Work Text:
October 31st, 1986
"When a newborn does not scream, one must slap it.” Orion Black tells Sirius this when he’s old enough to receive an education on the human body. "Hurting it helps."
Babies have to scream when they are born to start breathing. Before that, their lungs are filled with their mothers' body fluids, preventing them from receiving any air. Not all Black family babies scream. Those who don’t need a little help.
Regulus Black needs help.
He is freshly born, still covered in brown-red blood, but his skin beneath is blue.
In the vast snowdrift of the bed in the corner, Mother moans Sirius’ name. “Sirius. Do not hit your brother. Doctors—they're coming—”
But it is not the Black family way to hire doctors. Nurses and doctors killed Orion's mother in her sick bed…so the story goes. They are no longer allowed to treat members of the family; Sirius knows this.
But Sirius is three years old, and his mother is covered in blood too. She’s spent all day screaming this dead baby into the world. She's upset enough; Sirius does not want to slap her baby. He does not want to touch the baby at all.
“Sirius,” Orion repeats, his tone dipping dark. “Don't you care about your brother? Slap it.”
Sirius looks up. Mother's bedroom in their drafty American-style foursquare sways in oceanic shades of green. The windows are filmed with Catskill grit; the bulb on the ceiling burns between dust-fattened cobwebs; the blood-birth smell is so strong it drowns the oaken fumes rising from the whiskey glass in Father’s hand. Orion is a grey-black fellow with a gash for a mouth. His eyes, always very small, are narrowed even smaller now. He was rich once, back when the family owned a big business. Back when they lived downstate in a clean place called Brooklyn Heights…or so the story goes. They don't live there anymore. And Sirius has only ever caught whiffs of those riches: the fine clothes taken out for Christmas, the nice silverware, the way Father is a stickler for proper posture, the way Mother cries for all the poor, fine things she had to sell to keep the family afloat.
(Poor Mother. Poor us. The rich can become poor too if we suffer enough.)
From the corner, Mother’s moan is the strain of a cello. “Sirius, get a doctor. Do not hit my son…don't let your father…”
Sirius must choose. Pick a parent to obey.
He wipes sweat from his upper lip, looks at the smashed-blueberry-colored baby: small, curl-fingered, tufts of dark hair, silver eyes flecked with blue seeing nothing.
Sirius' little belly feels full of writhing, slick eels.
He doesn’t want the Grim Reaper to get his brother. He wants a brother. He’d been so excited when Mother and Father had announced he'd be getting one. Someone to hide with when Mother and Father get into their loud fights! Someone for company!
Together, they'll play games forever!
“Sirius Black,” Orion commands in a voice like a thunder god. "Slap it!"
"I shouldn't."
"I am telling you to."
This power-trip logic is beyond dispute. It sticks.
Sirius squares his shoulders and raises a hand—
Mother howls—
Father looks so proud—
Sirius kisses Regulus on the cheek afterwards, when Regulus starts to scream.
You taste like me, Sirius thinks.
June 1st, 2001
"Your ma's letting you out the house again, huh?" James Potter teases, pinching his eyes near enough shut. He needs glasses, but his pa doesn't wanna drive him to the next town over to get a prescription. He's blind as a bat.
"Cunt," agrees Sirius waspishly, winking at Regulus.
Reg answers with a calculated smirk, only to indulge Sirius. Regulus doesn't talk bad about the family if he can help it. Especially Mom.
James opens the old-fashioned cash register he's leaning against, closes it again, and cocks his head when the machine dings its familiar, merry ding. They’re in the little, gritty corner store Mr and Mrs Potter own. It smells of dildo-ish hotdogs and burnt coffee.
"I get off in twenty, if you want to…" In lieu of finishing the sentence, Potter mimes taking a drink.
"Why do you think we're here?" Sirius condescends, strolling around the laminate counter, opening the faux-wood cabinets behind James' head, and rooting around for two copies of Playboy Magazine. He throws a glossy copy messily (always intentionally messily) to Regulus, who catches it with one hand. He never misses, no matter how challenging Sirius tries to make the serves.
Another smirk, this one is victorious. A delinquent glow.
(Smirks are Reg's specialty.)
Sirius scowls, swings his ass onto the counter, and flicks open the copy.
(It's hard to meet Regulus' eyes sometimes.)
James gives a low whistle, regarding the busty redhead decorating the cover. “Oh, Lady Lily,” he sighs. Lady Lily can't possibly be her real name, but it doesn't much matter because she's a certified smoke-show. All the boys love it when she gets the centerfolds. "I’d give my firstborn son for a night with her—"
Sirius turns a page idly. "She'd eat you alive, virgin."
James isn't really a virgin, but he is eighteen—same as Sirius is eighteen—and he lives across town with his mother and father, who own the stale-aired, fluorescent-buzzing convenience mart that James works in after school. They met when they were thirteen, in the school lunch line. James was the new kid: crimson T-shirt, dirty sneakers thanks to his love of soccer, windswept hair. He was fifty cents short for the milk–apple–pizza combo, and the lard-faced lunch lady was being a bitch about it. Sirius had tapped Potter's shoulder and held out the coins. Said, real haughty: You can pay me back later. If you don’t, my kid brother’ll cut you. He’s been to the loony bin for doing stuff like that. I'll set him on you.
James had stared at Sirius, squinty, like lining up a shot. (But really, he just hadn't been able to see a damn thing). “You calling me poor, pretty boy?”
Like that, they were friends.
Ever since, they meet up in the convenience store after school, then stomp way out past the chain-link fences, past the boarded-up post office (nothing ever gets outta here not even letters), past the cornfield-framed farm supply shop, past the flyers for AA meetings. Yeah, they stomp way out into the turned-earth, flower-tumbled, hawk-crying woods by Alder Creek, where they eat stolen convenience-store candy in the shade, swig stinging bottom-shelf vodka, kick James’ soccer ball back and forth, and let the small-town-scaries wash off their bodies in the glacial-melt river. They talk about where they wanna go, what they wanna do when they're grown. James wants out: Canada or England, which he considers interchangeable. Sirius just wants to go back downstate, where all the real people are—real interestin' people who read the news and own 'inside dogs' and make art.
When they get bored of nature, as teenage boys tend to, they slouch back into town and wander into Romulus & Remus Farm Supply, where they order paper-cup instant coffee to sober up, loitering against itchy hay bales. And Sirius, who earns a heated, stomach-swooping kick out of heckling the tawny, half-literate twenty-year-old oaf who works there, always winks at the guy as he accepts his bog-water coffee. The oaf never winks back, which makes Sirius irritated. Makes him laugh. The oaf has got a girlfriend. She's a clumsy college thing, attending some university hours away. (Pink hair, for Christ's sake…what does she think this is? California?)
Anyway, Sirius brings Regulus along for all this adventuring sometimes. When Ma lets Regulus hang out with Sirius, that is. Such occasions are rare after Regulus' whole cutting-himself-with-a-Swiss-Army-knife-suicide-attempt-inpatient-rehab-extravaganza.
That was a long time ago. But Reg's still got the big, ugly scar on his left forearm.
Sirius looks up from his magazine and can see it now, the scar. A raised, thick rope of a line that snakes down from his inner elbow to his wrist. Regulus is stubborn about it. He lets people see it. If the roles were reversed, Sirius would never let nobody see. He'd be too ashamed about what it proves.
James hypothesizes that Reggie shows it for attention.
Sirius thinks Reg shows it to ward people off. And, more often than not, it works. Reg is a goddamn freak weirdo. Everybody says so. (It's Sirius' responsibility to make him a bit more like normal boys. It's Sirius' fault Reg is alive, after all. When Regulus was a dead baby, it was by Sirius' hand that Regulus woke up. To Reg's great disdain, Reg has been alive ever since.)
“What?” Regulus asks, prim, catching Sirius staring.
Sirius shifts on the counter. He thinks of feverish, fluorescent hospital hallways and flinches. “Nothing. Read your magazine, poof.”
Regulus' only reaction is to turn his silvery, underwater eyes to the side. "Have you got a newspaper, James? I shouldn't read porn—"
"I am telling you to, Reg," Sirius snipes, all croaky and low. A little threatening. A little unkind. Power trip logic.
A pause.
James says, "Stop flirting, you sick freaks." There is an uncustomary edge to his voice that Sirius chooses not to examine.
So they peruse their porn, wait out James' shift, then wander out to the woods to drink and play ball.
When Reg scores a goal Sirius should have blocked, Reg grins instead of smirking, and his princely little curls spin around his skull in the wind. Sirius' drunk eyes sort of get stuck on that for a second. The spin, the spindly spokes of black catching crisping marigold light, like sifting for gold with an onyx net.
Regulus’ eyelashes move gingerly. His gaze flits to Sirius’ who turns away all hasty. Caught.
(Sirius tells himself he's outgrown that sort of thing.)
Still, something twinges low in Sirius' gut. Makes him irritated. Makes him laugh. At the cackle, James catches Sirius’ eye and gives a quick shake of his head, as if Sirius has done something disappointing and exasperating, like take a dump right there in the grass.
Sirius puts his hands in his pocket, feels the Swiss Army knife he always carries with him, the cool weight of it.
It's dark by the time they're making it back home—a June sort of dark, no deepness to the shadows—just purgatorial greys overlapping. James skids off, waving bye-bye with one arm, his white-black soccer ball under the other. He lives in a yellow house with a porch wrapped round it like a skirt. Sirius has been inside a billion times; it always smells of the hearty venison stew Mrs Potter makes on Sundays.
A breeze picks up as the boys watch James grow smaller. The wind carries a white slip of paper spirling into the sky before slapping it against a light pole. A Missing Person poster—a young girl. Blonde, summer eyes. The missing girl flicks airborne again, and tiptoes down the street. The Black boys follow her home.
Sirius and Regulus don't look at each other until Sirius pushes open the front door to their dark-brick house. The hinges creak out like a rusty little bell above an antique shop. The outside dogs Walburga keeps chained near the shed start barking like crazy; Sirius wishes they'd shut up. He doesn't want Walburga to know they're home.
The house is an antique-hoarder's wet dream in a way—long, low, carpeted hallway crowded with heavy cabinets full of ancient creepy crap that glints. Trinkets gathered through an eclectic life: knives and ceramic dolls with their painted eyes scratched off and big-bellied animal skulls and arrow-tipped crystals and molted serpent sinks, jars bloated with the ashes of important dead people. Stuff from back when the Blacks were (allegedly) rich, held hostage in this stinky, rundown house as intimidating proof of what the family once was. The power trip logic of small-town socialites. As younger children, neither of the Black boys had been allowed to touch anything within the house. So instead, the Black siblings had found a second home in the woods, the cracked streets, the streams.
Regulus looks up at Sirius shot-quick as the door clicks closed behind them. They can hear the muffled timbre of an unmistakable French argument simmering away in the living room. They hold hands. It's always Regulus that reaches out first, fingers like the kisses of moths or cold silk.
"Mother's threatening to kill herself again," Regulus translates, listening, eyes baby-big. He looks so skinny in this gloom, so full of sharp little bones. "She's…listing all sorts of different ways to die—or you—no. Ah. I got it now. Dad is angry that he has to raise us on his own because Mom's too sick in the mind to help."
Sirius—who doesn't take French at school as Regulus does—puts a finger to his lips, clammy all over in ways he wasn't before. He slinks forward. Careful as a burglar, he peeks into the emerald-wallpapered living room. There's a sofa in there, a static-tuned TV, and Ma and Dad stand in the center, pointing fingers into each other's shouting faces. There's a scuff mark on Dad's wedding ring from repeatedly hitting things.
(Sirius thinks of Mother's cyclical, manic effusions followed by long, deep-wounded depressions. He remembers her weeping fits, the way she would draw the curtains tight over the windows and scream at him: shame of my flesh, ingrate, disappointment! Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting! He remembers her wandering in the backyard, naked, wine-staggering, addressing nobody. Addressing the ghosts in her mind she loves more than the living boys she passes by without seeing.)
No one else’s mom is like that, Sirius thinks.
Dad picks up a whiskey glass off the coffee table and tosses it like a spear. Against the wall, behind Ma's head, it bursts—a piñata of dripping amber and barb-sharp shards. “Je te le dis aussi!”
Mother, crying, doesn't cower. She shouts: Vas-y, fais-le donc! Je te défie!
April 27th, 1995
See, the thing is, Ma and Pa love to fight more than they've ever loved each other. They shout explosively in the French they never taught their children. When this happens, Sirius feels useless. He doesn't know how to make them stop.
He also feels vaguely like he should be cowering away from them the way Regulus often does. But Sirius likes to watch the way his father’s face purples and swells, the coy, almost flirtatious flick of his mother’s wrist when she snaps it against her husband’s chest and screams at him to just kill himself—she wishes he'd never been born! (Mother and Father are cousins. They don't make a fuss about it, but the Black family is very sophisticated and singular in this way. Toujours Pur. Watching Walburga and Orion fight is hilariously akin to watching someone quarrel with their own reflection.) Sirius likes it when his parents are angry at someone other than him, because they are often angry at him. He does not behave in a way befitting the Black's once aristocratic rank. He bullies smaller boys at the local school, he slips things into his pockets and walks out of shops, he keeps his hair long, plays his punk music too loud, kisses girls in parking lots, and refuses to attend Sunday mass. For these things—for being difficult, for being greatly daring—Walburga and Orion are always angry at him. Unless they are distracted by anger at each other.
One April afternoon, in the midst of spying on an argument, Sirius makes a small, involuntary sound when his father strikes his mother hard across the face. She bleeds. Sirius' skin plunges cold, and he wishes he were a doctor—someone who could heal her up. Both of his parents wheel around to look at him. No, not just him. Them. Reggie is spying too, standing right next to Sirius. Regulus is Sirius' constant companion. His little ghost, Mother always says. Keep an eye on your brother, Sirius, you're an example for him, Mother always says. This, Sirius can do, whatever needs to be done. He can be whatever Regulus needs him to be. It's them against the world—Sirius Black and his baby brother, lashed together. It's difficult to make friends as a Black…Sirius doesn't know why. Just is. Always has been. People look at the Black brothers sideways, like they're disgusting. Like they're inbred, all body parts stacked the wrong way up. Frankenstein's monsters that learned to walk and talk.
But the brothers had each other—it was enough. Most of the time.
Mother moans, clutching her cheek. "Out, boys! GET OUT!"
Father's face darkens: red to puce. "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE LOOKING AT?"
The brothers take one look at each other, suddenly cognizant of consequences, and then they're off, out the front door, down the crumbling steps fast as their prepubescent legs will carry them.
Sirius is three years older than Regulus, making him twelve to Reg's nine, and it shows in how fast they run: Sirius' clean strides versus Regulus' sketchy trot. They burst into the woods out behind their house, twigs snapping, the family dogs chained near the shed barking at the disturbance. The ripe ground suctions at Sirius' feet, mosquitoes pinch along his sweat-stamped brow. Sirius holds a hot breath as he and Regulus squat down with their back pressed to a bark-scratchy elm. They are poised in the underbrush like deer, waiting. But the world does not burst apart with a gunshot, nor do Mother or Father come stalking out of the house to yank down Sirius’ and Regulus’ trousers and spank them in front of each other. There is only silence, mounting. Silence mounting on silence, pushing down. Then, from indoors, the sound of Mother and Father resuming their domestic scuffle.
It is preferable to the quiet, Sirius thinks, exhaling like a relay racer. Preferable to being spanked. He hates being spanked. It doesn't really hurt. It's just humiliating. "Fuckers."
Regulus, teary, tries to smear mud from the bottoms of his bare feet. The shade is adding interesting contours to his ankles and toes. "I don't want to go back inside. Je déteste cet endroit."
(Regulus has always loved the forest. He brings things home from its verdant mouth: wounded sparrows, snakes missing a fang, mice with broken legs, creatures helpless enough to be cupped in his palms. Their mother disapproves, speaks sharply about disease and bad omens, about bringing subhuman things into the house. But Sirius understands Reg's impulse to shelter and protect.)
"Me neither." Sirius frowns around their darkening woods, considering. What would cheer Reg up? That’s what Reg has him for. To help make the world better. Make it easier. "Let's play a game until they stop."
Regulus' mouth twitches upwards, just the right-hand corner. He's a handsome little boy—smooth skin, good teeth, holds so still. "Hide-and-seek?"
"That's lame. I have something better."
Sirius loves games. Has always loved them, has always loved playing them with Regulus, who is soft and a stuck-up, but also a surprisingly good sport. Tag and hide-and-seek and playing house and catch and make-believe and puzzles and pranks and crosswords while Mother and Father brawl it out in the background like rabid dogs. Games are distracting. Games are fun! Sirius is good at games—whenever he plays, he's a winner for once!
So, there in the great outdoors, the gathering dark, Sirius invents a new game they've not played yet. The rules are clean-cut. Regulus catches on quickly because he's smart and because he trusts implicitly that Sirius knows best.
"It's called Grim Reaper." Sirius barks out a laugh, beckoning Reg in close. "Grim for short."
Regulus hmms and rubs at his bare feet again.
"You run," Sirius lifts his two long, knobby fingers and flicks them back and forth like a set of miniature pumping legs. "If I catch you, you have to kill yourself."
(He’s very taken with the phrase kill yourself. Mother says it to Father all the time. Mother says it's something she wants to do to herself. She tried to do it ages ago, in fact, a few years after Regulus had been born. Having a baby upset her, Dad had said. So, she'd had to go away to a place for upset people. Nobody's ever told Regulus about that. It'd been a very confusing time; Sirius hardly remembers it at all.)
"For real?" Reg deadpans.
Sirius is so idiotically endeared by the sarcasm that he ducks his face to disguise his grin. "No, you stupid idiot! Not really. Just pretend."
“Oh.” A dutiful pause. “Yes.”
"Unless…"
"No!"
A deeper pause comes. Honking geese fly overhead, racing their shadows.
"Reg, relax,” Sirius sighs at last. “Listen. It’s not actually killing yourself. It’s just—um—hurting yourself a bit. Just a scrape, like, on your hand or your elbow. Then it’s part of Grim that I have to play doctor and save you. Same way I did when you were born, remember? Remember how I brought you back to life the last time you were dead? Remember how Mama and Dad always tell you about that? Doctors save people from the Grim Reaper all the time. So, it makes sense.”
“I…remember.”
“See,” Sirius drawls triumphantly. “Death’s nothing, really. It’s not dangerous. You’ve already survived it once.”
“Yeah,” Regulus nods, more earnest now. Kinda convinced.
“And if you’re Grim and you catch me, then I have to kill myself, and you get to be the doctor!”
"We shouldn't—"
This makes Sirius irritated. Makes him laugh. He knows this reckless game will cheer them both up in the end. It's for the better. "I'm telling you to."
January 10th, 1999
Their game of Grim just ended, and they sit in Sirius' bed, sharing a bit of vodka from a crinkly old water bottle. Sirius can stretch out his hands to Regulus' and warm them in the gloaming chill. And though the thought is a happy one, he can't bring himself to do it. He says phlegmatically, "I want a bath."
The bathroom is tiled top to bottom; a glassy place, a room with no view.
In the tub together, the steam is fog-like. Sirius is lying on his back in the water, watching the fog disappear through a crack in the mold-spotty ceiling.
Sitting between Sirius' legs, scrubbing at a shallow cut on his right wrist: Regulus.
Earlier, during their game, Regulus had pretended to kill himself by slashing it. Regulus won't look at Sirius now and Sirius feels bad and wants to make it better. Wants Reg to look at him again.
“You’re not washing it right,” Sirius chides, glancing at his brother. “You're making it worse, idiot. You’ve got to be gentle.”
Regulus flips him off, cheeks puffed with guilty frustration. “You do it, then. If you're so smart."
"I am so smart."
"Then do it."
"I don't want to touch you, poofter—"
"Then why is your thigh on my hip—"
"You put it there, Reg!"
Really, they are a bit too old to be in the bath together, a bit too tipsy, but Mother is comatose in her bedroom and can't get up off the mattress and Father has been missing for a few days on business (whatever that is), and the house only has one bathroom. So, Sirius sits up and leans close to Regulus to help him scrub.
Sirius rolls his eyes.“C’mere.” He takes the drippy, threadbare washcloth with one hand. He holds Regulus' prim arm with the other.
For a moment, the loudest noise in the damp room is Regulus' chirping, half-assed protests.
Sirius hushes him with some slurred, inconsequential comforts.
Pat, pat, pat. Swab, swab, swab. The cut looks disgusting; Regulus' skin is so slippery and soft.
Regulus, bleeding a little less now, eyelids droopy with relief, leans in close enough to climb, just innocently, into Sirius' lap. His breath smells like alcohol—that sharp, evil tint.
Every time Sirius rocks forward and back against Reg's hips to scrub at the gash from different angles, something warm and pleasant sparks between his legs, deep inside. More than pleasant. It feels like magic—mysterious and vibrational and blood-rushing and low and so good it has to be forbidden. Regulus must feel it too, because he starts pushing against Sirius. More friction. More pressure. More, more, more. So new and euphoric and strange.
(He must not make a fuss about this feeling. About feeling this feeling with his brother. It's not forbidden. After all, Mother and Father are cousins. The Black family is very special and different in this way. Toujours Pur. That’s how it is.)
Sirius' heart is drumming in his neck.
Regulus' head swans back; his chest catches and quakes; the erection between his legs has become unbearable. Sirius can't take his eyes from it: the petal-pink tip, the river-winding veins, the dollop of his balls. Regulus has a pretty dick—slim and curved and cute like the rest of his body. Sirius wants to hold it in his fist, feel the weight and rushing blood, high up in the air just for him, twitching. Would Regulus let him? Sirius brings his hand to it. Curls his fingers around it with a proprietary touch so he can measure Regulus' reaction.
Reg makes a gruff noise. “Sirius, what are we—Sirius…we shouldn't…”
Sirius doesn't know what they're doing. He doesn't know anything—only that he’s trembling and his cock is hard against Regulus' and his belly aches and if Mother finds them, she'll spank them stupid. He's too drunk to care—drunk on this, and this, and this.
Sirius sucks in a starving breath. “Shh.” He has to be talkative. He has to know Regulus feels this too, that this tremor, this desire, is shared. That he's not going mental like Ma and making up shit.
This needy nervousness embarrasses him; he slits his eyes up towards the fault-line in the ceiling. It embarrasses him but there’s something lush and perversely thrilling about this. The body knows what it wants before the mind does. He's the big brother. He should know better. But what's better than this? He has never felt anything better.
"You like what you're feeling?" Sirius asks croakily, dragging his hand up and down the firm line of Regulus' cock. "Huh?”
Regulus just nods deliriously. His opaline eyelids flutter and his square mouth hangs open in a sighed gasp. “Oh, fuck.”
It’s sexy. It is a little sexy. Sirius loves to see the hop and skip of Reg's pulse, the blush rainbowing the shell of his ears, hear the damsel-in-distress tremble of his voice.
Sirius rasps a slow, primitive, satisfied noise. “I—ah—know."
Oh hell, I've lost my mind and I don't even care.
Legs twitch, sounds muffled. Everything is so warm and wet, getting sloppier, desperate.
Regulus' dick is throbbing, that fattest vein bucking against Sirius' palm.
Sirius takes Regulus' jaw in his hand as he had before, tilting it to see Reg's face. Tilting it to see Regulus' little features contort.
Let me get a good look at you.
Fingers digging in, power tripping, wet eyelashes, a kiss at the cheek, then the corner of his mouth that tastes like pure blood. The brother-blood they share. A two-headed boy, this is what they are, an amalgamation of lonesomeness and disgust and family and shared secrets and saved lives and the same inventory of small, useless knowledge: how the other’s footsteps sound at the end of a day, the unthinking count of how long each other darkens their bread in the toaster, how they tie their laces.
Sirius wonders if they should really kiss, but they do not really kiss.
The polluted water sloshes over the edges of the tub in time with their movements. The steam curls around them like a protective cradle and after a little while, Sirius forgets that he’d been tending to a wound at all.
Or maybe this may be the best way to tend to a wound.
When it's done, he can't look at Regulus. His chest feels shot through with a feathered arrow; the chains of his ribs are all tangled. The water runs off in rivulets when he stands, when he shakes himself like a wet puppy. The air is cold. He feels less clean than he did before the bath. His voice is hoarse. “I…I don't—know—"
"I know." Regulus blinks, and thinks, and mumbles like he'll cry. He sits there and hugs his turreted knees into his chest. "Neither do I."
They're united in this new, unknown territory. In the vast mystery of themselves.
"We shouldn't have…" Regulus whispers, like he's made a mistake assembling a puzzle. "Mais je te voulais, désespérément. Pourquoi ne m’as-tu pas embrassé, moi?"
Sirius wants to say something back but he doesn’t speak French and he has no idea what Regulus has said. I’ll kill you if you say anything to anyone, probably.
His throat feels itchy. It won't make sounds. He can not shake the cold that has settled in him.
He goes out into the winter woods afterwards, alone, and vomits into the frozen dirt. They should not have done that. He doesn't know why they shouldn't have—Mama and Dad are cousins, after all. This sort of thing is only natural—but he just has a bad feeling. There is something wrong with him, wrong in his soul. There is something wrong with Regulus too. They are bad, or else they have been destined for something bad, and this is simply how it manifests itself. Everyone at school will find out somehow, he's sure of it. James will stop being his friend, people will laugh at him, girls won't bat their eyes at him anymore. He wishes what they'd done there in the water had felt bad, but it had not. It felt so good. The goodness is confusing—how easily pleasure puppeteered him, how quickly it made his mind blank and romantic, how the guilt itself feels erotic even now. Confusion makes him sad and scared and horny and unsure if it even happened and terribly curious to try it again. To see if next time, maybe, it'll make more sense. (How much more twisty can their relationship get, really?)
He buries his vodka-acidic sick like a bad dog.
A Freudian echo comes to him as he walks back home, digging earth from the beds of his nails: Disgust is the threshold; desire is what lies beyond it.
Regulus is waiting for him on the stoop. They latch eyes and Sirius gets terribly sad all of a sudden.
I think I’m bad for you, bro. I’m scared of you. Scared of my own little brother. Scared for you.
They do not speak about it.
This does not mean they don't do it again.
September 2nd, 1998
It's September, and the forest is cool. Tossed, rainy dusk-light filters through the leaves, smudging the earth. Ghosts move here. The remnants of a railroad track abandoned to floods. A hunting shed with kill stains still on the floor. It’s the tail-end of the breeding season. Off-season for game hunting. Legally. Blacks are so often exempt from worldly rules such as that.
They've agreed that Regulus will get a half-hour head start. Sirius doesn’t like the idea of his idiot brother being all alone in the woods much longer than that. It’s not safe. There are so many threats in the outside world after all: witches and serial killers and kidnappers and zombies and werewolves. Mother has told them all about such things. But Sirius thinks it's good for both him and Reg to get some fresh air, no matter what Walburga says. Ma doesn't understand, not like he does. She's mental, and Sirius is sane. And anyway, Sirius can hear her and Father having another shouting match at each other from the house. This argument is about money, and Sirius doesn't want to hear it.
He walks through the forest, deeper, his leather hunting boots leaving tracks.
Paranoia is the state of being pursued from outside. Anxiety is the state of being pursued from within.
Regulus must feel both, while Sirius feels neither. As the pursuer, he feels powerful.
At a marshy, narrow river, he stops, spotting some splintered twigs, disturbed dew-pearled spider webs, and prints of human toes.
Sirius goes still like a hound spotting a rabbit.
Regulus plays Grim barefoot because Sirius says it's part of the rules. Bare feet are harder to track and slower to run away on. They bleed when snagged on thorns or stones.
Sirius bends to the tracks and sniffs—no blood today. But he can sense that his brother is close.
Predaceous, crouching behind the cover of the reeds, Sirius shifts his knife (a Swiss Army knife, for all sorts of predicaments) on his hip so the silver of it won't glint and give him away.
His eyes narrow. Sirius is trying to catch a glimpse of Reg’s panther-black tresses—a black slightly blue—amidst the green-brown vegetation. Trying and trying until he feels a blood-hot thrill slice down his spine as he spots his quarry.
Regulus is sitting on a flat rock at the edge of the gurgling creek, legs tucked up, gambling his fingers through the water as if to summon something up from the bottom. Regulus' hair is curled at its wet tips like he's run his sodden fingers through it. Rain and sunlight shapes glister on his skin. His sides are heaving, hair falling forward, his eyes downcast. He's tired from running, poor thing.
He stands and comes, almost creeping, along the shallow line of the brook. Greenish linens cling to his body and every one of his angular edges, wet and opaque. His thighs shift against the linen. It sticks to his shoulders, hugs his slim waist, clings awkwardly to his cock bouncing immodestly within the fabric.
It is curiosity and guilt that makes Sirius watch, that restrains him, for he thinks he would like to see what the wet fabric might offer. It’s only natural for boys to engage in dick measuring contests, after all. And he suspects Regulus has gotten himself all wet on purpose. He knows it'll piss Sirius off. Make him irritated. Make him laugh.
Sirius zeroes his eyes on the bulge at the basin of Reg's hips, feeling something in his pulse quicken while he sorts out what he wants to do with his brother. Half of the fun of playing Grim is the hunting half. The other half is the catching half—the struggle of the ambush, feeling Regulus give in to Sirius' superior strength and submit himself to being subdued, limp and wet-mouthed panting in Sirius' arms.
He thinks he'll attack from the back, unseen.
Regulus had moved to kneel again, poking at something at the edge of the water, a shell, perhaps.
Sirius approaches slowly, grave and nocturnal-quiet, drawing to a halt right behind Reg's hunched silhouette. This close, Sirius' mind is full of the smell of him: the strawberry milk Regulus drinks in the morning, the minty soap he washes with. Cherubic, his. All his.
Sirius lunges. He grabs Regulus by the waist and thrusts him down onto the mud, smothering Reg's body with his.
There’s frisson when Regulus realizes he’s been caught. He feels it in Reg's body—the sharp intake of breath, the breakout of goosebumps. Regulus jerks suddenly, a trapped animal throwing itself at the bars. He grunts raw sounds, feet scraping, fists battering. The bud-trellised trees throw the noise back at them.
Regulus is trying to get away. Really trying. That’s what’s hilariously charming about it. His idiot brother.
Forearms straining, straddling him, Sirius crowds his space, leaning close enough that his breath ghosts over the thin skin beneath Reg's ear. “You're dead.”
On his back, Regulus gazes up at Sirius with eyes like open pots of pewter paint. Muck on his clothes, blood at his lip, his body piled in the dirt. The smell of pond water, the slip of skin between Sirius' hands. His skin, shivering and saturated. Reglus groans, frowning, captured.
“Come on. Do something,” Sirius goads, thrilled and excited and red-blooded. He moves his hand, making it a tourniquet around Reg's neck to keep him down. "Aren't you going to keep fighting?"
Choked: “No.”
Sirius’ skin zings at the noise, goosebumps racing downward. "I'm telling you to."
"N—o!"
"Then kill yourself. I got you, so—"
Suddenly, Sirius' cheek smarts; Regulus' face blurs. It’s a weak punch, knuckles bobbing off flesh, but a little something scrunches within Sirius' sinuses and his head swims just the same.
“Nice.” Sirius is laughing, patting his palm to his nose. It comes away clean, but his stomach still rolls over inside itself. “Well done. Really good. You’re—”
“Sirius. Oh my god,” Regulus rolls his eyes, then, brow wrinkling with some complex emotion, “Get off me.”
It takes Sirius a minute to sort out what Reg's alluding to, and when it slots into place, when he looks down, he barks a laugh. Figures.
He's laughing still as he adjusts himself in his pants. It’s not something to be embarrassed about; certainly not surprising. These things happen. "What? You've never popped a boner after getting roughed up?”
“You know I—” Regulus raises his chin with stubborn pride and stops and doesn't continue. He just lies there for a long moment, looking at Sirius.
Sirius, whose cock is burning now, then numb, then both at once. Regulus' hands are flat to his chest. Sirius has no memory of how they got there. His heart is beating so fast, Regulus must feel its tempo.
Regulus swallows noisily. He shifts his lower half, arching just an inch. Hips against hips. "Is that—I don't, but do you—do you want me to…?”
Sirius' skin is sizzling. There's a trillion shames gathering in the nape of his brain. He’s not thinking coherently. He doesn't want Regulus to ask him what he wants. He wants Regulus to want it enough not to ask. He’s not even sure he’s doing it until it’s happening—until he gropes mockingly at Reg's dick in his trousers, hard as hell from being pinned beneath his big brother for sixty seconds. "I don't know what you're talking about, man. Jesus. Just kill yourself so I can save you. Then we can go inside and clean up. We're all mucky."
Sirius releases Regulus and sits back to smooth his hair. Faux-bored. Playing with his food.
(This will irritate Regulus. Frustrate him. Make him squirmy and eager to please, eager to get back in Sirius Black's good graces.)
With a vicious glance—rejection makes him vindictive—Regulus gathers himself to his feet. Stumbling, tripping over himself, he wades into the creek and pretends to drown himself so Sirius can resurrect him and drag Reg back onto the bank by his armpits. Rhythmic, caregiving chest compressions and spitty, sloppy mouth-to-mouth.
It's all part of the game.
It's a game they'll grow out of, right? Boys will be boys.
August 27th, 1999
He remembers the night Regulus tried to kill himself: the flash of blue and red lights rippling on the trees; the whispers of the EMTs as they set up the stretcher; the sour smell of blood; Sirius hadn't been wearing underwear and his dick felt chafed in his jeans.
(Funny, the arbitrary little details one remembers about bad nights.)
Now, Regulus is in the hospital. He has been there for four days since the night he tried to off himself. Some of his friends from school have gone to visit him—a girl named Dorcas and a boy named Evan—but Sirius has not visited the hospital yet. Mama won't let him.
He goes into Regulus' bedroom sometimes, just to stand inside.
The door unlocks smoothly. Four days. Already, Reg's bedroom has begun to feel museum-like with abandonment. The air is musky. A thin layer of dust greys his furniture. Shafts of pale sun highlight the unwrinkled sheets of his bed, the half-drunk cup of ginger tea still on his desk, his vintage radio.
Sirius imagines them, shoulder to shoulder, lying on the floor beside it like they used to: eyes half-open, sharing a stolen bottle of James' vodka, hollow cheeks dewy with sweat as they watch the hooked blades of the ceiling fan spiral, spiral, spiral.
Sirius loves his brother. All brothers love each other. All love is dangerous. He has loved Regulus from the moment he was born: silent and sapphire and suffocated by Mother’s umbilical cord. Hanging himself with it.
Reg had been a good baby. He is a good brother—sensitive and smart and understanding in every sense. Indeed, Sirius can still smell Reg lingering in the dust motes that snow through the air. He is only a ghost now- vapor and memory. This makes him easy to breathe in.
Sirius moves more deeply into the room. He watches himself in Regulus' mirror and swears to the God he doesn't much believe in that if Regulus comes back, he will not touch his brother again. Never again. That will be the price. He will forfeit this one instinct that has steadied him all his life, that has made enduring this existence possible. Yes, he thinks, with the bleak composure of an addict going sober. This should satisfy whatever miserly god presides over this town.
On the fifth day, Sirius goes to visit Regulus in the hospital. He and Ma have to drive two hours. He drinks vodka in the car out of a plastic bottle, and Mother pretends not to know. (Wouldn't be the first time for that kinda behavior from her…)
When they get to the white hospital, all Sirius can smell is bleach and blood and blackboard chalk dust. His vision oozes and he's feeling statistically more tipsy than sober.
In the starched bed, Regulus is so quiet.
Sirius should slap him, probably. He should hurt him. That always helps. But he's sworn off touching his brother.
“Don’t do that again,” Sirius tells Regulus instead. Tries to say it politely. It feels like stretching a broken bone.
Regulus snorts, dry. “Kill myself?”
“Scare the shit out of me.”
They don't talk for some time.
“Come to New York with me when I finish school,” Sirius demands eventually. "Back to the city, I mean. You can’t stand this fucking place, just like me. You’re just lying around waiting for Ma to die so you can help Dad when it happens. That’s not a life, idiot.”
Regulus glances at the sterile hallway beyond the white door and moistens his lips. He looks very weak in his droopy hospital gown, an IV bandaged into his hand. For a moment, both brothers listen to Walburga pacing in the hallway outside, talking to nobody.
Sirius wants to hug Reggie. Swaddle him up and steal him away. Kiss him, kinda. They have never kissed.
“I can’t stand this place…” Regulus repeats in a wilted voice.
Sirius leans lazily back in his chair, lifting two of its feet from the floor. The room spins like a top. “We could find an apartment. We could be a family. Start fresh far away from the parents. C'mon.”
“We already are family.”
“You know what I mean.”
Regulus' face looks a little red. He rubs his mouth with his IV-free hand.
There is a moment of quiet.
Sirius isn't even sure what he means, but he's sure it's got something to do kissing. Kinda. Maybe. Or maybe it's just mostly about being away from Mom and Dad.
"Whatever you want to be when you grow up," Sirius shrugs, "you can be that if we go. But you won't be anything here. Neither will I. That's why I want to leave, and why you should want to too."
"Nobody makes it out of here alive."
"Then I'm going to be the first."
"And only," jokes Regulus, which is not funny at all.
A pause.
"I think I'd be a good vet. I like creatures," Reg amends guilty. "Do you remember that hairless little rat with the broken leg I found once, how I fixed its foot and cut up little pieces of apple for it to eat out of my hand—"
"Sure, Reg. Whatever. Then let's—"
“You’re right, though. Mother will die. Somebody will need to look after Father, and it won’t be you,” Regulus interrupts. “You know I can’t leave Father. We should not even talk about this—”
“Fine,” Sirius drones, aloof in a way he doesn't fully feel. "Stay with the family, then, if you love them better than you love me. You're so boring."
A long time passes.
Regulus asks, exhausted, “Pourquoi ne m’as-tu pas embrassé, moi?"
“English, dude.” Sirius flicks Reg’s IV bag. “Come on.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Regulus closes his eyes. “Some things are better left unsaid.”
“But you said it. You literally just—”
“Not in a way you’d understand,” Regulus mumbles. “Which is the same,” he adds, “as saying nothing.”
December 25th, 1988
Someone touches Sirius' elbow.
A nurse. She is young like Mama. Only her hair is ginger, not black. And she is awake. Mama is in the hospital bed right in front of Sirius, asleep.
Come away, hushes the nurse. Your mother is okay. She will wake up soon, but she needs to be alone when she wakes up. Your Father is down the hall. Let's go say hello to him.
Sirius doesn't come away. He doesn't want to leave Mama. Animals have a natural instinct to seek solitude when their lives are coming to an end, so it's best to make sure Mama always has company.
And besides, last time he left her in her bed by herself, she closed herself in the bathroom and took medicine that made her fall asleep and turn dead-baby color and throw up bubbly red foam. He'd stuck his hand in that foam when he found her on the floor. He'd listened to the bubbles pop.
He unhooks his elbow from the nurse like a latch from a hook.
The nurse goes quiet and just stands with him.
Everything is so still. There's the sound of machine-beeping and the snowflakes pummeling the window are ruthless and baby Regulus is scream-crying somewhere down the feverish, fluorescent hospital hallway. Screaming is good. It is the strongest sign of life.
But Mama is so quiet.
Sirius should slap her, probably. He should hurt her. That always helps. He loves her very much and just wants her to wake up.
He raises his hand to hit her, but the nurse panics and shouts and stops him, holds him.
Then, Sirius is taken to another room by more nurses with mashed potato faces—they’re all white and globby and butter-shining sweaty. They ask him to explain himself and so he does.
“Mom doesn’t have any friends,” he says, very confident in his observations. “I don’t think she wants any, but even if she did I’m not sure who would want to be her friend. She’s angry and sad all the time. I heard my friend’s mom when they didn’t know I was listening, wonder why my dad was married to her. She’s just different from other moms. And other people. And I don’t think she cares much that she’s different which is maybe the most different thing about her.”
He’s not sure if this is what the nurses are talking about, but it’s what he’s thinking about.
Later, Dad brings Sirius home. He is a smart child; he stays up to study death. The sociological, the psychological, the cultural. The way it’s portrayed in art and literature and faith and ritual and playground games.
June 1st, 2001
Mother, crying, shouts: Vas-y, fais-le donc! Je te défie!
Sirius glances at Reg, who doesn't look up at him. So, he tugs on Reg's clammy-cold hand. "Let's get out of here."
He means the house, but he's thinking of the whole town.
Back outdoors again, in the unfenced backyard, the boys watch the fireflies float just above the blue-grey grass like wind-tossed embers. Clouds have swallowed the sunset. The trees of their forest are lined up like tall, faceless soldiers. Inside, another glass explodes. Sirius thinks of feverish, fluorescent hospital hallways and flinches, then pretends to cough.
Regulus, who's generally the brother praised for possessing good sense, turns to him. "Want to play Grim until they're done?"
Sirius' fake coughing fit falters. He drops Reg’s hand and clenches his fists at his sides. As a pulse of fear tightens his shoulders, he shrugs it off, defusing. "We haven't played Grim—"
"Since last time, I know."
"Yeah. And last time you—"
"I know what happened last time." Reg snips it as if he's trying to sell Sirius a used motorcycle.
Sirius wants to talk about last time. They never talk about last time. Sirius wants to be the big brother about this and use his best adult voice—knowing, cagey, stern. But that would make it seem like he cares, which would make it awkward. All he can manage is, "We shouldn't."
"I think we should." Regulus pulls a crumpled plastic water bottle out from his back pocket. It's full of clear liquid. Not water. He shakes it at Sirius, tempting. "Humor me?"
August 23rd, 1999
At night they're very careful, very quiet. Regulus has always been these things: careful, quiet. Sirius tells him this as Regulus slides into his room, teary from listening to Mom and Dad fight.
Sirius has been drinking vodka stolen from the Potter's shop. Drinking it from a clear plastic Poland Spring bottle. He's sure Regulus can smell it on his breath as he pushes the hood back from Regulus' skull. As he pulls Regulus towards the bed where they can tumble amidst feathers. As he undoes the sweatshirt from around Reggie's body, then his pajama pants.
"Take it off," Sirius whispers. "Reg, take it off, I can't stand it."
Regulus is bare beneath his clothes, alabaster-skinned. A warm mound of white meat.
"Oh, God. Yes," Regulus gasps, and Sirius gasps with him.
All the while, from the neighboring room, a muffled, chilling roar: Mother and Father screaming in French. It reminds Sirius of the frantic cries of hyenas ripping apart carrion. He saw that on TV one time and thinks of it when he’s trying to put himself to sleep.
But tonight, Sirius wants to make other noises: little comforting noises that make him feel less useless and make Regulus stop weeping. Happy sounds—the polar opposite of his parents. He wants to make Regulus whine and keen, the sheets whisper and hiss, to compose some ancestral rhythm of slapping skin and ragged breaths, wet and urgent stab-then-suction sounds. Soothing. Bodily. Base. Disgusting. Soothing because it's disgusting. United in the desire for that, in their understanding of it. (Just like the games they play, right? Disgust is the threshold; desire is what lies beyond it? This is what their bodies are for.)
Regulus is on his back, the edge of his face is turned into his pillow, and when Sirius grasps his jaw—a killer’s hand, cradling—twisting it to face him, he looks into Regulus' eyes and sees how dark they’ve become. The same shade as his navy clothes, piled on the floor beside the raft of Sirius' bed.
Sirius starts to undress. Starts to say something vulnerable—catches himself. He's still the big brother, isn’t he; knows better, always. He is not going to be poured out like this. Better not to speak. He tells Regulus this too, as Regulus' legs open under Sirius' slinking fingers.
Regulus' precum is colorless and honey-sticky on Sirius' skin. He shifts lower and swipes it off Reg's hardened tip with his tongue; licks it up. Salty, like tears. “Jesus, Reg, you're so hard. So hard, it's killing me—”
"Sirius," Regulus pleads. His huge, overcast eyes watch the bob of Sirius' head. He writhes and cants his hips and grabs at Sirius' shoulders, but he does not look away. His whole body is trembling like a caught thing, a frightened thing. "We shouldn't."
"You taste like me," Sirius croaks with a focus usually reserved for open-heart surgery. For saving lives. (He knows all about that. He's saved Regulus a million times during their Grim games.)
"Stop it. Don't say that. You make it so vulgar—"
This makes Sirius irritated. Makes him laugh. "Oh, shut up. Get onto your belly."
"Listen to me. We shouldn't—"
"I'm telling you to."
"You say that like you're Dad—"
Sarcastic comes Sirius' reply: "I'm not am I?"
"No, you're my brother."
(Unsaid: You're my brother, so we shouldn't be fucking.)
"Then why'd you come in here?" Sirius tilts his cocky chin, feigning boredom. His lips are tingling. "Huh? Why? Whenever you come in here, this is what you want."
Regulus looks back at him for some time. Looks with pupils like bullet holes and says, "Fine. Do it. Now. Just stop talking."
Then, with a cursive moan that punches right through Sirius' sternum, right through his brain, Regulus rolls onto his belly. It's all Sirius can do to straddle him and look him up and down. Twice. Splayed like a doll. The aquiline scoop of his lower back, the dimples over his square ass, Reg's curled toes, his parted legs with his own cock lodged between them, leaking.
Sirius wants to be telling Regulus how pretty he looks like this, how minty he smells, how fucking secret and odd and special and ugly and important this is. How hard it's making him; how much it's making him doubt himself. (If this were normal, he could tell James about it. But some self-consciousness always stays his tongue. He thinks maybe this isn't normal or okay—he suspects sometimes…maybe…well…it’s just that nobody else has parents who are related to each other…but Blacks are different. Always different and special! Yes.) Sirius puts it from his mind. He wants to be murmuring: You're gonna let me fuck you? You always do. Are you ever going to tell me not to? No? You love this, huh? Yeah, I know you do. You know what to do, Reggie.
But at night they're very careful, very quiet. He says nothing at all. Just spreads open Reg's cheeks with his thumb and forefinger to get a look at that little pink hole of his, clenching and puffy. Always eager. Always like: Ready when you are!
His idiot brother. His brother who has stopped crying.
Sirius spits on Reg's rim, tucks the saliva inside with his thumb, only to pull the finger free again with a crass pop. "’M gonna fuck you…"
Regulus braces, rising to his hands and knees, the sheets quieting the breath-humid sigh that comes from his mouth. "I said. Stop. Talking."
Sirius flares him a look: hot-tipped. "Yeah. I know.”
“Just, please. Hurry. Before Mother and—”
“Shh.”
(Even caged animals have been known to play games with their zoo keepers. Half the thrill of fucking is the risk that their parents might catch them. It reminds Sirius of playing Grim: if they're caught doing this, they're sure to be killed.)
The shh sound soothes with the tempo of Sirius' palm, cooling along the smoulder-path of Reg's bowed spine. Regulus settles like a fussing baby. He's looking over a shoulder at Sirius like he wants to kiss him, but they have never kissed.
Does Sirius want a kiss? He's not sure. It would teeter them too close to the kinds of things that happen between couples in books and movies.
Romance.
This isn't that. Sirius suspects that this is not that.
(But what would he know?)
He does what he's seen in porn videos and magazines. With his fingertip, Sirius rolls a loop around Reg's cute rim. He strokes himself three times before he taps the heavy crown of his cock against Reg's tailbone. He lines himself up with a croaked growl. Lines up and sinks in; he’s splitting Regulus wide open. So full. Sunk low. Sunk deep. Sunk raw. Sunk into Reg's soul. He could hurt Regulus like this if he wanted to. He could go fast and hard and dry.
“Jesus,” Reggie whispers, head dipping. The skinny muscles of his thighs spasm beneath Sirius' hands. His neck is laced with a pink blush.
Sirius starts to rock, roll himself in and out, slow-slick with spit and damp, and Regulus bucks his held hips back—teamwork—and tells him, I don't know, don't—I don't think—that—Sirius—we should stop—faster—
“Shh,” Sirius taunts, leaning over, more than half in love because he's always loved his brother, a whisper into the skin between Reg's mole-spotted shoulders. "Stop talking. You feel so—ah—good."
Pleasure broils in his bones—every muscle and sinew tightening in preparation to release—sensations sweet and wild-zingy as unfiltered tree sap racing down along the spokes of his ribs, making his fingertips twitch and his breath come in slinky gasps. He fucks into Regulus faster, deeper, Reg's form lax in his hands. Caught. Nodding, shaking his head, clawing away and pushing back against Sirius, both. Saying he likes it. He wants it. Saying he hates Sirius. Saying he doesn't want to do this, changed his mind. Saying he wants it so very much; no, wait, just wait—someone's coming. Don't you hear that? Somebody's coming, Sirius, stop—I think Mom can hear us—
Sirius, sick of all the talking, lust-blind and paled of sense, slaps Reg on the ass once. Then again, tinging the marble flesh a pretty pink.
Hurting it helps, he thinks.
Regulus' eyes close and his babbling whips into a cacophony of rosy vaporings and glottal moans, beating like blows, and Sirius has the sick suspicion that Regulus is enduring this more than he's enjoying it. Enduring this for reasons of his own, reasons which he shall never share with Sirius. And he feels a panic of terror for being so kept in the dark, so used by his brother, so Sirius drops a palm flat between Regulus' shoulder blades and pummels him. Just plows himself greedily inside, one thrust after another, after another, after another.
This is how Mother finds them when she throws the bedroom door open.
The spine of the room stiffens.
Regulus freezes, his expression one of listening silence.
Mother freezes, bated breath and baffled in the doorway.
Sirius freezes. His heart drops.
A car passes on the road; its headlights beam into the bedroom. Then, purple-dark folds in again.
Sirius is completely cold. Then molten-hot. Turbulent. Claustrophobic inside his skin. His ears are ringing as if he's been body-slammed by a stampeding rhino. Then he can't hear any sound at all. He's underwater or falling through a deadening veil.
It seems that nobody knows what to do. The scene is smoothly silent, laden with obscure and unnameable tension.
Down the hall, Dad turns on the TV. Laugh track.
Sirius, ever a man of action, grabs at a sheet to cover things up but his hands are numb and he can't really move his thumb and his gut feels rotten, like poisonous black mushrooms bloom in his intestines and Regulus starts to cry all over again. Just fucking cry. Just sob, loud and weak.
The sound, the vehement sobs, seem to remind them all that they're alive. Because they're alive, they must do something about this. Yes, something needs to be done.
Sirius pulls out—
Regulus ducks for his discarded hoodie—
Mother gropes along the wall for the light switch—
There is a great scuffle and all the lights get turned on—yellow, yolk-bright—and Sirius' sheet is yanked back. Cold, he's all cold again. He falls onto the floor with no recollection of why. Punishment is coming. He's sure that they're going to be spanked and that Regulus will be taken away to another room and Sirius forgets to put his underwear back on; his dick feels chafed in his jeans as he dresses and nobody is looking at him. He wants someone to look. He wants someone to scream. He can't stop thinking of pink mouth-foam, the pop—pop—pop sound of it and feverish, fluorescent hospital hallways. Mother's face is dad-baby color and he thinks, almost with relief, that he must have been right to doubt. He must have been right all along. Whatever they have done—what he and Regulus have done here tonight and so many nights before—it must be wrong.
(Perhaps guilt will purify him. Perhaps he'll be guilty enough to stop.)
But then Mother steps back very stolidly, mouth open—shut—open—shut. She doesn't seem angry. She seems overwhelmed. Uncomprehending. This peripheral affair she's finally facing is perhaps too bizarre to register properly. The effort of understanding what she is seeing would require more than she is willing, or able, to give. Like watching a cat skinned alive, like slowing past a ten-car pileup on the interstate, like hearing the voice of someone yowling from inside a burning building, it's easier to turn away. To not know. Ignorance is bliss! The saying is famous for a reason.
Walburga looks down. Then away.
She steps backwards out of the room. She shuts the door on them. She seals them inside, contained, alone together.
Nobody moves.
After a helpless beat, the brothers turn to each other, stricken not just by what has happened, but by what has not.
From the living room, the television laughs again.
August 23rd, 1999
The night is unsalvageable. Sirius has tried to talk to Mother—explain and excuse and gaslight the fuck outta her—but she just wants to sit with Dad and watch a sitcom about a funny family on TV. Regulus has gone into the forest somewhere, though it's very late and shadowy outside. And Sirius is thinking of September when he'll be back at school: James asking how the summer was, the taste of stale lunch-pizza on his tongue, all the normal kids who have only ever been caught smoking pot or stealing spare change.
He closes himself inside the hallway closet, makes his world small, tucked away with the coats and old boots and other queer oddities. He stands with his fingers clenched and looks down at his hands. Smooth, white knuckles. He's going to be sick into Dad's mummified galoshes. Very—enough to empty his belly-deep well of disgust all out. He gets panicky when he’s in deep like this. Starts thinking about repercussions and how sorry he is and how much he hates this place and everything in it: the farm supply shop and the handsome oaf that works there, the church, his family, the creepy woods, his bedroom, and all the local hospitals.
He hates himself most of all. He has ruined everything. Grim was his idea in the first place. Was the fucking his idea too? He has messed Regulus up. He has done something to his brother that is wrong. Or Regulus has done something to Sirius that is wrong. It takes two to tango. Or maybe Mother and Father have messed the whole family up and Sirius should have known better from the start. He should have done so many things differently.
Sirius leaves the closet and throws himself outdoors. He'll look for Regulus. Yes, he'll focus on finding Regulus and think of nothing else at all. It's the easy way out. Doing anything else would require him to sit with what has happened and if he does that, he'll go mental like Mama.
I'm just like her. Can't face reality. I get it, Mama. I do.
Outside, the night smells mossy, mist-drenched. Crickets sing. Deer bound away, flipping up their white tails. Sirius stomps into the woods, a flashlight beaming before him like a sword. Once he's deep enough, he glances back. Through the thick trees, he can just make out the edges of their house in the distance—its unlit windows, the chain-rattling of the dogs, the crunchy gravel drive.
Nobody is looking for him. The night could swallow him; he could get lost in the jaws of it.
He's thinking that now might be a good time to run away—not face reality at all, leave the family, go back to Brooklyn like he's always wanted, make art, own an inside dog, and take James with him. He's thinking now might be a good time for all that when branches shift to his right. He spots Regulus' narrow shadow slip away, retreating—and oh, but he loved his brother; he loves him.
Just like that, Sirius is giving chase, instinctively running after Reg. It feels like they're playing Grim again, and games are distracting. Games are fun! Games are something Sirius can win!
He methodically tracks Regulus in deep, then deeper still, where the branches lean low and the shrubs are thorny. They snag on his long hair and loose clothes; he doesn’t care.
Catching Regulus is easy—Sirius has done so very many times before. It's the adrenaline: wrapping his arms around Regulus, feeling Reg's limbs thrash, smelling his minty skin, hearing his baby-rattle breath.
Regulus is still crying. His tears fall wet on Sirius' forearms. “Stop, stop. Let me go!”
This makes Sirius irritated but it doesn't make him laugh. There's a nauseous and manic-giddy knot in his chest that's migrating up into his throat. Feels like tears, the ache of them. "Caught you, Reg. You know what to do."
Regulus doesn’t reply. He nods, just smooths his face up and down, sighing through his nose like he knew it was coming to this, like he’s relieved Sirius is permitting him to do this to himself, already reaching for the Swiss Army knife in Sirius' pocket. Always, it’s in Sirius’ pocket.
It's just a game. They've only ever been playing pretend. Impulsive, destructive, defiant fun.
The blood stands out against Regulus' skin when he cuts open his arm. Pretend suicide, because Sirius will save him and the deathly Grim Reaper can't catch him and it doesn't matter what they do or how they hurt each other—Mama showed them that with the shutting of the door. It does not matter. They can do anything. No consequences, never consequences. Invincible.
Regulus' left forearm is a mess of burgundy, of blood. It's a busted pomegranate that’s been cracked in half, vomiting viscera and glistening curds of flesh. The iron of it is slick beneath the pads of Sirius' fingers, thick and cloying. Sirius can’t look at it for long; it is harsh and angry. He can see bone—see it, and register surprise that it is not white. Not perfect, clean white like the fake skeleton in science class.
Regulus says Sirius' name in a voice that shakes. His eyes are open too far.
Now the lump has lifted from Sirius' chest. Now it is in his throat, a choking fog, and now the tears—the blurring burn. He can't see what he's doing to Reg's arm. He can't tell if the ripped hem of the shirt he's wrapping around the wound is working. Choking on his tears, he tries to talk to Regulus. Tries to ask if he's okay, ask why Regulus' lips are rapidly turning that blue-grey, dead-baby color again.
Sirius should slap him, probably. He should hurt him. That always helps.
He doesn't know any other way to help.
The slap echoes in the clearing; Regulus does not wake. His blood is steaming in the cool air. There is more blood coming every moment; it is not clotting.
In books and on television, characters shout for help during times like these. Or they walk—numb and blood-stained—away from the scene of the slaughter, collapsing on some artfully scarred floor. Or the moment is saved by good cops who sweep in on angelic solar-flares of flashing blue and red lights.
There is always hope in such stories, always a rescue.
But the Black brothers are alone in the woods. No one would hear him if he screamed; the sound would be taken up by the trees. He can't go running to Mom for help with this—she'll just turn away and Dad will get angry and violent. And Sirius cannot remember the last time he saw a police car. Months, at least.
Sirius doesn't know what to do.
He can't stop shaking.
Regulus is not making a single noise. Dirt is smeared on his greyish nose.
Sirius has had a brother almost all of his life. His baby brother is built into his life. He's afraid of life without a little brother. What sort of life would that be?
Heart beating in his mouth, Sirius lowers Reg to the ground. He steps away very stolidly, lips open—shut—open—shut. Overwhelmed. Uncomprehending. The effort of understanding what he is seeing would require more than he is able to give. Like watching a cat skinned alive, like slowing past a ten-car pileup on the interstate, like hearing the voice of someone yowling from inside a burning building, it's easier to turn away.
Sirius looks at the sky. Then he glances through the trees, toward home.
He runs back the way he came. The air is cool and the grass hisses as it parts around his thighs and an owl swoops low overhead.
It is a lovely evening.
August 23rd, 1999
He's covered in cold, tacky blood by the time the cops come. Old raspberry syrup. He thinks of it that way. Always playing little pranks on himself.
The plastic phone is still in his hand and the female dispatcher's voice keeps asking Sirius to describe where he is and what he sees. So he tells the woman about the flash of blue and red lights rippling on the trees; the whispers of the EMTs as they set up the stretcher; the sour smell of blood; how he's not wearing underwear and his dick feels chafed in his jeans.
He keeps holding the phone until someone gently takes it from his hand.
His fingers stay clawed.
June 1st, 2001
"I think we should." Regulus pulls a crumpled plastic water bottle out from his back pocket. It's full of clear liquid. Not water. "Humor me?"
His voice drips off his lower lip like a bead of resplendent dew from the point of a leaf: a come-hither cadence. Regulus wants to be fucked. That is what he's asking for.
"I'm telling you to," Regulus adds, smug.
Reluctance sets in like a sedative. For the first time in living memory, Sirius does not want to play this game. He cannot touch Regulus. He promised himself, he promised the universe, he promised to pay that price. His love for Regulus and his disgust with himself and his devotion to the promise he made so long ago war within him.
He wishes, nonsensically, that he and Reg were just friends, not brothers.
But Regulus' smile is hooked upward and springy coils of hair hang over his dove-lavender eyelids. Sirius studies him, tempted and scared of how tempted he is. His eyes dart to Reg's posture, the leonine hold of the vodka, the way Reg's feet are crossed at the ankles. Regulus has started looking a little grown-up lately. Sirius savors the thought. Growing up is good. Regulus will be able to navigate the wilds of the world better once he's grown. He'll need Sirius less, in theory. He'll outgrow this place and their past and their parents too. He'll leave this all behind and learn to be a vet. He'll leave this all behind and buy new clothes that hide his scar and make him unrecognizable. He'll leave this all behind and find someone who can kiss him. (They have never kissed.) He'll leave this all behind but he won't forget Sirius, his brother. Sirius knows this because he will not forget Regulus, his brother.
Sirius snatches the bottle and untwists the cap. His heart sinks into his stomach; it burns in the acid of him. "Just this time."
"What do you mean?"
The bottle crinkles under Sirius' grip as he lifts it to his grimly smiling lips. "We're getting too old for games. Games are for babies. This will be the last time."
There is a long lull in conversation. Sirius drinks and drinks. He doesn't believe a word of what he's said, and he wonders if Regulus will.
The clench of Reggie's teeth stiffens the line of his jaw. He's looking at Sirius the way he had fifteen years ago, when he'd been born and everything had still been simple. "Fine. But how about I catch you this time? You can have a head start."
Power trip logic.
A mocking bow. Sirius has hardly eaten, and the vodka is filling the cracks in his brain like cement, smoothing him all out. "If you want."
“I want.”
Sirius shoves the bottle back at his brother and turns tail, vanishing into the woods. He does not look back, though he'll regret this in the years to come.
June 1st, 2001
It's dark, but the streetlights are lit, and so Sirius imagines he's hopscotching between lily pads of lamplight as he makes the forty-minute walk to the Potter's house with nothing in his pockets but twenty bucks, his high school ID card, and the Swiss Army knife Regulus tried to kill himself with.
When the nice yellow house rears into view, Sirius stands for a moment, examining it. Like the windows of all the surrounding houses, the Potter's curtains are not closed. In the blue dining room, James is sitting down to dinner with his parents. They're talking. Mr Potter pours his wife some wine as James passes the salad bowl.
Sirius feels a little green with envy.
Rubbing the hilts of his hands into his itchy eyes, he steals across the manicured lawn and around the back to the rear of the house. There's a little herb garden there: the bent spines of tomato plants sagging full with red fruits. Thankfully, James' bedroom window is on the bottom floor. The plaid curtains are closed carelessly; there's a gap between them. The lights are out inside, but James always returns to his room once he's finished with his dinner.
It doesn't take long for the desk lamp in the bedroom to flicker to life. James reclines into his mattress, wearing jeans and a crewneck, tossing a little golden tennis ball back and forth between his hands.
Sirius scratches the back of his neck where nerves prickle. He sidles close to the house—pushing through Mr Potter's azalea bushes, scattering leaves—to give the window a white-knuckled knock.
Inside, James drops his ball with a startled swear and squints blindly around.
Sirius waves, knowing he probably looks drunk. Over his shoulder, he thinks he hears a crunch of shoes on pavement. He swivels, ready to run…but it's only Ms McGonagall across the street, feeding some stray tabbies.
Reg is nowhere to be seen. He hasn't found him yet. He's still out here somewhere, hunting Sirius. Still playing Grim, none the wiser.
When Sirius turns back, his neck sheening with sweat, James is wrestling the window open. "Sirius? What the—"
"Open up, will ya? Let me in!"
"I'm trying. It's—stuck—ah! There!"
Sucking in his belly, Sirius crawls inside and collapses right onto the carpeted floor beneath the window. He hunkers like avoiding a sniper's laser beam. "Took you long enough."
"Is someone after you?" James latches the window closed and shuts his curtains properly this time. "You're acting all weird—"
"I'm running away. Let's go. Come with me. Let's go to England or Canada like you're always saying. I don't care."
He does not know what possesses him to whisper it so bluntly, so low, so that Mr and Mrs Potter won't overhear. He does not know what has possessed him to cut and run tonight of all nights. He cannot remember deciding to leave. There's only the memory of standing there in the backyard, disgusted with Regulus and with himself, thinking that he can't stay. These things feel different to him—deciding to leave versus deciding not to stay—but perhaps they are only different words for the same choice. Perhaps he hasn't gotten to choose at all. Perhaps his feet just started moving, and by the time he's noticed, he's already running away.
He always knew he'd grow out of this nothing place, anyway. He always told everyone he would. He'd leave and go running around in the world without any of the baggage.
Hazily, James gives a nod. "I thought you were set on Brooklyn—"
"No can do. Mom and Dad will go looking for me there. We have to go further."
"Got it. What about your brother? We should get him."
"So, you'll come with me? Just like that?" Sirius snaps his fingers. "You're not going to argue—"
"Why would I? All we talk about is getting out of here. I was wondering when you'd want to pull the plug!"
"Then we'll go tonight," Sirius says, standing, crossing the room to James' purple piggy-bank atop his desk and pulling the plug out from the side of its belly. Coins and folded bills spill into his waiting hands. "The two of us—together. We'll catch the midnight bus that leaves from outside the old post office. That should get us to Albany, and from there we can get a train to anywhere in the world."
"But Reg—"
"Regulus will be better off on his own here." Sirius stuffs money into his pockets, unable to look at James. Outside, the cats across the street start to fight—ghostly hisses and screams. Sirius' hands are as cold as the coins he's handling.
James keeps an ominous quiet.
Fucking trouble.
Sirius peers a peek at him. At the set of Potter's square shoulders, the warm light playing along his brow. Dry, the knowing humor that cloaks James. On his lips, the coy frown that glimmers. The snow-litter of starlight at the window. "Won't you miss your brother, Black?"
He knows. James knows. About us. Me and Regulus. Somehow, he has sorted it out.
Sirius' pulse drums inside his ears.
This is the closest they've ever come to talking about it. This is as close as Sirius ever wants to come. "Like I said, he'll be better off without it. Me, I mean. Better off without me."
"Uh-huh. Sure."
"Don't fucking give me that look."
"I'm just asking—"
"You're not asking anything specific at all, actually."
James turns his back on Sirius and starts to pack a bag. After an awful and awkward beat, he says, "How long?"
"Huh?"
"How long have you and he…you know?"
"Oh, fuck off—"
"I just have to ask. I have to. I've been thinking about it for a long time and I…I don't know. It's fucked up, dude. You do understand that, right? People say stuff. Around town, people fucking say stuff about you two…and your Mom and everything. People at school. Even my mom and dad sometimes ask and…yeah. It's fucking weird, man."
"Mmph," Sirius replies, because his tongue is numb from shock. He closes his eyes, hands in pockets, cold with coins, with his knife. He imagines a bridge in his mind—something high and wind-whistling—a bridge it would be easy to jump from and lie down in the fevered water below, where nobody knows him and nobody can see him and nobody can ask him how long.
"Doesn't matter how long it went on for," he replies at last. "I'm leaving now. That means it's over."
James zips up his bag and hesitates for a long while, playing with the front flap. He’s thinking hard.
"Good." At last, James swings his JanSport onto one shoulder and faces Sirius. "That's what I was asking, I guess. I'm glad it's over. Let's go."
Sirius can see the way this vague discussion hangs there on the two of them, and he hates it. He wants to confess like a sinner kneeling before a priest. He wants to expose to James every ugly-good-pleasurable-bad-romantic-evil-wonderful thing he has ever said, ever thought, ever done, ever felt. Wants to wring himself out the way one squeezes a filthy, tear-swollen cloth and in the gush of polluted water, come clean. "Aren't you going to ask what happened?'
James hesitates, then joins Sirius at the piggy bank. He swipes the remaining money into his pockets. "Honestly, bro? I don't want to know."
Overwhelmed. Uncomprehending. The effort of understanding would require more than Potter can give. Easier to turn away. Not to know. The bliss of ignorance. The innocence of ignorance. James does not want to dirty his hands with this—he knows all he needs to know and will get involved no further.
Sirius feels repulsive and contagious. He feels very, very lonesome.
Nobody ever wants to know everything. Nobody but Regulus, his little brother, whom he is leaving behind.
June 1st, 2001
They leave the town on the purple midnight bus, leave all the secrets and ghosts that it holds, the memories muddled into its forests and fields.
Sirius rubs a circle into the steam on the window, making a small porthole through which he watches the town recede. The bus shudders as it pulls away from the curb; he is certain he will never set foot in this sun-bleached, dead-end place again. He'll miss Regulus and Mom and Dad and everything he's ever hated here, but to return would mean reliving the worst moments of his life.
And as the bus takes the last bend—the blood-gushing horizon waiting at the far end of the road like a gash they're going to dive into—Sirius catches sight of him: a tall, slender figure standing in the shadows of a side street. Standing on the sidewalk at too far a distance and at too little a distance, Regulus watches the bus cough its way forward with his hands empty at his sides. His eyes are narrow and salt-bright. They meet Sirius’ own.
Sirius knows those eyes. He knows the way they pinch when they fixate, knows how they'd looked when they had opened for the first time.
"Sorry," he breathes, even though he isn't really, and Regulus can't hear him anyway.
The bus rounds the corner. Regulus is out of sight forever.
No, not forever. He’ll be here when I come back. If I ever come back.
Sirius is breathing smoke; his throat stings. Like the explorers of old, he looks up to the sky, only he tracks telephone wires instead of constellations. They’ll guide him away, away.
February 13th, 2008
Sirius Black is twenty-five, but when his blind date—a pretty girl from Leeds called Mary McDonald—asks him to repeat his name again, sorry, she didn’t catch that, he tells her (in what he considers a decently passable British accent) that it’s Stanley Boardman, and that he’s twenty-seven.
She plays idly with her gold hoop earrings, doe eyes never leaving him. She seems smart.
To make up for the lie, he hastily tacks on a truth. Sirius adds that he works a few streets away, on Shaftesbury Avenue at the Hog's Head pub with his best mate, James, and that he makes a mean Old Fashioned.
"You'll have to make one for me back at your flat after this," she flirts, taking a stab at her salmon dinner.
He smirks, tucking into his own supper.
They're in a nice restaurant with wood floors and polished tables. The air smells of garlic and the waiters wear bow ties. With her wardrobe of sheer nylon and faux-fur, Mary fits right in.
A week ago, in the smoky haze of a poker table, James said dating would be good for Sirius. London is full of pretty women and handsome men. James said getting laid once in a while would make Sirius a better roommate too. Less sullen, less prone to locking himself in his bedroom and listening to morose music for hours on end.
Sorry. No. Getting laid would make him a better flatmate. Not roommate. Because they're pretending to be British now—putting the past in the past. Closing it like a casket and burying that shit. That shite.
Rest in peace, past-me.
Sirius does not fetishize memories of his past life: the house with the gravel drive, the dusky woods, Poland Spring water that's really vodka, Mom's voice, TV static, Regulus' minty soap, Dad's usual seat at the kitchen table.
Sirius has chased his dreams. He has an inside dog named Padfoot. Both muscular and tall, he's got dark stubble on his jaw that makes him look like an avant-garde artist, some trust-funded creative type.
Sirius is an adult now. He pays rent, lifts weights at a gym, buys paper towels when the roll runs empty, and he is the proud owner of a greedy, gasoline-guzzling motorbike.
Sirius fucks people that aren't blood-related: bankers and bakers and upper-crust folks and deadbeats and baristas. Ladies and lads that are all kinda sarcastic and all kinda uninterested in who he is as a person. He has a type.
Sirius has hobbies. He is not an artist, but he makes himself go to a dumbass pottery class on Tuesdays; he's made every mug in his flat. He does the crossword in the mornings. He’s learning French from a little book of translations. In the evenings, he walks to work through the kaleidoscopic, tourist-trampled, horn-honking city. He thinks he sees Regulus on these walks sometimes. Sees him in a young boy tagging along with his big brother, sees him in the slim fellow riding the bus all alone, sees him in the shark-eyed clerk who frequents the Hog's Head, sees him in the shadows that claw up his walls at night. But it's never really Regulus. It’s just that he thinks of Regulus often always. He is Sirius’ mythology. The theme that fills all the important childhood chapters.
Still, it's mad how much your life can improve if you just move somewhere new, Black.
In his pocket, Sirius’ BlackBerry buzzes. A text from James. It has to be. He has no other friends. Nobody else texts him unless it's Peter—his simple-minded manager at the Hogs Head—asking him to bin his night off and come in for a shift.
Sirius is about to take the phone from his pocket, to thumb through the glowing graveyard of messages there, when Mary speaks again. Her voice stands between him and the screen. She says she’s a vet in training. She says she works with wild animals. She says she works with magpies and hedgehogs and foxes that get sick, that get attacked by other creatures, that get hurt by humans.
Sirius looks down at his bleeding steak on his porcelain plate—the tender lean of the oozing meat—and thinks of Regulus. Regulus' porcelain arm, sliced open and oozing. Feverish, fluorescent hospital hallways. Regulus, who wants to be a vet, too. Or at least, he used to want to be that.
Sirius has no idea what his brother wants now. Sirius has not spoken to Regulus since the night he left. He does not skim for Regulus on the internet. He never researches the name. He does not know if Reggie is dead or alive. It is easier to not know. To turn the other cheek. Ignorance is bliss!
In his pocket, his phone vibrates incessantly.
"Er. Hey?" Mary tucks her dark hands beneath the table and cocks her head at him. "Are you okay?"
Sirius realizes he must have been quiet—brooding—for one moment too many. They look at each other in the utensil-clinking quiet.
"Sure." Sirius pushes his long hair away from his eyes and looks around for the bathroom. "Give me one second."
The bathroom is one of those fancy ones—all low lighting and dark green marble and jazz music playing from an unseen source. It smells like shit.
Standing at the sink, he taps at his phone. James has called and texted him.
'Dude'
'Dont come home tonit. Got a visitor.'
This makes Sirius irritated. Makes him make a sound, lithe and croaky in his throat. He’ll go home whenever he bloody well feels like it, thanks very much. James presumably having some lust-worthy girl over is hardly going to stop him.
He shoots James a friendly 'fuck off' and drops his phone into his back pocket.
February 13th, 2008
James and Sirius share a sloping flat above a butcher's shop. The stink of blood and guts and soft, uncooked bones seems to come up through the floorboards as Sirius unlocks the front door, elbowing his way inside. The entryway is tight, unlit. Every peg on the wall is occupied: charity shop coats, misshapen backpacks, a pointed wizard’s hat left over from some long-past Halloween party.
Mary pinches her cropped coat tight around her, looking shifty. "What's that smell—"
"Good thing you're not a vegetarian," Sirius jokes, which is what he always says when he takes somebody home.
Either his date/shag/whatever laughs, or they don't.
Mary doesn't. "I saw the butcher underneath. I'm not thick. It's not that. It's…hay? Or horses?"
Sirius shoves his coat onto an overburdened peg and lifts his nose to the air. He smells it too, then, wheaty and earthen.
Like Romulus and Remus Farm Supply, Sirius thinks, with a stab of brutish nostalgia. Where we used to order paper-cup instant coffees to sober up.
Then, the sound of laughter comes from the kitchen. Male laughter: James and a stranger or two, Nirvana playing on the stereo beneath that.
Sirius shrugs to Mary and beckons her forward. They walk in step. His hand lands in the nest of shadows gathered in the lowest section of her back. Her feet, the rods of her heels snipping from tile to wood as they near the twist of hall that opens them into the kitchen: a little room with its single square window, red walls smacked with ironic prints, lamplight, Sirius' old Swiss Army knife perched on the shelf next to a box of teabags, the rickety table..
Padfoot is napping under the table but James is sitting atop it, drinking Guinness from the can like a dolt. He wears glasses now—at Sirius’s insistence—which means he isn’t even squinting at their guests: two young men. Their backs are turned towards Sirius. One is slouching and tawny, with clothes that have seen one too many tumbles in a washing machine. The other visitor is shorter than his sepia companion, dressed in darkly tailored layers, his black hair is trimmed in a style that suggests an important and soulless corporate job.
James looks over the tops of his glasses at Sirius, poised in the doorframe, and coughs on his beer. "Ah," he says. "Um," he says. "You came," he says.
The visitors turn and—
Oh.
What happens next is something of a blur, a distorting smudge that sweeps violently across the room like a poisonous gas and suffocates him so deep that when it clears, Sirius can't help but choke. The sound gongs in the needle-drop silence of the room.
Sirius can just close his eyes. He can pretend that this is not happening. He can pretend to be someone else who does not recognize these guests who have barged their way into his kitchen. He is not Sirius Black. He is Stanley. He is British. He is twenty-seven. He takes idiotic pottery classes, which he pays for with his taxable income. His French book is there on the counter, dog-eared.
But when Sirius opens his eyes, he is still standing in his kitchen with James and Mary and the handsome oaf from the farm supply shop whom (upon reflection) he had a big fat stinking crush on. Oh, and Regulus fuckin' Black is here too.
Regulus is an adult now, dreamy and sad. He is very thin, like a curl of steam off a cup of coffee. He is handsome; his new clothes hide his forearm scar and make him nearly unrecognizable. His rainstorm eyes speak. They say things Sirius understands instantly; such is the language of siblings.
You lose. I win. Caught you. After all this time.
Sirius' hand drops off Mary's back and he stands there, caught in the eye contact. Caught in memories. He hisses a shaky breath, his heartbeat doubling. He should have listened to James and stayed away.
James, man himself, jumps down from the table and grimaces around at everyone. "Look who it is, Stan! Your brother dropped by with his boyfriend. They're in town…and have our address somehow. Yeah. Well. Another drink, anyone? I'm getting one. Ha. Ha. Ha…"
Mary says she'll have one, plainly sensing something off about the situation.
The oaf raises one lean finger, indicating his thirst. He’s a classic hot mess of introversion and social anxiety. Regulus smiles at him something small and kisses the corner of his mouth, right there in the puddle of Sirius' own kitchen.
(He's been alive for twenty-five years. Sirius and Regulus have never kissed.)
Regulus speaks as James leads Mary and the oaf away, towards the fridge. "Caught you, Sirius.”
“Well played.”
“You know what to do." Reg’s voice is liquid and cool, mature. It carves at Sirius’ chest like a knife.
Reggie can probably sing like a bird, and nobody has called Sirius by his name in seven years. “Maybe I don’t want to play anymore, bud.”
“Too bad.” Regulus dips one hip to lean against the counter. He skims idly through the French book, smirks. “I’m telling you too. Je te le dis aussi.”
Regulus isn't pulling his punches, and Sirius is proud of him for it. He's been trying to find Sirius for seven years, and Sirius is proud of him for that too.
He has been thinking of me for seven years straight. Heh. Stupid idiot.
It is a strange pleasure to know that their game of Grim never truly ended. It feels good to know that he, Sirius, is not the sort of person who gets given up on. Somebody—not just anybody, his brother—has been trying to find him, has been hunting him through the haunted ruins of distance and memory, refusing to accept his disappearance. Refusing closure.
Sirius can’t look away from Reg’s hand on the book of translations, flipping through the pages. “Pourquoi tu m’as jamais embrassée?”
Slow, so slow, Regulus rests the book back down. He straightens a cuff-link, pearl-grey. “I was waiting. Just waiting for you to ask me to and I would have.”
“Would you still?”
“Would you ask me to?”
Sirius turns his back on his brother now. He drags his hands down his face, holds them there, and thinks again the thought that came to him on the day he raised Regulus from the dead for the first time. Together, they'll play games forever.
Sirius' Swiss Army Knife catches the resinous lamplight, winks.