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The last time Sirius sees his brother is a Friday. It’s a rainy day at the beginning of July. The temperatures outside are mild. The sky is darkened by an armada of staggering clouds, foreboding calamities destined to occur. It is chilly within the castle. Summer has not yet broken through the walls worth of centuries of history. The corridors of Hogwarts are whitewashed in a gloomy light.
Those are his last days here, Sirius is aware. The Hogwarts Express is leaving on Sunday, and this will be his final ride. He will never return to the safety of the castle. He will fight in a war which will force him to meet his brother on the battlefield. But that is a choice Regulus had committed to long before him.
Sirius can’t pinpoint the exact moment that his brother has slipped from him.
Perhaps it had been their first true argument about the sides of the war, when Sirius, at the ripe age of fourteen, had declared he was going to fight for the light, and Regulus had called him an idiot. Perhaps it had been when Sirius left home and never returned, a night he still can’t remember but whose extent exceeded everything he was had been prepared for. Perhaps it was when he had been slandering their family, expecting solace from his brother, and ended up receiving but a fearful expression. Perhaps it had been when he burned the letter.
Or maybe they had been doomed to this obscure grief long before. Perhaps it had ambushed them the very second Sirius was sorted to Gryffindor. Perhaps they had been born with it. Perhaps it is in their blood, coursing through their veins like the madness of the family, and the only way to rid themselves of their inevitable fall is to bleed themselves dry.
Possibly, there is nothing they can do. No way to save themselves or save the other. Maybe there had never been one point in time when they crossed the threshold, but it had always been meant to happen, creepingly, leisurely, and there is nothing they could have ever done.
He is roaming about the empty corridors, the chatter of students an ominous companion. Sometimes a shriek captures the exact pitch of one of those from his mother. Other times a laughter is the exact mirror of one of those from his cousin. The lancet windows leave the grounds to appear like abstract paintings from a bygone era. Hardly anyone is outside, but there are always exceptions. A handful of dark silhouettes, enveloped in their cloaks and coats, are wandering aimlessly across the meadows. Most students are in their common rooms or the Great Hall. Some groups settled down in empty classrooms. These are haunting him on his incomprehensible maundering towards an unavoidable future whose verdict has already fallen.
Everyone is celebrating the end of the school year, celebrating that they have made it past the weeks and weeks full of work and study, celebrating the welcoming of the summer holiday. The general mood in the castle is joyous, something he has never noticed the years before, but is suddenly painfully aware of, now that he is standing outside the ecstatic crowd and not within them. Surely, the atmosphere amongst the Year Sevens is a different one. Their delight is mixed with nostalgia and a lingering premonition coming close to fear. They are leaving their secure home of seven years to step into a ruthless world full of grown-ups, who claim to never have been children at all. There is no going back after this.
The prospect of war is a frightening one, which is approaching them at an ever-constant pace. It is going to get them, and there is no way around it. They can’t run; they can’t hide. They can only brace themselves for the inexorable impact and hope for the best.
They used to dream. Sirius used to dream. He had seen a world before his mind’s eye in which the beginnings of a war had quickly petered out, a life in which he had been surrounded by his friends, his brother, and parts of a family he had yet to find. He had pictured gentle colours, and he had known the warmth of the sun on his skin. Rain had shimmered like glitter, like stars, and the cold had always been bearable in a cosy room with a chimney.
These aspirations have faded over time, losing themselves between taking a punch and screaming something never to be forgiven, and he is left in his current state of dullness. He’s still young; he has not yet seen the war. He has no idea how it will haunt him past the potential of decent existence. He doesn’t know it yet, but this day marks the beginning of the rest of his life, the beginning of the end.
Sirius isn’t sure why this cacophony of thought threads is raining upon him exactly today, but here he is, and every imaginative sound is agonising to his ears. This exceeds the expected graduation crises experienced by his peers. Everyone has their own little worries about the future, as well as those they share with others, but they’re hardly bathing in their misery like Sirius is. He doesn’t remember the last time everything was all right. Had everything ever been all right?
Perhaps for a few blessed weeks during the early phases of his childhood. There had been times of contentment; they had been a family, once. They might never have been effortless, every word and every gesture poisoned by their nature, but they used to be something. His mother had known how to laugh, once, she’d done so, when she had stayed distant from the bottle long enough. His father used to tell stories, once, tales and mysteries about ideas unfathomable to Sirius’ young imagination. Now, the laughter rings hallow in soulless spaces and the childish narrative has faded into the background, so slowly Sirius has never noticed the moment it stopped.
He passes by a classroom occupied by a group of Ravenclaws in his year. The opened door grants him the sight of a parallel world within his heart. He’s friendly with most of them, even with Graham. They share nods in the corridors when they passed each other, which is a progress he should probably be appreciative of, but whenever their ways meet, all Sirius sees is the motion of a flinch, a fundamental fear in his eyes. Suddenly, Graham’s face is covered in blood and his nose is in a crooked shape. Sirius’ breathing is ragged, his hands are shaking and covered in blood, his knuckles are bruised. There is so much anger, he can’t locate where it is coming from. He doesn’t remember the moment his fist met Graham’s face. The first memory coming to his mind is that of him lying on the floor. His face is covered in blood and his nose is in a crooked shape.
Graham catches his eye. He waves timidly. Sirius tries to offer a smile in return. The corners of his mouth can’t find the strength to climb high in his face. The moment passes as he leaves the classroom behind. He’ll likely never see those people again. Their lives will progress past the limits of his observable universe.
Sirius doesn’t know where his friends are. He should be with them right now. He should be celebrating the illusion of newfound freedom, but he can’t stay in one place. Whether the monsters are chasing him or he is chasing them, he cannot say. But they’re on the run, and whenever Sirius’ steps stop, snippets come spiralling towards him, of the past and the future, neither of which belong to him, and his world breaks apart a little more.
His head aches as though it is going to break. Too many things piling up in a space too tight. Words he holds as well as those he has foolishly let go, expressions he has captured which will never leave him alone, branches he should have taken when he went another way. All of them are scrambling to get away from this crowded place, but none of them ever get far. There is his anger, so much anger, originating from in between the happenings, and it is the force holding everything together.
Sirius is trying, he really is, every day, with all he has to offer, to be the best version of himself. He respects that there are things not meant for his understanding, secrets to be kept from him and jokes he will never see the value of. He accepts that pictures other people paint of him do not have to resemble his truth, and he attempts to take it to heart not to let it irritate him. He does his best to look closely, tries to catch the sign of his best friend starting to fall apart, so that he can intervene before he once again can only pick up the pieces, glue them back together and pretend everything is as well as it has ever been. He wants to be okay with the look in Remus’ eyes, when his mind is drawn back to that one night in fifth year, and he inevitably questions whether his decision to forgive Sirius was the right one.
But then there are the words he throws at James. They are digging like knives, and he leaves his best friend bleeding once again for something that has never been related to him. There are the punches he throws, at Peter, Graham, at anyone who stands in his way to an abandoned space where he’ll find nothing but torment. There are the promises he breaks; the secrets he shares, although they were never his to keep; the games he is always going to win, no matter the cost, no matter the sacrifice. There are the habits that make him no different from his parents; the poison he drinks has been theirs long before, and his mirror watches as the lines blur.
He may try all he wants, but there is only so much a man can be. This is him.
Sometimes the world turns still, too. In those moments, everything halts. Silence grows monumental. Sirius is alone, detached from those who give their everything to care. James’ voice echos opaquely. Peter looks at him in fright, Remus is hurt, Mary won’t cross paths with him, Graham flinches. It’s all there, as it is always, but none of it can touch him. He can see the trust breaking in Remus’ eyes, but he will not patch it back up. All Mary wants is an apology, but somewhere between the times he loses the strength to mind about her.
It is a dangerous peace, one that is threatening to absorb him completely, to never set him free again, but it is a moment of clarity when he can finally see lucidly. He never wants to leave this place, but he does, always and indispensably. Something pulls him back, each time again.
When Peter hugs him, he will fall apart in his arms, and he doubts there will ever be a moment in time when he’ll lose his ability to care again. When tears start to form in James’ eyes, he will collapse right on the spot, chanting apologies like prayers. When Lily smiles at him in the hallway, he will make up his mind and force three words to make it right again.
Sirius doesn’t notice where his steps are leading him. He watches the portraits as he passes them, trying to find the meaning to those inhabiting them, unaware of the corridors they adorn. Each way through the castle is familiar to him, there is not one corner he has not yet set foot in. He can find his way in the dead of the night, when every shadow looks the same, and they all take on a strange familiarity. Nevertheless, he is taken by surprise when he forces his eyes away from the walls and perceives what is, apparently, the destination of his aimless rambling.
He finds himself in a quiet section of the corridor in front of the library. Not many students come here. It is a dead end, and there is nothing to see. The stone walls are plain, and there isn’t even as much as a bench. But there is a small window overlooking the courtyard with a sill wide enough for one person to sit on comfortably. During the summer, the window is often opened, allowing the chatter of students to gently trickle into this deserted corner of the castle.
Sirius used to come here frequently, and he still does. Until the very end, he supposes. He has spent countless hours alone in this niche, when his own laughter got too loud or the touch of his clothes against his skin made him nauseous. Never once had he met another person here. This had always been his special place. It is comically poetic, really, that out of all the people he could have met here on his very last visit, it had to be him. Of course, it is him. It always is him.
Sirius stills. There are no voices coming from the courtyard today, only the steady pattering of the rain against the window, gingerly, as though not to break the phantom of harmony lying over the castle.
Regulus watches as the rain traces shapes onto the glass, shapes contouring into stories which always end in certain death. He hasn’t noticed his brother’s presence yet. The feeling in his stomach resembles the image of the clouds in the sky, woven and tremendous, silently spreading, taking over the blue to leave a fearsome darkness. Something is coming. There is a faint premonition, just out of his reach. He can’t get a hold of it, but its presence is violent, pulsing through him in waves. It’s the only thing there is these days. It takes away everything else, it consumes him.
Regulus doesn’t remember how it used to be, his past merely a collection of unfinished sketches. He wants to say he has lost the feeling of a winter night’s scent, but he isn’t sure that was ever his to know. His days are long, the weeks move fast. He barely sleeps, unable to come to rest, enveloped in the comfort of his duvet. His days are lived in the remote land between being awake and drifting away. Each blink of his eyes has him falling from the sky and startles him like the screams of his brother reverberating through Grimmauld Place. He’s growing up, but when he challenges his imagination, the plush toy dog in his bed still smells of Sirius.
Returning home for the summer leaves him with a peculiar feeling. He never wants to come back to Grimmauld, but inescapably he has to, every time. The house seems to grow ghastlier each year. The hallways appear longer as they turn into never ending terror, the windows leave less light to pass through them. His mother’s words take him apart, piece by piece, until nothing remains and his parts flow through the air like dust, scattered throughout lifeless ruins. His father’s absence is storming as he sits in his study and the air around him gets fuzzy with smoke.
Sometime between then and now, Regulus has left behind his sense of self, and with it, everything that ever shaped a difference. Nothing can touch him any more, as he falls into a never-ending pit of silence. The curses have unmantled every layer of protection from his body to the point of no return. They have crossed the event horizon to come to the other side and find nothing. There is nothing. Regulus can’t feel the fabric of his robes against his skin, he no longer knows the warmth of Barty’s touch. Sometimes he’ll seek ways for the blood to run, but it won’t make a change. The only sensation remains the metallic taste on his tongue.
At times, when he looks down at his hands, they will be trenched in scarlet, and he will pray for it to be his own blood. But he is unscathed, each time, and the sin that clings to him remains to belong with his brother.
His existence is mostly dull. The world is distant. Pandora’s voice is foreign to his ears, suddenly all he eats tastes of blood. He shuts her out, he doesn’t listen to what she has to say. He skips the meals and spends the time somewhere that he can see the sky change shapes. He doesn’t eat, only when Evan forces him to. He often has to throw up afterwards, the lingering presence of blood mixing with the flavour of bile. It exhausts him, drains him of the last spark of strength he possesses. Evan washes his face and helps him to bed. He looks at him with so much worry, Regulus is sure he will crush underneath its weight. Some nights he sleeps, others the monsters of his family will drive him out of his body, and he watches the world from above.
Most of the time, there is and remains nothing. This shadows of something yet to come move through him. He can’t breathe when they pass though his lungs, he feels like he’s dying when they shift though his heart. They trade one place for another, and it is robbing Regulus of all life he has left. But sometimes they abandon him. The silhouettes of a time ahead vanish. Then he stands entirely on his own. In times like these, he’s afraid he’s going to implode. Forces from the outside are crushing down on him, and there is nothing to withstand this pressure. He can’t find the reason to care, he has forgotten how to love, he is too weak for his rage to take a form. He is a star dying.
A chilly wind blows in through the window. A shiver runs down his spine. He has the feeling he is being watched, it is breathing down his neck, whispering into his ear. The idea of it is not unfamiliar. It follows him around, no matter where he goes. He casts glances over his shoulder, but the corridors behind him always remain empty. But he can’t help it. He keeps checking, every time, and his world remains lonely.
He doesn’t expect to see someone when he turns to glimpse at the deserted corridor. The ground beneath him opens the moment he sees his fierce curls enter his vision. He’s falling through all layers of Earth’s mantle when he meets his grey eyes. Bile is creeping up his gullet. He catches sights of unknown lives. Motion sickness overcomes him. He can’t tell the difference between up and down.
“Hey, Reg,” Sirius says warily.
Regulus is back on the windowsill. The world stops. His head is still spinning. He stares at his brother fiercely.
“How are you?” Sirius asks when he realises he isn’t going to get a reply.
He sighs. Dark bags paint the skin under his eyes. His appearance is a mirror of Regulus’. His hair is longer, his grey eyes are slightly darker — they’re warmer — but that’s it. They share the same sharp cheekbones, their black waves are of the same pattern. Their porcelain skin is functioning to cover up their sins, and the blood pulsing through their veins is equally venomous. They are both rotten from the inside, and they are both fighting to keep the façade upright, exhausting themselves so no one sees the decaying creep of their innermost selves.
“What’s in it for you?” he asks, sceptically, “Why do you care?”
It has been months since they have last spoken. They steer clear of each other in the corridors, they avoid the eyes of one another, they pretend to have forgotten the other’s existence, their past, their own part in it.
Sirius’ tentative expression drops. Something vicious flickers in his eyes. Disappointment and anger combining to put out the tender flame of hope.
“There’s nothing in it for me,” he says, dejectedly, “I just want to know how you–” He breaks off abruptly. He shakes his head. “Forget it, will you? Just forget it. Why do I even bother?”
He doesn’t know why he is even trying, he’s not sure where he wants to go with it. Regulus had set out on his path long before Sirius had even considered that this was a choice to make. They’re not brothers, they are in no relation to one another. He has no reason to stand here in an attempt to fix something that has never been intact.
Deep in the oceans of his consciousness, there is his ground. In the depths of his oceanic trenches, buried under kilometres of water, shielded from all light, in the uttermost dark, there lies his reason. It is there. He is standing on the shore, with only his feet in the water, but he can feel its ineluctable pull. He could dive into the waters and search for it. He’d find it, stained and impure, it’s familial. But he’s not going to. Once his head would breach through the surface, once his body would be fully engulfed by the water, it would swallow him, and it would take him. He’d find his brother, but he’d lose himself
Their Pandora’s box remains sealed. He doesn’t know why he’s trying to rebuild the relics of their brotherhood. He will know when he’s older. When time has burdened him with wisdom, he’ll understand, and it will have seemed so obvious all along. He’ll want to tear out his organs at the sheer ignorance of his youthful self, but nothing will change that he has mistaken the love for his brother as anger for the greater part of his life.
He turns to leave, irritation boiling up in him. He should have left the moment he had seen his corner was occupied, all the more so once he realised by whom it was.
Regulus scoffs. He echos from the bare walls like the voice of their father.
“Why, Sirius, you want to know how I am doing? I feel honoured to be granted your heed.” Regulus’ tone slices through Sirius’ skin like glass shards as his robes soak in red. “If you must know, I’ve been feeling a little under the weather lately. Can you possibly imagine?”
Regulus stares at him as though to set him on fire by his pure willpower. He feels like he is going to collapse. He is thoroughly drained, his limbs prickle with numbness. His empty stomach feels nonnegligibly heavy. The weight is pulling him down, and all he wants is to sink into the stones as the most comfortable pillow he’s ever had. But there is something to his brother’s presence that startles him into a lucid state of cognisance like nothing else manages to. It ignites the fire of anger within him, and the flame spreads to an inferno. His vision tunnels, and as he is blind to everything else, his point of focus is sharper than he has ever experienced. His thoughts are shrieking, the disturbing ringing penetrating his hearing. Only Sirius can unleash his rage like this.
Sirius’ face contorts into a frown. He presses his lips together firmly. His knuckles turn white as his hands clench to fists.
“What, and you’re accusing me now for your misery?!” he spits, shutting out his limbic system to shut out the fearsome other side of possibilities beyond fault and blame, “I have given you everything, Regulus. Everything. I have bled for you, as you stood and watched with an impassive expression. You abandoned me when I needed you most, and I still came back to you, because I believed in you. But you shut me out, time after time, and you took decisions, one after another, and it was you alone who paved that path. You put yourself in your current place, so don’t you dare blame me for it when your promised land turns out to be full of rotten fruits.”
Regulus glares at him bitterly.
“You think you know the world, Sirius, don’t you?” his voice suddenly calm and devoid of any heat, he speaks exactly like their mother, “That’s always been your problem. You simplify the world, break it down into distorted pieces of reality so you can stomach them better. You take the easy way out, never once pausing to shed as much as a single thought to other options. Because the paths of these routes are too rough for you. Because you put your comfort first and foremost. You have no idea what you’re speaking about. You don’t know what it’s like.”
Sirius wants to claw himself out of his own body, break his ribcage open from his middle, and crawl out of this shell of a person. He wants to tear at Regulus, shake him until he gets light-heated. He wants to take him and drag him through the embers of their past until the pictures are imprinted in his eyes.
“Are you out of your mind?! Do you truly think I took the easy way out? That this was the path of least resistance for me?” He looks at his brother with so much fury, he cannot tell where his face ends and where the mocking profile of his imagination begins. “If I had wanted to take the easy way, I would have left home the moment the Potters first invited me over for the holidays. Because that’s what you’re on about, isn’t it? That I ran away, right? That I was able to muster the courage for it, something you have never been able to do.”
Regulus doesn’t react, his expression vacant. His hands itch with Sirius’ drying blood on them.
“I stayed at Grimmauld Place as long as I could. I stayed, and I put myself through hell. And I questioned if I was doing the right thing. Constantly, I wondered if it was worth it. But I stayed. Because I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t leave you behind. Making sure you’re all right in that house has been the most difficult thing I have ever done, and it consumed me. It consumed everything of me. Every part, all I was. And then I left, yes, I left. Because finally, finally, I couldn’t take it any more. I was gonna die. I stayed to the very last second, so don’t you tell me that I took the easy way out. I have given my everything to make your life easier.”
Something shimmers in his eyes. Sirius sees the flicker of that night pass through them.
“I never asked you to protect me!” Regulus spits.
“You didn’t have to! I was your bother! That was what I was supposed to do! That was my whole purpose!”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the child his little brother once used to be sits and cries. His tears resound through Sirius’ head, each drop hitting the ground stabs him like a knife. Red beads fall into oceans created of tears. His hands are blood-stained, his knuckles are bruised. His lineage is cursed.
“You shouldn’t have wasted your love on me,” Regulus says, his expression as blank as it has always been. There is something raw to his words. They tumble out of his mouth as his voice wavers, just for a moment.
Sirius catches on to that feeling without realising. “Don’t call it a waste,” he asks, and the rage subsides, just for a moment.
“But that’s what it is, isn’t it?” Regulus questions, his eyebrow raised. The fire is back. “Sirius, you’re all that I despise. You disgust me.”
“It isn’t. Or, it wasn’t,” Sirius says firmly, “I don’t regret the time I invested in you, but I do regret the way you turned out to be. You’re a stranger to me.”
Regulus wrinkles his nose. “You’re one to speak.”
Sirius regards him for a little while. He can feel the seconds slipping by them. Precious time running away they will never get a hold of again. They are wasting their words as they are wasting their lives. This will never come back. They will be alone before they realise it. They are already lost.
“You know what, Regulus?” he asks, and he finds it difficult to stay in place when his surroundings seem to be drifting away, one stone brick after another, and they’re floating through space completely weightless. He wants to close his eyes and let the motion take him. “You’re a pretty shit brother, and probably an even worse person. I defended you for years. Yes, you didn’t ask me to do so, but I did it still. Because I loved you. I truly used to love you. And I would have gladly given you everything had you asked me to. I took punch after punch for you, I took the curses. I starved for days when they denied me meals for a mistake that had been yours. Because I took the blame, and I did it over and over again. And I never expected anything in return from you.
“But that one time, one time that I asked for your help, you turned me down. I was bleeding out on some ancient, horrendous looking carpet, and I begged you to do something. I begged you. Because I could feel the life slipping from me. I knew I was going to die. But you stood there and watched as Walburga once again raised her wand, and I couldn’t even scream at the pain of the Cruciatus any more.
“The last thing I remember before everything went black is you. You, how you were standing there, looking at me, lacking any kind of emotion whatsoever, and you did nothing, absolutely nothing. And now this is what I see every single time I look at you. Every time I can only see that look in your face. And, yes, I have changed. And, yes, I might be a stranger to you now. But that is not on me. I tried to be there for you, I have been there for you for so long. I can only do so much.”
Regulus watches him in silence. His organs contract, and his hands are covered in his brother’s blood. What Sirius doesn’t know about that night is everything that came after his consciousness had faded.
Regulus stands, his body frozen, and he’s watching from above as the blood of his brother soaks the blue carpet and the colours combine into an intense shade of violet. He’s lying on his back, unable to move barring violent spasms. The wounds on his legs are the deepest. Sirius’ trousers are torn, his skin underneath is of crimson colour. The cuts are gaping, splitting his skin. Sirius is whimpering, his breathing is laboured. His pleading has long faded. His raw screams resonate in Regulus’ mind, even when his awareness drifts, and he is choking on his own spit and tears. When Walburga raises her wand yet again, he is too weak to wail, and the sounds leaving his mouth are broken and hoarse. He’s coughing, retching, as the contents of his stomach force their way back up his gullet. Lumps of partially digested food come out of his mouth, thin yellow liquid runs down the sides of his face. He’s gasping for air, but all he can do is choke on his vomit. The air tastes of metal and bile. Regulus’ nose burns at the odour.
When Walburga finally lowers her wand, she and Orion leave the room as though none of this had even happened. Sirius’ poignant twitching stills, and he lies stiffly on the indigo carpet. Kreacher appears with a crack that startles Regulus back into his body. He can barely blink before the tears spring to his eyes. He falls to his knees, his hands hovering over Sirius’ body without touching him, afraid to break what is already shattered. Kreacher is unable to hold in a gasp. He hurries to tend to the boy. Regulus’ whole world narrows to his brother dying on this carpet. He’s not conscious about his actions as he tries to pick up, piece by piece, of what is left of him. His hands soon take the scarlet colour of Sirius’ blood. He carefully places his brother’s head in his lap and cleans the sick from his face. His fingers leave red traces on his cheeks. Kreacher nurses the wounds on his legs. Sometimes Sirius quivers in pain. Most of the time he lies lifeless.
Regulus keeps muttering under his breath, sending prayers to all the gods that might or might not exist. He asks them not to take his brother, he pleads with them to give him some more time on this earth. They can have him instead, if they want to. Anything but his brother.
His head is throbbing, black dots dance around his vision. The ringing in his ears blends with Sirius’ subsided screams. But as everything blurs out of focus, Sirius remains bleeding in his lap, and he has never been so helpless. Kreacher is chanting in a language he cannot understand, fighting a despairing battle against the wounds that keep reopening. His words fade into one another and get lost in the pounding of Regulus’ heart. His fingers search for a pulse at Sirius’ neck, but he keeps smearing blood everywhere. The tears keep coming from his eyes, as he holds Sirius’ head in his hands like this solely is enough to tether him to life. His eyes roam around the room, aimlessly, exposed to the poison of their ancestors, until they land on the chimney. The room snaps back into focus, the ringing in his ears ceases at once.
“Kreacher,” he calls, his voice sore against the robust spirit of the room.
The elf looks up from Sirius’ legs, where his hands, too, are drenched in crimson. Regulus doesn’t regard him, his eyes fixed on the fireplace behind him. Kreacher follows his gaze. He sighs heavily. His glance return to Regulus. Their eyes meet, and the world stills completely. Nothing moves, there is no sound. An understanding passes through them at that moment, Sirius’ unconscious form lying between them.
“Leave,” Regulus orders, “If they figure out you helped me, they’re going to kill you. When they asked you, tell them I ordered you out of the room. You’re not tied to this. This is a truth you can tell them.”
Kreacher hesitates, and they hang suspended in time. Then, he nods slightly, with caution and regret, before he retreats from the room.
Regulus lifts his brother from the ground, his body drifting limply in his arms. He heaves him into the chimney, unaware of the strength pulsing though his body. Only when the green flames swallow Sirius from his vision, he sacks to the ground, utterly worn out.
He doesn’t stir until Orion enters the room the next morning. He takes in the sight he is presented with and draws his wand the second he connects the pieces. Regulus’ world shrinks to a single sensation; the burning of his body consumes every part of his perception. His screams echo distantly, foreign to his own voice. He loses every sense of time as he squirms on the very same ground his brother had threatened to bleed out merely hours ago. His whole body flares under the fire of the Cruciatus. Nausea fills his head as his organs cramp. He bites his tongue, the thick vermilion liquid filling his mouth. He’s retching gall, and it all becomes one. The aching numbs everything. His eyelid flutter, and a darkness overcomes him.
When he wakes up, he’s in his room, enveloped by his duvet. His body tingles piercingly. His hands are covered in the dried blood of his brother. He can try to wash it off, rub it until it mixes with his own, he can do it over and over again, but it won’t come off. This will stay with him forever.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Sirius flinches at the hollow tone in his brother’s voice. His eyes seem dead, there’s no spark to them now, the embers of his anger finally burnt out. The endless grey takes everything.
“You speak of yourself like you’re infallible. You act like I betrayed you in the most crucial moment of your life, Sirius, as though you hadn’t abandoned me long before that. You traded me for James Potter the second you met him on the Hogwarts express. I haven’t been yours since the minute I was sorted into Slytherin. I searched for your eyes that moment, and I saw exactly how your face dropped when the Hat called the word. You turned your back on me long before I had the chance to even think of betraying you. You accuse me of being a bad brother, but maybe have a look at yourself, first. I certainly am no angel, but you’re no saint, either, so don’t pretend. You can continue to keep up your scheme and fool people, but sooner or later the mask will crumble and everyone will see you for who you are.
“I didn’t betray you, that night. You were Potter’s long before you went off to him, and I haven’t been yours in all that time, all the way along. You left me to rot before I even knew we were infected. You forsook me before I even knew what life outside of Grimmauld Place could look like.”
Sirius watches him dejectedly. The darkness in his chest is tearing at his ribcage, growing larger and attempting to break out of its prison within his heart. What Regulus doesn’t know is how heartbroken Sirius is at their creeping estrangement, how vehemently tried to work against it, all in vain.
Sirius feels a crashing wave of shame overcome him when his brother gets called to Slytherin, but even before the waters return to the ocean, guilt stars gnawing at him. The fact that Regulus belongs to Slytherin changes nothing. Sirius might have hoped for him to end up in Ravenclaw, and he can believe all he wants that this would have been the right choice, but condemning Regulus for a decision that was never his to make would make him no better than their parents. Regulus carries on to be his brother. Nothing will ever change that.
When Regulus starts avoiding him come the following weeks, he feels the first ruptures in the fortress of his self, which function as a warning he is not yet able to grasp. He attempts to seek him, but his brother is particular, and he has felt the brief despicable shame in Sirius’ eyes. They still speak, occasionally, but Regulus maintains his distance, and no matter Sirius’ efforts, they will never return to the state they occupied before they separated for one long year. Their conversations grow scarcer and shorter. Sirius cries himself to sleep in James’ arms countless times when he can’t explain to himself how to settle the chaos of the world. The hole in his chest keeps growing into an unruly force he carries with him wherever he goes. He will never be able to make up for something that has always been out of his control, and he carries the burden of it on his back each day. It gains mass each time his brother avoids his gaze in the corridor until the guilt overtakes, and he is the one who is unable to look.
This day brings a strange lighting. The corridor appears gloomy as towering clouds swallow the sun’s light. The constant clatter of the rain is only occasionally disrupted by the vague voices of a distant conversation.
They stare at each other as the words they don’t say fill the space in between them. They are stars of one system, orbiting around one another, once created from the same cloud of gas and dust. They are depended on the other, bound together by their gravitational pull. As one of them devours the mass of the other, pulling at its life, they change their structures and turn to states unimaginable for single stars. One of them will turn into a blue straggler, too bright to belong in its environment, and he will consume his counterpart, until they are one anew.
Regulus will never return to the school without his brother. He will go missing within two months’ time. He will be presumed dead on his eighteenth birthday the following year. Sometime in between those two dates, he will find his end.
His lungs will fill with water as lifeless hands drag him down. Coldness will envelop him like the love of his mother, and the light above the surface will wash away in the choppy waves. Fingers will claw at his skin, tearing him apart, for his blood to wake the lake. His last thought, under rubbles of opaque recreations of the truth, will inevitable and invariably be of Sirius.
He will never know how much his brother loved him.
Sirius will scoff when he reads the article about his little brother gone missing. He’ll shake his head, wondering out-loud on what type of suicide mission Voldemort has sent him. He will be dying internally. Each day he won’t hear any news about his brother, another piece of his soul will break, setting apart from him and getting underway to find the missing counterpart to its kind.
Sirius will truly and finally break when he receives the news. It will be a sunny Monday morning. Something about the lighting will seem strange when he wakes up. He will have a feeling he should know what’s going to come. The aching in his chest will resemble family. His mind will be clouded, and he’ll feel as though he has been here before. An owl he will still recognise will sit on the sill of the kitchen window. This will be the moment he’ll know. He will know, and he’ll finally and irrevocably break apart. Remus will come to pick up the pieces. He’ll let the owl in, and he’ll take the letter. Sirius will never read it. He won’t read the Daily Prophet the following day, which spreads the message officially.
Twelve years he’ll spend in Azkaban. Twelve years he will think about his brother, wondering every single day how he could have changed the outcome. He’ll see Regulus’ face under the hoods of the dementors, in the crumbled bricks of his cell’s walls, and every time he closes his eyes. He’ll see James, too, and Peter, and Remus, and Lily, and Harry. But his mind will always and inevitably come back to Regulus.
He will die on a Tuesday. He’ll know, before his cousin’s spell will even hit him, that those are his last seconds. He’ll see Harry, and he’ll see James within him, and he’ll see the look on Remus’ face, because he, too, knows. But his last thought, inevitable and indisputably, will be of Regulus.
He will never know how much his brother loved him.
But that all lies in the future. For now, all they have is the present and each other, as they both stand still in that deserted corridor and time moves unbeknownst to them.
Sirius thinks he knows what he wants. He’s convinced he has it figured out. He’s going to fight in the war for the greater good, and he cannot yet waste time to ponder about the sacrifices he will make with time and those he has already given along the way. He’s not yet able to admit that he does not care about the light or the dark, when only that means he can hold his brother for one moment longer. He has not yet realised that right and wrong can be formed to suit the situation, that good and bad vary from one story to another, and he will live to bend the morals he now stands by. He’s trying his best, holding on tight to a version he longs to be, in a vain attempt to compensate the sins of his past.
Regulus doesn’t think he has any idea of what he wants. Everything he has been taught swirls around in his head, taking new shapes and forms, and all that ought to be the truth blurs with new realisations. Everyone around him seems to know exactly what they’re striving for and what he should be striving for, too. One sentence contradicts the next, and threads get woven, torn apart and rebound with other perspectives. It’s one big tangled mess, and the only thing it all has in common is the colour red. The taste of metal and bile. A rotten smell in the air. But as everything turns incoherent and reality and imagination come together to form a new world, there is one spark that remains. One thing he does know.
Sirius has to stay save. Sirius has to come out of this bogus war in one piece. Regulus is lost, gone missing between two worlds, of which neither one is real. His insides are decaying, he was born with spiteful blood. He cannot save himself, any more. Perhaps there had once been a time when he could have gone a different path, found another place to stay. But he hadn’t, and his current way is only leading him to inevitable demise. Sirius was born with a lighter core. He had taken a different trail which had led him through the deepest of forests and steepest of mountains. He has always been drawing on his inner strength, the light Regulus had never been able to find within himself, and found a way to stop the decomposing parts of him from spreading. He has escaped the familial madness that used to bind the two of them together, and whilst Regulus loathes him for his luck, he can’t dismiss the eternal gratitude he feels that at least he found his way. If Regulus hasn’t, at least Sirius has figured it out.
Regulus remains drained in a world which has withdrawn everything from him. He’s weary of the colossal expectations taking the form of an Obscurus. He is ready to leave it behind. He will willingly accept the moment when it arrives, and then he will greet Death as an old friend, and he will go with him gladly, and, equals, they will depart this life.
Until that moment, there is only one deed that remains. He has to guard Sirius from the monsters trying to grasp at him, following him around to draw him back into the gloom of genetic madness. And the only way to do that is to stay away from him, to run to a place where their worlds will never again overlap. Because he is the infection which spreads, he is the gateway to hell. Regulus is the only thing tethering Sirius to their family, to his doom. Without Regulus, he is safe. Without Regulus, no one can touch him.
Sirius startles when Regulus rushes past him abruptly without so much as another word.
With Regulus’ departure, a part of his soul detaches itself from him. It follows the pull of his brother’s existence and nestles in between his ribs to bestow an unlikely shimmer of faintest hope in the most atrocious of times.
“Happy belated birthday, Reggie,” Sirius whispers to the ghost of the empty corridor.
He remains for just a moment longer, chained to his spot, unable to move, and he watches as the rain traces shapes onto the glass, shapes contouring into stories which always end in certain death.
They have been through this before; they will go through it again. They will burden themselves with this life all over again, until the end of time. Neither of them will change, neither of them will want to. They can try all their might, and they can promise themselves for a different outcome, just to save the other. It is futile. They both are aware of this as they continue like before. Just for the sake of it.