FIC: Angels and Changelings, Sirius/Regulus (R - NC-17)
Title: Angels and Changelings
Pairing: Sirius/Regulus
Rating: R to NC-17
Disclaimer: No infringement on copyright is intended.
Warnings: incest, mild bondage, cross-dressing, voyeurism, possible dub-con
A.N.: Originally written for hp_springsmut. Thanks to wildestranger for the readthrough.
i.
She knows from the very first minute, as she desperately strains to hear crying, that there is something wrong with her firstborn. The ache of childbirth pulses through her muscles, and the midwife is rustling about just out of her field of vision. And the baby is silent.
Blackness comes over her and she can’t be sure if the world has gone mute or she has gone deaf.
When she wakes again, she can finally hear the baby screaming. She waits and listens. But the toothless crone, who babbled to her in Italian as she pushed and struggled, does not bring it to her.
The clock on the wall pounds out each minute that passes. A warm, Mediterranean breeze stirs the gauzy white curtains of her bedroom, setting them drifting like sun-dappled clouds. And still the midwife does not bring the infant to her.
She rises and on legs as flimsy as paper, she staggers down the corridor, chasing the sound of the baby’s angry cries. Clinging to the doorframe as she pushes the door to the nursery wide, she stares at the squalling bundle in the midwife’s arms. The old woman beams at her, chittering something that she doesn’t understand and holding the baby out to her.
The child is red and wrinkled like old fruit, and she shakes her head, before backing away to return to her bed.
ii.
When Regulus is born, Amaryllis Black gestures imperiously for the St Mungo’s Healers to leave as she cradles her precious newborn in her arms.
iii.
As a small boy, Sirius likes climbing trees and flying on his broom. His black hair is always blown thick by the wind and his porcelain cheeks are forever rose-flushed. He laughs like life’s a drug. He touches everything: fingering the fabric of his silk robes and stroking the lines of the antique china vases.
No boys should be as pretty as he is; it’s unnatural. His atavistic beauty makes him look like a princeling from the tarnished edge of the Golden Age. It stirs an unreasonable shame in Amaryllis and she finds herself wondering what the old Italian woman did with her baby while she slept.
Sirius may be the heir, but he is not a Black.
Regulus though is a perfect Black. He’s attractive in a Black kind of way: a haughty little mouth and prim upturned nose. He sits quietly, hands folded neatly in his lap and watches as his brother helps himself to biscuits and talks to the house-elves.
He doesn’t grow out of liking to be cuddled though. And he’s Amaryllis’s treasure, her sunshine, so in the private moments of the family, she rests his head on her chest and lets him curl into her lap as she strokes his crow-black hair.
But one day, when Regulus is fourteen and Amaryllis is smoothing his shirt over his shoulders, he hisses and draws away from her touch. His dark hair falls over his face like a shadow as he refuses to meet her wide, concerned eyes.
“Regulus? Regulus, tell me what’s wrong,” she commands, tilting his chin up so he’s forced to look at her. His gaze skitters over her face like a small bird pecking at crumbs, then darts off to the family portrait that hangs over the fireplace.
“Are you hurt, darling?” Amaryllis presses. Her heart is beating a little faster at the mere thought of it. Her fingers undo the buttons at the collar of her baby’s shirt before he can protest.
He stands there awkwardly, still apparently transfixed by the painting, as Amaryllis slides the heavy white cotton shirt away from his whiter skin. A small, horrified gasp escapes her lips as she sees the wicked red marks of teeth along her son’s delicate collarbone. There are scratches - horrible, savage gouges - down his narrow, hairless chest. Right down to his flat belly, about his nipples.
“Who did this to you, Regulus?” she demands in a shaky voice.
Regulus stands there and shivers, but doesn’t speak. He glances down at the signs of abuse and won’t say a word.
Just as silent as Sirius was that first moment he was born.
iv.
“Hold still, Reg.”
She hears the creak of furniture before she finds them. They’re in the parlour, and the air is warm and thick with perfume stolen from her dressing table. Its cloying scent makes her feel light-headed even as she stares at them.
Regulus is sprawled on the burgundy velvet chaise-longue, his arm hanging limply over the side with a flimsy black something of lace dangling from his curled fingers. His cheeks have an alcoholic burn to them and his eyes are half-lidded as he gazes at his brother.
Dressed in an unbuttoned shirt and a pair of red women’s panties made of slippery satin that shine in the gaslight, Sirius is straddling his younger brother’s thigh. His knee is pressed against Regulus’s groin as he leans over him, the tip of his pink tongue poking from between his swollen, cherry-painted lips as he smears a different shade of lipstick over Regulus’s lips.
One of his long-fingered white hands is clutching the back of the sofa to steady himself, and his lashes flutter blackly against his flawless skin as he concentrates. Amaryllis can see the lean muscles in his legs tauten as he moves, the scanty underwear riding up high on his slender hips and about the curves of his arse.
“Tart,” he says with a dirty laugh, as he draws back to examine his handiwork.
Regulus blinks at him. He looks like a child-whore - all sinning innocence. The make-up is wretchedly well-applied, but he is young. He’s a baby.
By the time Corvus Black appears, summoned by Amaryllis shrill cries, Regulus’s mascara is streaking down his face, blotting a pure white page with spilt ink. Sirius reclines on the chaise-longue, long legs curled under up himself, and his stained lower lip caught between perfect teeth the only sign that he is uneasy.
There is nothing Amaryllis can do: Regulus is soundly thrashed alongside his brother.
v.
Amaryllis almost knows what she’ll find even before she peers past the ajar door. She thinks the writing must have been on the nursery wall and she was too blind to see it.
In the month since she found Sirius making Regulus play his sluttish games, she’s watched them. Regulus is tense whenever Sirius is around, shooting him glances whenever he thinks the older boy won’t see. Sirius touches Regulus too often. A hundred fleeting touches: fingers through his hair, an elbow to the ribs.
They’ve sat together in the gardens, under the weeping willow that sways about them, and Amaryllis has watched from the window as Sirius’s hands wander like spiders, darting below the waistband of Regulus’s trousers. Her poor boy holds so still, refusing to look when Sirius loosens his hair like nightfall from the decorous knot into which Amaryllis prefers it tied, his hands trembling as the tighten about the book in his lap.
And Regulus isn’t sleeping. Amaryllis knows why and wishes she didn’t. It’s all cuckoos and changelings, and she doesn’t know how to save her son until she’s seen the monster’s real face.
So she creeps through Grimmauld Place in the emptiest hour of night, to her darling’s bedroom. The door is not quite half-open, but wide enough that if she places her eye to the crack, she can see her son’s torment.
It’s only when her hands start to hurt that she realises they’re clenched so tightly into fists that her nails are digging into her palms - eight bloody crescent moons on her fortune.
Regulus’s hands are tied to the wrought-iron bedframe with the thin strip of Sirius’s Gryffindor school-tie that glows a diabolic red and gold through the dark. His head is rolled back, revealing his pulse beating like butterfly wings at his throat. What she can see of his sweet face is contorted into an anguished expression. The sheets are rumpled about his twisting limbs like the earth of an unmade grave.
Hunching over him, with fingers clawing deep into his pale thighs, is Sirius. His long black hair trails serpentinely over his brother’s shifting hips as he bends his head to Regulus’s groin. From where she stands, Amaryllis can see the hollows and planes of Regulus’s body, shadowed and lit in silver. She can also see the tight, red ring of Sirius’s lips stretched about his brother’s cock.
She can even hear the soft moans that Regulus is making, and the slippery wet noise of Sirius’s mouth.
Sirius’s head rises and falls while he sucks and licks, just as Regulus’s chest heaves with shuddering breaths. She can see his lips slide easily down the dark skin of Regulus’s straining erection. His eyes burn in the night as he stares fixedly at Regulus in his distress.
And when he pulls back, letting Regulus’s cock slip from his mouth and leaving it to glisten slickly in the light that spills through his parted curtains, there’s a smile of the damned on his beautiful face.
It’s so very wrong that Amaryllis doesn’t know how to even begin putting it right. Even as she watches Regulus writhe beneath his brother’s infernal ministrations, as she listens to his pitiful whimpers and sees Sirius respond only by working him harder and faster, she can’t think of the first step.
Even if she were to go in there now - this very minute that Regulus’s hips are arching off the bed like his spine is on fire, Sirius rising persistently with him and his bound wrists allowing no escape - and pry Sirius off of him, would that be enough? Would anything be enough to save her child from the beast she’s allowed to live with them?
And if she calls to Corvus, there will only be more marks on poor Regulus’s body.
She wishes she could see Regulus’s face, maybe even catch his eye and let him know that he’s not alone in his misery and that his mother will fight for him. But his face is twisted away, pressing into the pillow as his whole body trembles and jerks.
It’s so like he’s in pain that she almost sobs.
When her baby sags back onto the dirty sheets of his bed, Sirius rocks back, dragging his hand over his plump, wet lips like the little savage he is. It’s obscene the way his tongue slides from between his lips and swipes up the pearly strand of his brother’s come that dribbles down his chin.
She will cut out the canker. She will stab iron into the changeling’s heart. She will make it go back to where it belongs.
vi.
They don’t have a moment alone; Amaryllis makes sure of that. Kreacher goes with them where she cannot.
Right now, they’re sharing the little stool in front of the ancient piano in their old playroom. Amaryllis does not like how closely they sit to one another so she settles in the low nursing chair in the corner and embroiders handkerchiefs that no-one will use. Her wandering attention is evident in the jagged curve of the ivy in her design, and the wilting petals of the flowers.
“Idiot,” Sirius reprimands Regulus jovially. “Your fingers are all wrong. Here, like this.”
A short, stuttering series of notes ring out and Amaryllis looks up to see Sirius’s hand resting on Regulus’s. They are looking at each other in a manner that is plainly disgusting. Perhaps if an onlooker, who did not know what depravity Sirius inflicted on his brother, were to see them, they would interpret it as fraternal warmth.
But Amaryllis knows.
“Regulus can manage quite well enough without your assistance, Sirius,” she says, turning back to the scene of dying flowers and rampant weeds that she seems to have created. “Perhaps when Professor Steinmetz no longer has to come to me with stories of your inattention and disobedience in your music lessons, you will be in a position to instruct your brother. But not before.”
The silence stretches on too long.
When she looks up, Sirius is grinning at Regulus in a way that makes her skin prickle. Perhaps it’s mother’s intuition, but she shoots to her feet in an edgy rustle of vermillion satin robes. She drops her embroidery hoop onto the chair and crosses to them, looking alertly between the two of them.
She sees what it is making Sirius grin and Regulus look down at his hands as they rest on the keys.
Written in the dust on top of the piano is the word: WHORE.
Not enough that he should defile her innocent son, but the creature wants to turn him against the one person who truly loves him. She feels a surge of grim triumph: Sirius knows she is going to fight for Regulus and is making steps against her.
“Regulus, go to your room,” she says, all calmness now that she knows the battlefield.
It is a momentary slight that the boy looks to his elder brother before he moves, but she looks past it. Sirius has had him in his thrall for months, maybe even years; it’s not Regulus’s fault.
When the door closes, she turns to Sirius and smiles. It’s such a blisteringly cold smile that even Sirius wavers slightly before it.
“Show me your hands.”
Sirius doesn’t move. His gaze drops, no longer defiant but sullen.
“Show me your hands,” she says again. Even the iron in her voice is not enough to break him.
There’s a wordless struggle as she catches his wrists and tries to drag them up. He’s a strong, sixteen-year old boy, but she is a mother. No force on earth can resist a mother who knows her child’s in danger.
It doesn’t make any difference when she finds Sirius’s hands are clean. The decision’s already been made.
Sirius leaves 12, Grimmauld Place that very afternoon. She wraps her arm about Regulus’s shaking shoulders and they watch from the window as Sirius strides off down the sunlit street with his suitcase in hand, and doesn’t look back.
vii.
Regulus is safe now.
Even if he spends his evenings with Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange. Even if he comes home one night with his eyes feverishly bright and his left arm cradled to his chest.
Regulus is safe now.
viii.
Even now he’s a grown man, with his own affairs and responsibilities, Amaryllis never denies Regulus the chance to rest against her.
She strokes the hair from his sweat-damp forehead as he lays his head on her breast. He smells of the sea and she wishes they’d had more time for family holidays while Corvus was alive. She’d have made sandcastles with her little boy, and maybe there’d have been no Sirius to kick them down.
“Are you alright, darling?” she murmurs, feeling trembles shake his slim frame.
He nestles closer, his breath almost too warm against her throat, like a wet scarf wrapped too tightly, but she can’t bear to move him.
“Mmm,” he agrees dazedly.
“Because you know Mother will look after you, don’t you? Mother will always look after her baby. Just like I did before.”
He stills for a moment, then tilts his head and looks up at her. His pupils are dizzying pinpoints and Amaryllis cuddles him closer. She shifts on the sofa, rearranging the cushion behind her aching back and giving him room to curl his legs up off the floor.
“With Sirius,” she says. Her voice is quiet because they’ve never discussed this before. But she needs him to know that whatever it is he’s facing, it’s her battle too. Even when it was from her own flesh, anything that threatens her child has to go. “How he hurt you.”
“Don’t be silly, Mother,” Regulus says at last, letting his head drop back onto her shoulder as though it is too heavy to hold up anymore.
Amaryllis is glad that she sent Kreacher away. This is a delicate conversation and well suited to the serene shade of the drawing room. The Earl Grey tea that Regulus has left to get cold, and the cakes that he has not touched, complete the scene. This is a loving mother with her doting son, and they may talk about anything.
“I saw, Regulus,” she explains. “He had your hands tied. I saw. I’m sorry you had to suffer that before I could make him go away.”
She doesn’t expect Regulus to laugh and, coupled with the fact that it is a hoarse, hacking laugh that sounds to tear at Regulus’s throat, she finds herself suddenly uneasy. As if the spectre of Sirius that she thought she had driven away all those years ago had merely been hiding in some dark corner, behind the grandfather clock or lurking at the corners of the family portrait.
“Of course he had my hands tied,” Regulus tells her in a slurred, amused voice. “If he hadn’t, I’d no doubt have knotted my fingers in his hair and fucked his mouth until his lips bled.” He twists his neck to look at her, but his eyes are glazed and can’t settle. “Did you think you were saving me? Silly girl.”
There is no answer. None. Because this has never been a question.
Regulus is silent too then. Forever. His body grows slowly cold in her arms while Amaryllis wonders why she never thought to check Regulus’s hands for piano dust, and whether there had been scratches and bites on Sirius’s shoulders and thighs.
ix.
Her screams echo through the empty house even after they take her body away. Trapped in the frame, she screams and screams to cover the sound of their laughter and the piano playing.
END
Pairing: Sirius/Regulus
Rating: R to NC-17
Disclaimer: No infringement on copyright is intended.
Warnings: incest, mild bondage, cross-dressing, voyeurism, possible dub-con
A.N.: Originally written for hp_springsmut. Thanks to wildestranger for the readthrough.
i.
She knows from the very first minute, as she desperately strains to hear crying, that there is something wrong with her firstborn. The ache of childbirth pulses through her muscles, and the midwife is rustling about just out of her field of vision. And the baby is silent.
Blackness comes over her and she can’t be sure if the world has gone mute or she has gone deaf.
When she wakes again, she can finally hear the baby screaming. She waits and listens. But the toothless crone, who babbled to her in Italian as she pushed and struggled, does not bring it to her.
The clock on the wall pounds out each minute that passes. A warm, Mediterranean breeze stirs the gauzy white curtains of her bedroom, setting them drifting like sun-dappled clouds. And still the midwife does not bring the infant to her.
She rises and on legs as flimsy as paper, she staggers down the corridor, chasing the sound of the baby’s angry cries. Clinging to the doorframe as she pushes the door to the nursery wide, she stares at the squalling bundle in the midwife’s arms. The old woman beams at her, chittering something that she doesn’t understand and holding the baby out to her.
The child is red and wrinkled like old fruit, and she shakes her head, before backing away to return to her bed.
ii.
When Regulus is born, Amaryllis Black gestures imperiously for the St Mungo’s Healers to leave as she cradles her precious newborn in her arms.
iii.
As a small boy, Sirius likes climbing trees and flying on his broom. His black hair is always blown thick by the wind and his porcelain cheeks are forever rose-flushed. He laughs like life’s a drug. He touches everything: fingering the fabric of his silk robes and stroking the lines of the antique china vases.
No boys should be as pretty as he is; it’s unnatural. His atavistic beauty makes him look like a princeling from the tarnished edge of the Golden Age. It stirs an unreasonable shame in Amaryllis and she finds herself wondering what the old Italian woman did with her baby while she slept.
Sirius may be the heir, but he is not a Black.
Regulus though is a perfect Black. He’s attractive in a Black kind of way: a haughty little mouth and prim upturned nose. He sits quietly, hands folded neatly in his lap and watches as his brother helps himself to biscuits and talks to the house-elves.
He doesn’t grow out of liking to be cuddled though. And he’s Amaryllis’s treasure, her sunshine, so in the private moments of the family, she rests his head on her chest and lets him curl into her lap as she strokes his crow-black hair.
But one day, when Regulus is fourteen and Amaryllis is smoothing his shirt over his shoulders, he hisses and draws away from her touch. His dark hair falls over his face like a shadow as he refuses to meet her wide, concerned eyes.
“Regulus? Regulus, tell me what’s wrong,” she commands, tilting his chin up so he’s forced to look at her. His gaze skitters over her face like a small bird pecking at crumbs, then darts off to the family portrait that hangs over the fireplace.
“Are you hurt, darling?” Amaryllis presses. Her heart is beating a little faster at the mere thought of it. Her fingers undo the buttons at the collar of her baby’s shirt before he can protest.
He stands there awkwardly, still apparently transfixed by the painting, as Amaryllis slides the heavy white cotton shirt away from his whiter skin. A small, horrified gasp escapes her lips as she sees the wicked red marks of teeth along her son’s delicate collarbone. There are scratches - horrible, savage gouges - down his narrow, hairless chest. Right down to his flat belly, about his nipples.
“Who did this to you, Regulus?” she demands in a shaky voice.
Regulus stands there and shivers, but doesn’t speak. He glances down at the signs of abuse and won’t say a word.
Just as silent as Sirius was that first moment he was born.
iv.
“Hold still, Reg.”
She hears the creak of furniture before she finds them. They’re in the parlour, and the air is warm and thick with perfume stolen from her dressing table. Its cloying scent makes her feel light-headed even as she stares at them.
Regulus is sprawled on the burgundy velvet chaise-longue, his arm hanging limply over the side with a flimsy black something of lace dangling from his curled fingers. His cheeks have an alcoholic burn to them and his eyes are half-lidded as he gazes at his brother.
Dressed in an unbuttoned shirt and a pair of red women’s panties made of slippery satin that shine in the gaslight, Sirius is straddling his younger brother’s thigh. His knee is pressed against Regulus’s groin as he leans over him, the tip of his pink tongue poking from between his swollen, cherry-painted lips as he smears a different shade of lipstick over Regulus’s lips.
One of his long-fingered white hands is clutching the back of the sofa to steady himself, and his lashes flutter blackly against his flawless skin as he concentrates. Amaryllis can see the lean muscles in his legs tauten as he moves, the scanty underwear riding up high on his slender hips and about the curves of his arse.
“Tart,” he says with a dirty laugh, as he draws back to examine his handiwork.
Regulus blinks at him. He looks like a child-whore - all sinning innocence. The make-up is wretchedly well-applied, but he is young. He’s a baby.
By the time Corvus Black appears, summoned by Amaryllis shrill cries, Regulus’s mascara is streaking down his face, blotting a pure white page with spilt ink. Sirius reclines on the chaise-longue, long legs curled under up himself, and his stained lower lip caught between perfect teeth the only sign that he is uneasy.
There is nothing Amaryllis can do: Regulus is soundly thrashed alongside his brother.
v.
Amaryllis almost knows what she’ll find even before she peers past the ajar door. She thinks the writing must have been on the nursery wall and she was too blind to see it.
In the month since she found Sirius making Regulus play his sluttish games, she’s watched them. Regulus is tense whenever Sirius is around, shooting him glances whenever he thinks the older boy won’t see. Sirius touches Regulus too often. A hundred fleeting touches: fingers through his hair, an elbow to the ribs.
They’ve sat together in the gardens, under the weeping willow that sways about them, and Amaryllis has watched from the window as Sirius’s hands wander like spiders, darting below the waistband of Regulus’s trousers. Her poor boy holds so still, refusing to look when Sirius loosens his hair like nightfall from the decorous knot into which Amaryllis prefers it tied, his hands trembling as the tighten about the book in his lap.
And Regulus isn’t sleeping. Amaryllis knows why and wishes she didn’t. It’s all cuckoos and changelings, and she doesn’t know how to save her son until she’s seen the monster’s real face.
So she creeps through Grimmauld Place in the emptiest hour of night, to her darling’s bedroom. The door is not quite half-open, but wide enough that if she places her eye to the crack, she can see her son’s torment.
It’s only when her hands start to hurt that she realises they’re clenched so tightly into fists that her nails are digging into her palms - eight bloody crescent moons on her fortune.
Regulus’s hands are tied to the wrought-iron bedframe with the thin strip of Sirius’s Gryffindor school-tie that glows a diabolic red and gold through the dark. His head is rolled back, revealing his pulse beating like butterfly wings at his throat. What she can see of his sweet face is contorted into an anguished expression. The sheets are rumpled about his twisting limbs like the earth of an unmade grave.
Hunching over him, with fingers clawing deep into his pale thighs, is Sirius. His long black hair trails serpentinely over his brother’s shifting hips as he bends his head to Regulus’s groin. From where she stands, Amaryllis can see the hollows and planes of Regulus’s body, shadowed and lit in silver. She can also see the tight, red ring of Sirius’s lips stretched about his brother’s cock.
She can even hear the soft moans that Regulus is making, and the slippery wet noise of Sirius’s mouth.
Sirius’s head rises and falls while he sucks and licks, just as Regulus’s chest heaves with shuddering breaths. She can see his lips slide easily down the dark skin of Regulus’s straining erection. His eyes burn in the night as he stares fixedly at Regulus in his distress.
And when he pulls back, letting Regulus’s cock slip from his mouth and leaving it to glisten slickly in the light that spills through his parted curtains, there’s a smile of the damned on his beautiful face.
It’s so very wrong that Amaryllis doesn’t know how to even begin putting it right. Even as she watches Regulus writhe beneath his brother’s infernal ministrations, as she listens to his pitiful whimpers and sees Sirius respond only by working him harder and faster, she can’t think of the first step.
Even if she were to go in there now - this very minute that Regulus’s hips are arching off the bed like his spine is on fire, Sirius rising persistently with him and his bound wrists allowing no escape - and pry Sirius off of him, would that be enough? Would anything be enough to save her child from the beast she’s allowed to live with them?
And if she calls to Corvus, there will only be more marks on poor Regulus’s body.
She wishes she could see Regulus’s face, maybe even catch his eye and let him know that he’s not alone in his misery and that his mother will fight for him. But his face is twisted away, pressing into the pillow as his whole body trembles and jerks.
It’s so like he’s in pain that she almost sobs.
When her baby sags back onto the dirty sheets of his bed, Sirius rocks back, dragging his hand over his plump, wet lips like the little savage he is. It’s obscene the way his tongue slides from between his lips and swipes up the pearly strand of his brother’s come that dribbles down his chin.
She will cut out the canker. She will stab iron into the changeling’s heart. She will make it go back to where it belongs.
vi.
They don’t have a moment alone; Amaryllis makes sure of that. Kreacher goes with them where she cannot.
Right now, they’re sharing the little stool in front of the ancient piano in their old playroom. Amaryllis does not like how closely they sit to one another so she settles in the low nursing chair in the corner and embroiders handkerchiefs that no-one will use. Her wandering attention is evident in the jagged curve of the ivy in her design, and the wilting petals of the flowers.
“Idiot,” Sirius reprimands Regulus jovially. “Your fingers are all wrong. Here, like this.”
A short, stuttering series of notes ring out and Amaryllis looks up to see Sirius’s hand resting on Regulus’s. They are looking at each other in a manner that is plainly disgusting. Perhaps if an onlooker, who did not know what depravity Sirius inflicted on his brother, were to see them, they would interpret it as fraternal warmth.
But Amaryllis knows.
“Regulus can manage quite well enough without your assistance, Sirius,” she says, turning back to the scene of dying flowers and rampant weeds that she seems to have created. “Perhaps when Professor Steinmetz no longer has to come to me with stories of your inattention and disobedience in your music lessons, you will be in a position to instruct your brother. But not before.”
The silence stretches on too long.
When she looks up, Sirius is grinning at Regulus in a way that makes her skin prickle. Perhaps it’s mother’s intuition, but she shoots to her feet in an edgy rustle of vermillion satin robes. She drops her embroidery hoop onto the chair and crosses to them, looking alertly between the two of them.
She sees what it is making Sirius grin and Regulus look down at his hands as they rest on the keys.
Written in the dust on top of the piano is the word: WHORE.
Not enough that he should defile her innocent son, but the creature wants to turn him against the one person who truly loves him. She feels a surge of grim triumph: Sirius knows she is going to fight for Regulus and is making steps against her.
“Regulus, go to your room,” she says, all calmness now that she knows the battlefield.
It is a momentary slight that the boy looks to his elder brother before he moves, but she looks past it. Sirius has had him in his thrall for months, maybe even years; it’s not Regulus’s fault.
When the door closes, she turns to Sirius and smiles. It’s such a blisteringly cold smile that even Sirius wavers slightly before it.
“Show me your hands.”
Sirius doesn’t move. His gaze drops, no longer defiant but sullen.
“Show me your hands,” she says again. Even the iron in her voice is not enough to break him.
There’s a wordless struggle as she catches his wrists and tries to drag them up. He’s a strong, sixteen-year old boy, but she is a mother. No force on earth can resist a mother who knows her child’s in danger.
It doesn’t make any difference when she finds Sirius’s hands are clean. The decision’s already been made.
Sirius leaves 12, Grimmauld Place that very afternoon. She wraps her arm about Regulus’s shaking shoulders and they watch from the window as Sirius strides off down the sunlit street with his suitcase in hand, and doesn’t look back.
vii.
Regulus is safe now.
Even if he spends his evenings with Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange. Even if he comes home one night with his eyes feverishly bright and his left arm cradled to his chest.
Regulus is safe now.
viii.
Even now he’s a grown man, with his own affairs and responsibilities, Amaryllis never denies Regulus the chance to rest against her.
She strokes the hair from his sweat-damp forehead as he lays his head on her breast. He smells of the sea and she wishes they’d had more time for family holidays while Corvus was alive. She’d have made sandcastles with her little boy, and maybe there’d have been no Sirius to kick them down.
“Are you alright, darling?” she murmurs, feeling trembles shake his slim frame.
He nestles closer, his breath almost too warm against her throat, like a wet scarf wrapped too tightly, but she can’t bear to move him.
“Mmm,” he agrees dazedly.
“Because you know Mother will look after you, don’t you? Mother will always look after her baby. Just like I did before.”
He stills for a moment, then tilts his head and looks up at her. His pupils are dizzying pinpoints and Amaryllis cuddles him closer. She shifts on the sofa, rearranging the cushion behind her aching back and giving him room to curl his legs up off the floor.
“With Sirius,” she says. Her voice is quiet because they’ve never discussed this before. But she needs him to know that whatever it is he’s facing, it’s her battle too. Even when it was from her own flesh, anything that threatens her child has to go. “How he hurt you.”
“Don’t be silly, Mother,” Regulus says at last, letting his head drop back onto her shoulder as though it is too heavy to hold up anymore.
Amaryllis is glad that she sent Kreacher away. This is a delicate conversation and well suited to the serene shade of the drawing room. The Earl Grey tea that Regulus has left to get cold, and the cakes that he has not touched, complete the scene. This is a loving mother with her doting son, and they may talk about anything.
“I saw, Regulus,” she explains. “He had your hands tied. I saw. I’m sorry you had to suffer that before I could make him go away.”
She doesn’t expect Regulus to laugh and, coupled with the fact that it is a hoarse, hacking laugh that sounds to tear at Regulus’s throat, she finds herself suddenly uneasy. As if the spectre of Sirius that she thought she had driven away all those years ago had merely been hiding in some dark corner, behind the grandfather clock or lurking at the corners of the family portrait.
“Of course he had my hands tied,” Regulus tells her in a slurred, amused voice. “If he hadn’t, I’d no doubt have knotted my fingers in his hair and fucked his mouth until his lips bled.” He twists his neck to look at her, but his eyes are glazed and can’t settle. “Did you think you were saving me? Silly girl.”
There is no answer. None. Because this has never been a question.
Regulus is silent too then. Forever. His body grows slowly cold in her arms while Amaryllis wonders why she never thought to check Regulus’s hands for piano dust, and whether there had been scratches and bites on Sirius’s shoulders and thighs.
ix.
Her screams echo through the empty house even after they take her body away. Trapped in the frame, she screams and screams to cover the sound of their laughter and the piano playing.
END