried to mimic it, parting his own lips just a sliver, letting the very tip of his tongue glide, a hesitant question, over the seam of James’s closed mouth.
James made a sound. His fingers on Regulus’s jaw tightening.
This was it. He braced for the shove, the shout, the inevitable, disgusted ‘Get off me, you fucking—’
It didn’t come.
Instead, James’s other hand came up and tangled in the front of Regulus’s black cashmere jumper, fisting the fine wool.
And then James Potter, sun-kissed, golden, girl-mad, rugby-hero James Potter, kissed him back.
It wasn’t like Regulus had thought it would be.
It wasn’t like anything.
James’s mouth softened, opened. His lips were slightly chapped from the cold, but still very soft. They moved against Regulus’s with a tentative, exploratory pressure, as if he were handling something fragile and infinitely precious.
When Regulus’s tongue ventured another nervous flick, James met it not with force, but with a soft, answering stroke of his own, a slick, deliberate slide that wasn’t tentative at all.
A sound escaped Regulus as the jolt went straight down his spine, pooling as a hard, immediate heat between his legs.
Regulus was melting.
James’s hand slid from his jaw into his hair, fingers carding through the dark, silken curls at his nape.
“Fuck,” James breathed against his mouth, the word a puff of humid air.
James broke the kiss, but only just.
His lips were wet.
The hazel in his eyes was dark, pupils blown wide.
He touched Regulus’s cheek again, his thumb brushing over the high, sharp bone, then down, tracing the swollen, sensitive skin of his lower lip.
James swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in the strong column of his throat. “We can’t,” he said.
Regulus looked up at him. He didn’t blink.
“Why not?”
“Regulus, we can’t,”
He couldn’t. Regulus understood now.
But Regulus could.
He would have let James do anything.
But James was pulling away. He took a full step back, then another. The space between them yawned, suddenly vast and cold.
James lifted a hand to his own mouth, his fingertips touching his lips as if confirming a wound. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright,” Regulus heard himself say. The lie was automatic, a smooth sheet of ice over a churning sea.
James scratched his neck. His gaze was fixed on a point somewhere near Regulus’s shoulder, unable to climb back to his face.
“I don’t—” he started, his voice thick. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean to. I just… you were just there, and you looked…”
You looked like you’d been whipped?
You looked like no one had been kind to you in a thousand years?
Regulus felt a burning wave of shame, hot and sickly. He’d forced this. He’d taken James’s instinctive, clumsy kindness and twisted it into something that now hung between them like a bad smell.
“It’s fine, really,” Regulus said, wrestling his voice into something light, casual. He managed a small, wry twist of his lips. “Don’t know what got into me. It was stupid. We just forget it. Okay? It was a weird moment. A Christmas blip. We’ll just… go back to how it was.”
James’s eyes finally flicked up to meet his. He studied him for a long moment, his hazel eyes searching Regulus’s face. “Can we?”
“’Course we can.”
James let out a long, slow breath, his shoulders slumping slightly in what might have been relief. “Christ. Okay.”
“Okay,” Regulus echoed, nodding.
There was another beat of awkward silence.
“Right, well,” James said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “I’m, uh… I’m going to go… and speak to your brother again.”
“You do that,” Regulus said.
James hovered for a second longer, his eyes darting over Regulus’s face one last time, searching for a crack in the ice. Then he nodded, a quick, jerky motion. “Right. Yeah.”
He turned and left, pulling the door shut behind him with a soft but definitive click.
Regulus stood perfectly still in the centre of the room. He could hear the receding tread of James’s footsteps on the runner, heading east, towards the warzone. Towards Sirius.
Slowly, he unclenched his hands from where they had been held rigidly behind his back. He brought them in front of him, turning his palms up to the fading light from the window.
They were shaking.
A fine tremor ran through his fingers, making the tendons in his wrists jump. He willed them to stop. He was a Black. He was in control.
They trembled on.
“Stop it,” he whispered to them, his voice harsh in the quiet.
They didn’t listen. The tremor travelled up his arms. He curled his fingers into fists, the nails biting into his palms. The sharp, clean pain was a focus. He squeezed until the shaking was forced inward, contained by sheer pressure, until all that was left was a faint, persistent vibration deep in the marrow of his bones.
Regulus had done the right thing. The grown-up thing.
So why did he feel like he was made of glass, and that every beat of his heart was a tiny, spreading crack?
The last afternoon of the year was thin and bright, the sun a cold coin in a white sky. The turning of the calendar at midnight was just noise, a party for people whose years actually changed.
He’d seen James only in glimpses, a flash of a red jumper disappearing around a corner, the rumble of his laugh from another room. They were orbiting each other with a careful, gravitational dread, pulled by the memory of the collision but trapped in paths that would not allow another.
It was fine. It was more than fine. There were a handful of hours until the morning of the second of January. Until the sleek, silent car would arrive to spirit him back to Grimmauld Place, and he could begin the work of forgetting any of this had ever happened. The Potters, the ice skating, the library, the kiss, all could be folded away like a disturbing dream. This was the last page of the last chapter.
By evening, the house was transformed. Staff moved with determined cheer, draping swathes of silver and gold, filling vases with winter greenery and white roses that seemed to glow against the dark wood. The air grew thick with the scent of pine, roasting meat, and expensive perfume as guests began to filter in.
It was a nice New Year’s Eve gathering. Fleamont’s business associates and their sleek, laughing wives. Euphemia’s friends from various charities. And amongst them, a younger, louder contingent: James’s friends.
Peter Pettigrew arrived early, pink-faced and beaming, with a girl named Mary Macdonald on his arm, a tall, striking girl with dark skin and an Afro. Then came others Regulus recognized from the upper years at Fallowmere. A flock of girls, their party dresses a riot of sequins and velvet, their laughter like shattering glass. And among them, unmistakable, was Lily Evans.
She was with a friend, a blonde girl Regulus didn’t know. Evans wore a simple emerald green dress that made her hair look like fire. She was smiling as she took in the grand hall. Regulus saw James materialise beside her almost immediately, his grin wide and bright. The golden boy, back in his natural habitat, performing for an audience.
The house thrummed with a glittering, oppressive cheer. Music swelled from the ball room, competing with the roar of conversation and the constant pop of champagne corks. Everyone seemed to be holding a glass, their faces flushed with anticipation. Toasts were made to the departing year, to health, to prosperity.
Regulus had worn a black high-necked polo knit sweater. It was the closest thing to armour he had. If he stretched his neck or tilted his head back, the fingerprint-shaped blooms would be visible above the ribbed collar. So he sat a little hunched on a stiff Chippendale chair in a corner of the room, and didn’t speak much to anyone. He was a still, dark point at the edge of the whirling colour.
He watched James across the room, now demonstrating some rugby move to a captivated Dorcas, while Peter looked on adoringly. Lily Evans was talking to Euphemia.
It was all so unbearably nice. So warm, so celebratory, so full of a future these people were excited to step into.
His eyes tracked James leading Evans towards the punch bowl, his hand on the small of her back. Regulus looked away, a hot coil of something ugly tightening in his gut. It wasn’t jealousy, he told himself.
He couldn’t breathe.
The warmth of the house, the perfume, the forced joy, it was suffocating. His skin felt too tight. On a sideboard in the hall, sat a bottle of amber whisky. Without a conscious plan, his feet carried him to it. He tucked it under his arm, the cool glass against his ribs, and slipped out through the kitchen door, unnoticed.
Regulus crunched across the gravel, the sounds of the party muting behind him to a dull, cheerful murmur. He walked to the old stables, the only place he knew was guaranteed to be empty of party guests.
The stable block was dark and quiet, smelling of hay, and the clean, sharp scent of horses. He sat down on a bench.
Here, the silence was almost absolute, broken only by the soft snuffling and shift of a large brown horse in another box. Regulus leaned against the rough wooden partition, the bottle clutched to his chest.
He’d never drunk spirits before. Wine at formal dinners, a sip of champagne here and there. But this was different.
Regulus uncorked it.
The smell was immediate, oak, smoke, and a sweet, medicinal burn that stung his nostrils. He didn’t bother with a glass. He put the bottle to his lips and tilted it back.
Fire.
It was pure, undiluted fire. It raged down his throat, exploded in his chest, and he doubled over, a series of harsh, involuntary coughs racking his frame. His eyes watering instantly.
It was brutal.
Awful.
It tasted of petrol and regret and anger.
But as the coughing subsided, a slow, deep warmth began to spread from his core.
So Regulus took another, smaller swallow. This time, he was ready for it. He grimaced, but held it down. The warmth spread further. He took another drink. And another.
The world began to tilt on a gentle, friendly axis. The weight in his chest lightened. A strange, loose feeling settled in his joints. He wasn’t Regulus Black, only heir to a cursed house. He was just a boy, getting defiantly drunk on stolen whisky, while a party full of happy people celebrated a future he wanted no part of.
He coughed again, and a laugh followed it, brittle and strange even to his own ears.
Regulus wasn't sure how long he'd been in the stable, but when he stumbled back out, the cold air felt like a balm. He made his way to the side door, the half-empty bottle swinging loosely from his fingers.
Inside, the heat and noise of the party hit him like a wall. He leaned heavily against the cool wallpaper, closing his eyes as the patterned vines seemed to swim. The floor was delightfully unsteady.
"Regulus! There you are."
He opened his eyes. James stood a few feet away, his face flushed from the party's warmth, a crystal glass in hand. Beside him was Lily Evans.
Evans had her arms folded, one thumb rubbing over the beaded strap of her dress. The pose pulled the green fabric taut across her chest. She had quite large breasts.
"You alright?" James asked, stepping closer. His cheer faded into something more cautious. "You look a bit… peaky."
"I'm fiiine," Regulus said, the word stretching out, slurring pleasantly. The world was soft at the edges, wrapped in cotton wool. He gave them what he hoped was a convincing smile. It felt lopsided.
Lily reached out and lightly touched James’s forearm. “Wait. Potter is this Black’s brother?”
“Hm? Oh. Right. Yeah,” James said, as if just remembering the world contained this particular piece of trivia. He gestured loosely between them. “Reg, this is Lily Evans. Lily, this is the infamous Regulus Black. The quieter, more studious model.”
“Oh,” Lily said. She looked Regulus up and down, a quick, assessing sweep. “Right. Of course.” Her plush lips pressed together for a second. “You look…”
“Pissed?” James supplied helpfully. He set his glass down with a decisive clink.
“I was going to say ‘a bit pale’,” Lily corrected, shooting James a look. “But yes, that too.”
James cleared his throat, “Right. Come on, mate. Let's get you some water and maybe a strategic sit-down."
Potter stepped forward, but Regulus waved a dismissive hand, the motion causing him to list sideways. James caught his elbow, steadying him. “Whoa there. Steady on.”
“Do you need help with him?”
"It's fine, Evans, I’m stronger than I look," James joked, throwing her an apologetic smile. "Go on back, I'll just get this one sorted. Be back before the countdown."
Lily looked between them for a second, her gaze lingering on Regulus’s glazed, distant stare. "Alright."
The second she was gone, James’s supportive arm turned into a steering lock. He marched them into an empty corridor, the noise of the party fading to a muffled thump. The party-host ease melted away, leaving something angry. "Christ, Black. What did you do, drain the cabinet? Are you completely mental? My parents have half of Surrey here!”
Regulus just grinned brightly, an easy expression he never wore sober. He thrust the bottle between them, the amber liquid sloshing. “S’good,” he announced, "Warms you up. From the inside."
"Yeah, I know what it does," James said. He began steering Regulus down the corridor, away from the party, towards the west wing and the guest rooms. "The trick is to not let it warm you into a puddle on the floor."
Regulus let himself be guided, his steps clumsy but light. The weight was gone. The careful posture, the hunched shoulders, all dissolved in the warm haze. He felt fantastic. Loose-limbed and brave. He took a defiant swig from the bottle as they walked, the burn a familiar friend now.
“Oi, hand it over, you menace,” James said, making a half-hearted swipe.
Regulus tutted, pulling it close to his chest. "Mine. Finders keepers."
James stared, his jaw working, and let out a sharp, incredulous puff of air through his nose. "You're unbelievable."
They reached a quiet junction where the corridor branched. Regulus’s legs staged a mutiny.
Before James could grab him, he simply folded. Regulus slid gracelessly down the wall, landing in an untidy heap against the skirting board with a soft thump.
"Oi. No. None of that. Up you get," James ordered, his voice strained. He bent, his warm hand shooting out to grab Regulus's wrist. The touch was electric, skin on skin. "This isn't funny, Black. Get up."
Regulus looked at James's large hand encircling his pale wrist, then let his body go utterly, provocatively slack. He melted, collapsing sideways until his cheek pressed into the intricate pattern of the runner. "Mmm. 'S nice down here. Soft. Cool."
“Regulus. Get. Off. The. Floor.”
“Make me,” Regulus breathed, his head lolling to look up.
James was a dark column against the faint sconce light. Tall. Impossibly solid. The fabric of his shirt was taut across the span of his chest and shoulders, and Regulus’s drunken gaze traced the lines of him with a hunger that felt like a live wire in his gut.
"For fuck's sake Black," James muttered. He reached down, his hands hooking roughly under Regulus's arms. "Alright, you win. We're doing this the hard way."
He hauled him upward.
Regulus made his legs into useless jelly. He offered no resistance, no help. As James pulled him to his feet, Regulus crumpled forward, his body sagging directly into James’s chest.
For one spinning second, he was held there. His face was buried in the warm hollow between James’s shoulder and neck. He smelled of expensive aftershave.
"Stand up, you idiot," James hissed into his hair.
“Can’t,” Regulus mumbled, the word muffled against his skin. He let his body go even heavier, a boneless surrender. “Legs don’t work. You’re strong. ‘S nice.” He slurred the praise directly into James’s collar, his lips brushing the heated skin.
James went rigid. He didn’t shove him away, but his grip tightened almost painfully on his arms. "Regulus, for God’s sake, stop it. You have to stand up."
"Stop what?" Regulus murmured. He dared to nuzzle closer, his nose tracing the sharp line of James's jaw, inhaling the spiced scent of him. "You're the one holding me up”
James let out a frustrated breath, the warmth of it ghosting over Regulus’s temple.
And Regulus, buoyed by the liquid courage coursing through him, understood something with crystalline, drunken clarity. This was it. This desperate, clawing want. Perhaps this was how Sirius felt for Lupin. This need to be close, to be seen.
He’d let James do anything. Kiss him. Shove him back against the wall. Hell, he’d drop to his knees right here on this runner. He’d let James grab a fistful of his hair and use his mouth, only if it meant James would look down at him afterwards with desire. He understood his brother now.
He opened his mouth, the confession—"Just kiss me again" or something far worse–hovering on his whisky-slick tongue.
But at that moment, a door further down the corridor opened. A couple, two of Fleamont's silver-haired associates, emerged from the guest bathroom, laughing softly. They spotted James.
"Ah, James! There you are. Your mother was looking for you," the man said, his voice jovial.
The woman's eyes landed on Regulus, who was leaning heavily against James, his cheeks flushed and his eyes glazed. Her politely curious smile froze.
James plastered on his brightest, most charming grin. But Regulus, even through the pleasant, swimming haze of the whisky, could see the tightness at the corners of his eyes, the way it didn’t quite reach them.
“Mr. Cartwright! Mrs. Cartwright! Happy New Year!” James said. He subtly shifted his body, trying to block their view of Regulus’s slumped form. “Just, uh, helping my friend here. Got a bit turned around in the dark. He is heading off to bed now.”
He reached back without looking, his hand finding Regulus’s upper arm. His grip was not gentle. It was a vise, a silent command to behave.
“Ah, yes,” Mr. Cartwright said, a jovial man with a booming laugh. “Bit of a rough start to the New Year, eh, lad? The champagne’s stronger than it looks!”
He clapped James on the shoulder. “Actually, James, I was hoping to nab you for a moment. Young Cartwright, my nephew, Roger, was just telling me about your try against Marlborough. Wanted to get the details straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were! Have you got a minute?”
“Of course, sir!” James said, the enthusiasm in his voice ringing just a hair false. He didn’t let go of Regulus’s arm. “Be delighted. Just let me, uh, just let me see my friend to the stairs. Won’t be a tick.”
He began to walk, hauling Regulus along with him, his steps fast and purposeful towards the side door that led to the back stairs.
The moment they were through the door and in the dim, utilitarian hallway, James whirled around.
Regulus opened his mouth, but James cut him off.
“I don’t want to hear it.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Just get upstairs. Now. Go to your room. Don’t come back down. If anyone asks, you’ve got a migraine.”
“I am fine,” Regulus slurred, the words thicker than he intended.
“You are not fine,” James snapped. “You’re pissed. And if my dad or, God forbid, Mum had found you like that…” He trailed off.
Potter took a deep breath, visibly trying to wrestle his temper under control. “Just. Go. To. Bed.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. With one last, scorching look, he turned on his heel and stalked back towards the brightly lit hallway, towards the waiting Mr. Cartwright and the normal, explicable world of rugby triumphs.
The countdown clawed its way to zero.
A roar went up, glasses raised, and in the centre of it all, the sun achieved its zenith.
Not a star, a boy.
James Potter, grinning, flushed with the heat of the crowd, turned not to the room, not to the noise, but to a single point of brilliant green.
His hand cupped the soft curve of Lily Evans’s cheek. She leaned into the touch. A gift expected, deserved.
The path to the lake was a ghost trail through the sleeping gardens, familiar now. He’d walked it in his mind a hundred times since that afternoon, the feel of James’s hands steadying him on the ice, the bright, braying sound of his laugh that had, for a few stolen hours, felt like it was for him.
The bottle of whisky he’d snatched from the sideboard was in his jacket. He pulled it out. The glass was cold enough to sting his fingers.
He unscrewed the cap, tilted it to his lips, and found it funny, in a hollow, distant way, that it was empty. He threw the bottle. It didn’t shatter; it vanished with a soft thump into the deep, mushy snow, a grave for good intentions.
Regulus walked to the water.
The dock stretched out before him, a long, black finger pointing accusingly into the heart of the frozen expanse. The ice wasn’t the milky grey of their skating day. Tonight, under the starlit sky, it was a glossy sheet of obsidian.
Regulus walked to the very end of the dock. The old, salt-bleached boards were wet. He sat down, letting his legs dangle over the edge, the toes of his boots just brushing the ice.
He wasn’t sad. Sadness was a feeling, and he felt curiously empty of them all. He wasn’t angry. Anger required energy, a fire he could no longer sustain.
He was just empty.
A book read to the last page. A sum solved. A bit tired, really. And his arse was cold where the meltwater from the dock had seeped through the fine wool of his trousers.
Regulus pushed himself up. The movement was unsteady, the world tilting on a gentle, whisky-lubricated axis. He stood for a moment at the precipice of the wood, looking back. Up on the hill, the Potter house glowed. Every window was a square of buttery, golden light. He could imagine the warmth, the laughter spilling out, the cheerful chaos. It was a snow-globe scene of a perfect life. A really nice place.
He didn’t fit in. He was a stark, black inkblot on the edge of the festive page.
Regulus took one step off the dock and onto the ice. And then another.
The ice sighed. A deep, resonant groan.
A dark, elegant seam appeared between his feet, spiderwebbing out, a black lacework on black glass. And suddenly the pattern held him no more. The lace dissolved. The solid certainty of the surface vanished.
One moment he was standing on the skin of the world, and the next, the skin simply gave way.
He didn’t fight. He had done all his fighting, and it had come to nothing. This was an end to the constant, quiet war of being Regulus Black.
The cold became a burning, then the burning became nothing at all.
Epilogue:
There once were two brothers.
The elder was Sirius, for the dog star. The scorcher. His loyalty was a wildfire. It was a guard dog’s bared teeth, a frantic, full-body lunge to place himself between any perceived threat and the smaller, quieter shadow at his heels. Once, long ago in the sun-dappled haze of a nursery world, he would have sooner set himself alight than let a single ember singe his brother’s sleeve.
Now, of course, the wildfire had long since burned. It had raged through the halls of Grimmauld Place, scorching the ancient damask, leaving behind not warmth, but a gutted shell, a blackened manor of bitter silence. The brother who remained was left to walk its echoing, soot-stained corridors alone, tracing the phantom outlines of the blaze on walls that felt perilously close to crumbling.
The younger was Regulus, for the heart of the lion. Alpha Leonis. The little king. And before the great fire, he had navigated his world with one truth: his brother’s wildfire was the force around which his own small orbit was fixed. He trusted its heat with the absolute, unthinking faith of a planet that knows no other source of light.
Now, in the warm, golden belly of the New Year, there seemed to be only one brother present.
Sirius wove through the crowd, a streak of restless black in a kaleidoscope of glitter and cheer. Someone had put on a Bowie record, and the air smelled of pine needles and spilled champagne and smoke.
He was not celebrating any more. A cold, sick cement had settled in his stomach, a mortar of guilt and a gnawing, formless dread.
Regulus must have drunk too much.
The thought brought a flash of memory: a glimpse, maybe half an hour ago, of Regulus stumbling in from one of the side rooms, his movements loose and uncoordinated. Sirius had been across the room. He’d seen his brother’s state and felt a sharp pang in his chest.
The threat he’d made in the corridor felt grotesque and bloated.
Regulus hadn’t retaliated. He’d simply taken the hit. Internalized it. And then, apparently, decided to wash it down with everything in the drinks cabinet.
But Sirius hadn’t gone after him. He’d just turned back to Moony, who was doing his usual thing, keeping a careful, mate-y distance in public. It drove Sirius up the wall sometimes, that caution. Remus was so scared of his dickhead father finding out, of anyone finding out, that sometimes it felt like he was embarrassed by them. By him.
Sirius didn’t give a rat’s arse about who knew he was bi. But for Remus, it wasn’t that simple. He had his father to think about, and that bastard was a whole different kind of problem. And Sirius understood that, logically. But in the moment, watching Remus keep a careful three-foot buffer between them in a crowded room, it still felt like a slap. So yeah, he'd seen his little brother looking like a wreck and he'd chosen to be pissed off about Moony's distance instead.
Sirius had been getting paralytic at parties since he was fourteen. He’d done shit at that age that Regulus, at sixteen, probably couldn’t even imagine. He was the expert. The veteran delinquent. And yet here he was, feeling a raw, purely paternal terror at the thought of his brother with a drink.
Regulus did not drink.
It wasn’t just the illegality of it, though that was part of it, the rule-follower, the perfect prefect who would sooner set himself on fire than get a detention. Regulus hated anything that threatened the pristine control he wielded like a suit of armour.
The absence in the room had now become an active, sucking void, pulling at his attention, his breath. It felt like a missing tooth his tongue couldn’t stop probing.
Sirius cut through the part like a shark through warm water, his eyes fixed on the only person who might have a clue: James. James, who was by the fireplace doing some idiotic dance that had Lily Evans laughing. "Prongs."
James turned, his smile fading as he took in Sirius’s face. “Yeah, Pads?”
“Where’s Regulus?”
James’s gaze swept the room. His brow furrowed. “I think he is in his room. You know how he gets.”
That was the goddamn problem.
“How much has he had?”
James’s face paled, the flush draining away. He shifted his weight, his eyes flicking away for a fraction of a second. “I… I saw him with a bottle. He seemed alright.”
“A bottle?” Sirius took a half-step closer, invading James’s space. “What the fuck, Prongs? What kind of bottle?”
“Mate, calm down-”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! What bottle?”
James ran a hand through his hair. “Whisky, alright? It was a half-litre of my dad’s Macallan. I tried to get it off him! He wasn’t having it. Was I supposed to tackle him in the middle of my parents' party?”
“So you just let him wander off with half a litre of hard liquor?” Sirius hissed.
“I told him to go up to his room! To go sleep it off! He’s not an idiot, he’s the cleverest bastard in the school! He knows his limits!” James’s defence was fraying, his own worry now mirroring Sirius’s. “He went up there. He’s fine.”
Sirius didn’t reply. He just turned and shoved his way through the crowd, past Remus who called out his name. He was a projectile launched towards the staircase.
Sirius skidded to a halt outside the last door on the left.
For a second, he just stood there, braced. His mind spun out a grim, ridiculous film reel. Regulus, face-down in a pool of his sick. Regulus, blue-lipped and still, because he was a lightweight who didn’t know his limits and had choked in his sleep.
Sirius knocked. A short, sharp rap-rap-rap with his knuckles.
“Regulus?”
Nothing. Not a rustle, not a groan.
The anger was familiar, a comfortable old coat. Easier than the cold, slithering thing beneath it. This was just Regulus being a dramatic little shit. Hiding. Sulking. Making a point.
“Regulus, I know you’re in there, you berk. Open the door.”
Still nothing. The complete lack of response, no hissed ‘piss off’, no sound of movement, was wrong.
“Right. That’s it.”
Sirius didn’t wait. He turned the handle and shoved the door open.
The room was bathed in the cool, blueish light filtering through the bay window from the security lamp on the lawn. It took his eyes a second to adjust.
“Reg?” he tried.
Sirius fumbled along the wall by the door, his fingers finding the switch. He flicked it.
The room was empty. The bed was made, the burgundy duvet smooth. The books were stacked in a perfect, geometric tower on the desk. A black jumper lay folded on the duvet. No shoes were kicked off by the bed.
Sirius checked the bathroom.
Empty too.
The shower was dry. The towel hung on the rail. The air smelled faintly of the herbal soap and nothing else, no sour tang of sickness. Just clean, empty space.
Sirius backed out of the bathroom and into the corridor. He began franticly opening doors. All empty. All silent.
The cold prickle became a full-bodied chill, icing his veins. He wasn’t upstairs. He wasn’t passed out.
Sirius pelted down the final few stairs. James and Remus were in the hall now, their faces etched with matching alarm.
“He’s not upstairs.”
“The library? The kitchen?” James was already moving, his party cheer gone, replaced by a leader’s focus.
They checked. The library was dark and still. The kitchen held only Fiona, up to her elbows in soapy water. “Haven’t seen him since the countdown, loves,” she wiped her hands on her apron, concern dawning. “Is everything alright?”
Sirius gaze snapped past her, to the heavy oak back door that led to the scullery and the yard. It was shut, a solid barrier of dark wood. A new horror started playing behind his eyes: Regulus, in his polo shirt and trousers, having stumbled out for air and passed out in the snow.
“He might be outside,” Sirius said, the words clipped. “Might have fallen. Got disoriented.”
He didn’t wait for consensus. He crossed the room and yanked the door open.
The night that greeted him was not the biting, iron-hard freeze of the past week. The air was still, heavy, almost warm, and damp, smelling of wet earth, and the faint, green scent of snow melting into grass.
Remus was right behind him.
Sirius ignored him, his eyes raking over the patio. There were old footprints everywhere, blurred and softened into vague, communal depressions.
But from the conservatory door to his left, a single, new set cut a clean, decisive line through the snow.
A straight, unwavering line of deep, sure impressions.
They led away from the golden house, down the gentle slope of the lawn, towards the black ribbon of gravel path that he knew wound its way to the lake.
And there, beside the first step off the stone patio onto the grass, something caught the starlight and winked. A tiny, malevolent eye.
His fingers plunged into the wet slush, closing around something solid and smooth and bitterly cold.
Sirius pulled it free.
A bottle.
A finger of amber liquid sloshed at the bottom.
“Oh, Christ,” James breathed from behind him, his voice thin.
Sirius didn’t hear him. The world had narrowed to a tunnel. At one end: the warm, golden house full of life. At the other: those lone, marching footprints, disappearing into the dark.
And his brother was at the end of them.
He ran.
He ran as he had never run before. He ploughed through the wet snow, his breath sawing in his lungs, a frantic, white flag in the air.
The footprints led down the path, a dark stitch in the white fabric of the garden. They led past the skeletal rose bushes, past the stone garden bench. They led straight onto the old wooden dock.
The planks were dark and slick with meltwater, a bridge to nowhere.
Sirius’s boots hit the wood, skidding on the frost. He ran to the very end, the world tilting around him.
And there, the story ended.
The footprints stopped.
Just beyond the edge of the wood, where the dock met the lake, the frozen skin had a wound.
A jagged, black maw, star-shaped and violent, breathed water up against the ruptured ice.
“REGULUS!”
Sirius didn’t think. He lunged forward, boots scrambling for purchase on the slick wood, his body already coiling to leap into that black, swallowing void.
A hand hooked into the back of his leather jacket and yanked him back. He stumbled, crashing into Remus's chest behind him. Remus, who had somehow, despite the bad leg and the treacherous path, gotten there.
“LET ME GO!” Sirius roared, thrashing, elbows flying, a wild animal caught in a trap. “HE’S IN THERE! I HAVE TO GET HIM!”
It was too late.
James fetched the ladder from the boathouse and a coil of thick rope. But the ladder was too short to probe the deep, silty bottom of the lake. The ice around the dock was treacherous, groaning at the slightest pressure, refusing to bear the weight of a rescue.
Fleamont and Euphemia arrived, then came the police and the men in black drysuits. Blue lights cut through the dawn-thickened gloom.
Sirius watched all of it from the dock. He stood, a statue of frozen grief, his eyes glued to the star-shaped rip in the world.
It was foolish to hope, really.
There were no footprints leading away from the ice. There was only one place he could be.
And it was, indeed, all too late.
They brought him up.
They pulled the lion’s heart from the black water.
The clever, brave, broken heart of the constellation. The anchor of the beast. And it was not beating anymore.
They lifted him, so carefully, as if he might be sleeping, onto a stretcher on the snow. Someone covered him with a silver thermal blanket, but not before Sirius saw his face.
Regulus looked like he was carved from ice.
His expression was peaceful. Not scared. Not angry. Not sad. Closed. His eyes were shut, the dark lashes, so like Sirius’s own, fanned against his pale skin.
The little king, finally withdrawn to a silent, cold castle where no one could reach him.