(no subject)
Title: Perigee
Pairing: Sirius/Remus, Regulus
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The war began.
A/N: For statelines and hostile_21, primarily because they are two sexy ladies who had birthdays 349857 moons ago, secondarily because Rina wrote me a FICLET and because La did beta for her own fic (although I didn't tell her that at the time and I'm a jerk), and thirdarily because they are Black brother aficionados.
:::
8. In the month of December he memorized Remus Lupin, swallowing trivia and snapshot memories to compensate for the things that could not be articulated or defined. Here is the exact color of his eyes: cloudy blue, starless, encapsulated on winter nights. Here are the clues of his presence: butterfly-folded books scattered around the flat, and a pair of glasses with bent earpieces. Here are the words he says too often: quite, maybe, incidentally, please.
In December they agreed that November was a bad month. Sirius thought of tombs and flowers frozen in the ground; these pictures came with an ease that was inextricably bound with the leak in the roof. At night they curled tight around each other and Remus ran his hands up and down Sirius's spine. Sirius shrank at the chill of his fingers, and thought of dark, underwater things, grasping anemones, and thought Remus would laugh at the comparison, and thought Remus would like to laugh at the comparison, and thought he'd keep it to himself. In the mornings he woke up warm.
We're lucky, Remus took to saying. We are. Sirius thought he agreed.
7. Remus was better at it than he was. He knew how to make jokes every month when he got a notice from the Registry; he made Sirius feel overgrown and ghastly and immature, completely graceless. Eventually Sirius trained himself to smile in time to Remus's good-bad humor, and to swallow venomous anger every time he passed the calendar with the lunar silhouettes, reminding him that the Ministry only ever sent notices in the week preceding the full moon. One day Remus told him The Department of Magical Registry will implement an extensive classification system effective January 1st, 1980. Sirius asked what this meant, this grand fucking euphemism. Remus said something like papers, blood samples, promises, and he smiled grimly.
Remus proposed the theory that this - this mess of an arrangement, their shared existence consisting of one bedroom, cold second floors, the dubious division of rent - all this was quite, quite illegal as defined by Statute XXIII of the Werewolf Accommodation Act. Sometimes this made them feel marginally better, like cunning princes, sons of luck.
More often it did not. You are their people, Sirius said. You don't do this to your own people. Shit.
Ah, people, the very word, Remus said. Therein lies the problem.
Fuck, Sirius said.
Fuck indeed, Remus replied, lightly.
In the meantime Remus would find jobs in Muggle shops with funny hours, lousy hours, but it was the kind of sporadic schedule in which he could disguise an illness. The prize was to have found work at all. Sirius refused to get a job; he read Remus's books, went out in the daytime, went to James or Lily and did what Dumbledore told him to.
In the second half of November Andromeda told him about Regulus's service, the dazed grief of it, the effluvia of mountainous, snowy flowers and where - Sirius did not know if he would use this information - his brother was buried.
After she told him this he could not remember where Remus worked - had he quit the library for the bookshop, yet, (the adulterous bibliophile), and what were his hours? He guessed Harold's Books and was lucky. When he came through the door Remus was behind the counter, and approaching him as a customer Sirius asked a number of insipid questions about the Book of Mormon (the shop owner was in earshot). Finally Remus said Well why don't I show you, sir. They hid in an aisle in the back of the shop, talking in low voices till the end of Remus's shift. Remus was shaking and Sirius was still. Sirius said, I'm sorry if they sack you for this and Remus said, Jesus, Padfoot, you don't have to say sorry, it's your brother's been buried. He's your brother.
Is, was, Sirius thought. Past tense, proper tense.
He had come to believe in superstitious things by then. He opened the mail in order by topic and postmark and stirred his coffee counterclockwise, three times. When he left the flat he curled his fingers around the copper doorknob and held it for a moment, pretending fingerprints were blessings that kept the outside out and in the inside safe. He had come to believe in arbitrary divisions of time, that the old names under which days are divided meant something: Sundays were stale lemon tea in his senses, Wednesdays were protected in their own strange buoyant sea, Fridays were faintly dangerous, balanced on red cusps. Sirius was waiting for Remus to turn the page in the calendar; he thought it would be better, then, when a new month came and he could take with it the things he wanted and forget the things he didn't.
6. When he was sure his mind had fixed on the idea like a coat on a hook, the thought slipped back out of his head as quickly as it had come. Sirius thought of his brother: the stiff elegance in the syllables of his name, of hair lighter than Sirius's, and of Regulus's small mouth. He thought of bleached-white summers before he left home. He thought of stark holidays punctuated by russet and emerald parcels, the anemic wash over the word family and its connotations. He thought of long lists in the Order's headquarter, lists on which Regulus's name appeared, and how for so long the only thing his brother's name meant to him was a tally: it meant, simply, we're outnumbered.
When Sirius thought of Regulus waiting to die, his mind went white, with a sudden absence like emerging or being submerged; he could not decide which. He thought of the person who had killed him, and the conjured face appeared as a costume mask, nothing of individuation, not a human spark.
I hate it, he told Remus. I hate what Regulus did.
Do you hate him?
Sirius was quiet.
They had never talked about it, since it had happened. What Sirius did not understand about death was life: that afterwards, it was still governed by prosaic things. They still shopped, and one or the other still cooked dinner, and when one cut his finger the other found a bandage. They still stole library books and read them up past midnight, when Mother Electricity smiled on them. They still knew how to be with one another, how to say wry, affected things; and how Sirius could tease Remus about a pair of glasses he could not remember having seen him wear before and how Remus could say Oh shut up, blushing.
5. It was peaceful, for a while.
4. Remus left for Harold's Books at ten o'clock in the morning and Sirius pulled the shades open and watched him go: one, two, three dozen steps before he was out of sight. Sirius waited, before he did it: he made tea, ate lunch, tried to read a book that was nothing to do with charms. After ten minutes he could not turn the pages, because his bones felt hollow and ached in such a strange way that it was almost a tickle. He put the book down and squeezed the arm of the sofa, latching onto the spongy green fabric until he could feel his arms properly again, until he was steady. He opened a window and breathed, again, again, cold air blooming his lungs.
He left for his bedroom, locking the door behind him.
He thought of Remus. (If he's back early, he thought, I won't. If I hear the lock I will stop right now and I will not think of this again. Sirius paused, as if expecting thought to inspire being, but he only heard Ms. Downstairs' radio and his own breath.)
There was a book on the trunk at the foot of the bed; Sirius had put it there that morning. It was heavy, red-purple bound, almost illuminated inside with fine, spindly black drawings. In his arms it fell open directly to the middle, where Sirius had put a place-marker. The words on the page listed the history, wand movement, and incantation. The words on the page said rarely achieved and permanent and things Sirius had memorized a week ago, that he needed only to glance at briefly to spark recognition, his mind supplying the picture. He read the page with the faintest register, as if for ceremony, and laid it back onto the bed, face-up.
He thought of Regulus and his peaceful face. He tried, as best he could, to filter out every last thing save his brother. But other things came to his mind, unbidden: an image of Remus reading the night before last, a bus schedule, an unknotted tie, the tree outside his old bedroom window. He saw Remus leaving the bookshop early. A hundred small things flashed through his mind like bright flocks of bird-pests, that would not go away for his wishing them to. Sirius squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of Regulus, the clearest picture, the most recent, and it was a picture of himself, too. Sirius put his wand to his temple and tapped once, twice.
Obliviate, he said.
3. His mind worked in a new way, where everything was connected, convoluted, plaited. When he left the flat, he left because the floorboards were memories, their creaks were memories, the pitcher was memories until it slipped from his fingers at breakfast, one morning, and scattered across the floor like broken teal eggshells. (Reparo, Remus said, in quick competence. A moment later he had put his hand on Sirius's wrist and simply squeezed.) Every step was once a path, somewhere else, leading to places he was not sure he should have arrived at.
One night he thought he saw a shade of his brother.
When he stayed in the flat, he stayed because he could not filter London out of his senses. Some days after Regulus died he and Remus went out, just walking, and Sirius was positive he felt every thing, every little thing: he heard the cacophony of traffic, screech of swings, his footsteps, Remus's footsteps, boys in boots, girls in Mary Janes, and twelve varieties of songbird. He heard every family strife, television, radio, hammer, stairstep, door-slam in all of the houses he passed. He saw details in every window-pastel laundry and white cats, forlorn girls, grime; every glossy pane and every crack in sharp relief, and these were flats going down blocks and blocks, further than he'd ever seen before. Sirius felt the air and each fiber of his clothing. He breathed in the exhaust, fried food, cut grass, Remus's hair, dead flowerbeds. He passed a poster and could not read it, because every letter registered at once. Remus was speaking, and Sirius was listening, and he could not understand a thing.
He could not remember one thing without remembering another.
He asked Remus to bring a book back from the library and in contrast the title was barely recalled, eked out of his memory word by stuttered word. Remus retrieved it, dutifully. Sirius waited till he was asleep to look at it, and when he did he could read it perfectly.
In the daytime, when Remus watched him closely, he tried to tell himself guilt is not a scar, or a freckle, or anything visible outside of his own mind. No one can see it and it needn't be there.
2. The letter said that Regulus was dead.
Midmorning, a man from the Order came and Sirius, who had been awake most of the night smoking, asked the following questions with an eerie kind of efficiency: Who found him? When? Where was he found? How long had the Order known? What did he look like? How did he die? How long had he been dead? Sirius was morbid: he wanted to see the exact angles of his brother's arms, stretched out before him acute and obtuse; he wanted to see Regulus's face, the imprints of pebbles on his cheek, the spidery blue shadows of his hair and eyelashes.
The man from the Order answered in a slow practiced voice, like he had done this before: aurors had found Regulus, it had been hours ago, it had not not far from the flat, and he had not been dead long. He was unmarked, reason to believe it had been a Killing Curse.
It was quick, then, Sirius said.
Someone cared about him, Remus said quietly. Or else they did not care at all.
Sirius nodded.
The man from the Order left, and Sirius told Remus to go to work. He was sure Remus would argue and was relieved when he didn't. Before he left Remus kissed him, hard, nothing of romance and everything of impression. He said, There was nothing you could have done. He watched Sirius warily, his mouth slightly open. Listen to me, Sirius, there wasn't anything. Do you believe that?
I believe that, Sirius said. I-know, I know. I did everything I could.
1. It was five o'clock in the evening when Regulus came to the flat.
No one spoke names or the grating word please. They'll find me, Regulus said. They are going to find me. His eyes were raw, veins visible and frayed, and there was a dark shadow of blood under his nose. (Remember Easter third year, you hit him, he cried, you said Pinch your fucking nose and showed Regulus just where on the bridge. Afterwards Sirius held the bloodwarm, blossomed kerchief in his hand, and Regulus laughed thickly and told him what stupid shapes he saw in it.)
Sirius said okay, and sat. He hunched over and covered his face and Regulus sat next to him with the grey eyes of a Stoic and said nothing, only leaned in closer and closer until they were fused together - it was not an embrace, he realized - simply clinging. Regulus's arms were shaking. Later they pulled away and Sirius got up, poured a glass of water for (he couldn't remember whom), and smeared the beads of condensation on the pitcher with a sweaty handprint. Regulus was nearly forgotten - he was a black heap on the sofa - as Sirius made a surreptitious check of the flat: shades, locks, lights, the implements of hide-and-go-seek. Then Regulus started making the noises, small bird noises.
As he walked Regulus to the empty bedroom Regulus said I'm not asking for anything.
I can't give you anything, Sirius said.
I know. I'm going to leave, he said.
Regulus allowed himself to be led across the threshold of the bedroom.
They are going to find me, Regulus said again, and Sirius thought he would be sick.
He put Regulus into his bed, like a mother would, and kneeled by the head and pet Regulus's dirty hair. You don't know what I did, Regulus said. Sirius said he did but Regulus just shook his head. He spoke again. When I'm here it's not safe for you.
It never is.
Regulus inhaled slowly and exhaled in a shake. He glanced around the room but doubtless could see little for the evening made everything colorless; it was the sort of dove-grey, cigarette-grey that Sirius could pretend it was morning, for what morning is worth: the earth thawing, the light neutralizing fear. In that moment he wanted Remus there so badly his chest ached. Remus was away.
When they find me - Regulus said. When they come -
He did not go on.
When Regulus fell asleep Sirius filled the blanks in his own mind. When they came for him it would be quiet and it would not be quick. Regulus did something, and it would not be quick.
(He thought: would they come to him alone or in pairs? Would it be in corridors or the edges of wheat-fringed fields? Would the air smell like metal or would it smell like grass and rain, and industry and people, like it does every day when someone else is dying?) Sirius was sweating at his own either/or propositions, the macabre algorithms he created. It became black outside and he could not think any longer, his chest was heavy with two people's fear, so he crawled into the bed beside his brother and waited and slept if only for minutes. He had a quick, riotous dream where he was bleeding and could not stop, until everything got quieter, heavier, his body siphoned by the pillowing air till it was part of the pillowing air. He woke up not knowing what day it was till he saw Regulus's peaceful face, his features smudged in the dark. Sirius left the room.
(They're going to find me, Regulus said. I know, Sirius said.)
When he returned, after midnight, Sirius left the door open an angle so orange hall-light filtered in, in a weak gradient, cutting across the room but not the bed and not reaching Regulus's eyes. He did not wake up when Sirius kissed him. He did not wake up when Sirius drew his wand to Regulus's temple.
Pairing: Sirius/Remus, Regulus
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The war began.
A/N: For statelines and hostile_21, primarily because they are two sexy ladies who had birthdays 349857 moons ago, secondarily because Rina wrote me a FICLET and because La did beta for her own fic (although I didn't tell her that at the time and I'm a jerk), and thirdarily because they are Black brother aficionados.
:::
8. In the month of December he memorized Remus Lupin, swallowing trivia and snapshot memories to compensate for the things that could not be articulated or defined. Here is the exact color of his eyes: cloudy blue, starless, encapsulated on winter nights. Here are the clues of his presence: butterfly-folded books scattered around the flat, and a pair of glasses with bent earpieces. Here are the words he says too often: quite, maybe, incidentally, please.
In December they agreed that November was a bad month. Sirius thought of tombs and flowers frozen in the ground; these pictures came with an ease that was inextricably bound with the leak in the roof. At night they curled tight around each other and Remus ran his hands up and down Sirius's spine. Sirius shrank at the chill of his fingers, and thought of dark, underwater things, grasping anemones, and thought Remus would laugh at the comparison, and thought Remus would like to laugh at the comparison, and thought he'd keep it to himself. In the mornings he woke up warm.
We're lucky, Remus took to saying. We are. Sirius thought he agreed.
7. Remus was better at it than he was. He knew how to make jokes every month when he got a notice from the Registry; he made Sirius feel overgrown and ghastly and immature, completely graceless. Eventually Sirius trained himself to smile in time to Remus's good-bad humor, and to swallow venomous anger every time he passed the calendar with the lunar silhouettes, reminding him that the Ministry only ever sent notices in the week preceding the full moon. One day Remus told him The Department of Magical Registry will implement an extensive classification system effective January 1st, 1980. Sirius asked what this meant, this grand fucking euphemism. Remus said something like papers, blood samples, promises, and he smiled grimly.
Remus proposed the theory that this - this mess of an arrangement, their shared existence consisting of one bedroom, cold second floors, the dubious division of rent - all this was quite, quite illegal as defined by Statute XXIII of the Werewolf Accommodation Act. Sometimes this made them feel marginally better, like cunning princes, sons of luck.
More often it did not. You are their people, Sirius said. You don't do this to your own people. Shit.
Ah, people, the very word, Remus said. Therein lies the problem.
Fuck, Sirius said.
Fuck indeed, Remus replied, lightly.
In the meantime Remus would find jobs in Muggle shops with funny hours, lousy hours, but it was the kind of sporadic schedule in which he could disguise an illness. The prize was to have found work at all. Sirius refused to get a job; he read Remus's books, went out in the daytime, went to James or Lily and did what Dumbledore told him to.
In the second half of November Andromeda told him about Regulus's service, the dazed grief of it, the effluvia of mountainous, snowy flowers and where - Sirius did not know if he would use this information - his brother was buried.
After she told him this he could not remember where Remus worked - had he quit the library for the bookshop, yet, (the adulterous bibliophile), and what were his hours? He guessed Harold's Books and was lucky. When he came through the door Remus was behind the counter, and approaching him as a customer Sirius asked a number of insipid questions about the Book of Mormon (the shop owner was in earshot). Finally Remus said Well why don't I show you, sir. They hid in an aisle in the back of the shop, talking in low voices till the end of Remus's shift. Remus was shaking and Sirius was still. Sirius said, I'm sorry if they sack you for this and Remus said, Jesus, Padfoot, you don't have to say sorry, it's your brother's been buried. He's your brother.
Is, was, Sirius thought. Past tense, proper tense.
He had come to believe in superstitious things by then. He opened the mail in order by topic and postmark and stirred his coffee counterclockwise, three times. When he left the flat he curled his fingers around the copper doorknob and held it for a moment, pretending fingerprints were blessings that kept the outside out and in the inside safe. He had come to believe in arbitrary divisions of time, that the old names under which days are divided meant something: Sundays were stale lemon tea in his senses, Wednesdays were protected in their own strange buoyant sea, Fridays were faintly dangerous, balanced on red cusps. Sirius was waiting for Remus to turn the page in the calendar; he thought it would be better, then, when a new month came and he could take with it the things he wanted and forget the things he didn't.
6. When he was sure his mind had fixed on the idea like a coat on a hook, the thought slipped back out of his head as quickly as it had come. Sirius thought of his brother: the stiff elegance in the syllables of his name, of hair lighter than Sirius's, and of Regulus's small mouth. He thought of bleached-white summers before he left home. He thought of stark holidays punctuated by russet and emerald parcels, the anemic wash over the word family and its connotations. He thought of long lists in the Order's headquarter, lists on which Regulus's name appeared, and how for so long the only thing his brother's name meant to him was a tally: it meant, simply, we're outnumbered.
When Sirius thought of Regulus waiting to die, his mind went white, with a sudden absence like emerging or being submerged; he could not decide which. He thought of the person who had killed him, and the conjured face appeared as a costume mask, nothing of individuation, not a human spark.
I hate it, he told Remus. I hate what Regulus did.
Do you hate him?
Sirius was quiet.
They had never talked about it, since it had happened. What Sirius did not understand about death was life: that afterwards, it was still governed by prosaic things. They still shopped, and one or the other still cooked dinner, and when one cut his finger the other found a bandage. They still stole library books and read them up past midnight, when Mother Electricity smiled on them. They still knew how to be with one another, how to say wry, affected things; and how Sirius could tease Remus about a pair of glasses he could not remember having seen him wear before and how Remus could say Oh shut up, blushing.
5. It was peaceful, for a while.
4. Remus left for Harold's Books at ten o'clock in the morning and Sirius pulled the shades open and watched him go: one, two, three dozen steps before he was out of sight. Sirius waited, before he did it: he made tea, ate lunch, tried to read a book that was nothing to do with charms. After ten minutes he could not turn the pages, because his bones felt hollow and ached in such a strange way that it was almost a tickle. He put the book down and squeezed the arm of the sofa, latching onto the spongy green fabric until he could feel his arms properly again, until he was steady. He opened a window and breathed, again, again, cold air blooming his lungs.
He left for his bedroom, locking the door behind him.
He thought of Remus. (If he's back early, he thought, I won't. If I hear the lock I will stop right now and I will not think of this again. Sirius paused, as if expecting thought to inspire being, but he only heard Ms. Downstairs' radio and his own breath.)
There was a book on the trunk at the foot of the bed; Sirius had put it there that morning. It was heavy, red-purple bound, almost illuminated inside with fine, spindly black drawings. In his arms it fell open directly to the middle, where Sirius had put a place-marker. The words on the page listed the history, wand movement, and incantation. The words on the page said rarely achieved and permanent and things Sirius had memorized a week ago, that he needed only to glance at briefly to spark recognition, his mind supplying the picture. He read the page with the faintest register, as if for ceremony, and laid it back onto the bed, face-up.
He thought of Regulus and his peaceful face. He tried, as best he could, to filter out every last thing save his brother. But other things came to his mind, unbidden: an image of Remus reading the night before last, a bus schedule, an unknotted tie, the tree outside his old bedroom window. He saw Remus leaving the bookshop early. A hundred small things flashed through his mind like bright flocks of bird-pests, that would not go away for his wishing them to. Sirius squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of Regulus, the clearest picture, the most recent, and it was a picture of himself, too. Sirius put his wand to his temple and tapped once, twice.
Obliviate, he said.
3. His mind worked in a new way, where everything was connected, convoluted, plaited. When he left the flat, he left because the floorboards were memories, their creaks were memories, the pitcher was memories until it slipped from his fingers at breakfast, one morning, and scattered across the floor like broken teal eggshells. (Reparo, Remus said, in quick competence. A moment later he had put his hand on Sirius's wrist and simply squeezed.) Every step was once a path, somewhere else, leading to places he was not sure he should have arrived at.
One night he thought he saw a shade of his brother.
When he stayed in the flat, he stayed because he could not filter London out of his senses. Some days after Regulus died he and Remus went out, just walking, and Sirius was positive he felt every thing, every little thing: he heard the cacophony of traffic, screech of swings, his footsteps, Remus's footsteps, boys in boots, girls in Mary Janes, and twelve varieties of songbird. He heard every family strife, television, radio, hammer, stairstep, door-slam in all of the houses he passed. He saw details in every window-pastel laundry and white cats, forlorn girls, grime; every glossy pane and every crack in sharp relief, and these were flats going down blocks and blocks, further than he'd ever seen before. Sirius felt the air and each fiber of his clothing. He breathed in the exhaust, fried food, cut grass, Remus's hair, dead flowerbeds. He passed a poster and could not read it, because every letter registered at once. Remus was speaking, and Sirius was listening, and he could not understand a thing.
He could not remember one thing without remembering another.
He asked Remus to bring a book back from the library and in contrast the title was barely recalled, eked out of his memory word by stuttered word. Remus retrieved it, dutifully. Sirius waited till he was asleep to look at it, and when he did he could read it perfectly.
In the daytime, when Remus watched him closely, he tried to tell himself guilt is not a scar, or a freckle, or anything visible outside of his own mind. No one can see it and it needn't be there.
2. The letter said that Regulus was dead.
Midmorning, a man from the Order came and Sirius, who had been awake most of the night smoking, asked the following questions with an eerie kind of efficiency: Who found him? When? Where was he found? How long had the Order known? What did he look like? How did he die? How long had he been dead? Sirius was morbid: he wanted to see the exact angles of his brother's arms, stretched out before him acute and obtuse; he wanted to see Regulus's face, the imprints of pebbles on his cheek, the spidery blue shadows of his hair and eyelashes.
The man from the Order answered in a slow practiced voice, like he had done this before: aurors had found Regulus, it had been hours ago, it had not not far from the flat, and he had not been dead long. He was unmarked, reason to believe it had been a Killing Curse.
It was quick, then, Sirius said.
Someone cared about him, Remus said quietly. Or else they did not care at all.
Sirius nodded.
The man from the Order left, and Sirius told Remus to go to work. He was sure Remus would argue and was relieved when he didn't. Before he left Remus kissed him, hard, nothing of romance and everything of impression. He said, There was nothing you could have done. He watched Sirius warily, his mouth slightly open. Listen to me, Sirius, there wasn't anything. Do you believe that?
I believe that, Sirius said. I-know, I know. I did everything I could.
1. It was five o'clock in the evening when Regulus came to the flat.
No one spoke names or the grating word please. They'll find me, Regulus said. They are going to find me. His eyes were raw, veins visible and frayed, and there was a dark shadow of blood under his nose. (Remember Easter third year, you hit him, he cried, you said Pinch your fucking nose and showed Regulus just where on the bridge. Afterwards Sirius held the bloodwarm, blossomed kerchief in his hand, and Regulus laughed thickly and told him what stupid shapes he saw in it.)
Sirius said okay, and sat. He hunched over and covered his face and Regulus sat next to him with the grey eyes of a Stoic and said nothing, only leaned in closer and closer until they were fused together - it was not an embrace, he realized - simply clinging. Regulus's arms were shaking. Later they pulled away and Sirius got up, poured a glass of water for (he couldn't remember whom), and smeared the beads of condensation on the pitcher with a sweaty handprint. Regulus was nearly forgotten - he was a black heap on the sofa - as Sirius made a surreptitious check of the flat: shades, locks, lights, the implements of hide-and-go-seek. Then Regulus started making the noises, small bird noises.
As he walked Regulus to the empty bedroom Regulus said I'm not asking for anything.
I can't give you anything, Sirius said.
I know. I'm going to leave, he said.
Regulus allowed himself to be led across the threshold of the bedroom.
They are going to find me, Regulus said again, and Sirius thought he would be sick.
He put Regulus into his bed, like a mother would, and kneeled by the head and pet Regulus's dirty hair. You don't know what I did, Regulus said. Sirius said he did but Regulus just shook his head. He spoke again. When I'm here it's not safe for you.
It never is.
Regulus inhaled slowly and exhaled in a shake. He glanced around the room but doubtless could see little for the evening made everything colorless; it was the sort of dove-grey, cigarette-grey that Sirius could pretend it was morning, for what morning is worth: the earth thawing, the light neutralizing fear. In that moment he wanted Remus there so badly his chest ached. Remus was away.
When they find me - Regulus said. When they come -
He did not go on.
When Regulus fell asleep Sirius filled the blanks in his own mind. When they came for him it would be quiet and it would not be quick. Regulus did something, and it would not be quick.
(He thought: would they come to him alone or in pairs? Would it be in corridors or the edges of wheat-fringed fields? Would the air smell like metal or would it smell like grass and rain, and industry and people, like it does every day when someone else is dying?) Sirius was sweating at his own either/or propositions, the macabre algorithms he created. It became black outside and he could not think any longer, his chest was heavy with two people's fear, so he crawled into the bed beside his brother and waited and slept if only for minutes. He had a quick, riotous dream where he was bleeding and could not stop, until everything got quieter, heavier, his body siphoned by the pillowing air till it was part of the pillowing air. He woke up not knowing what day it was till he saw Regulus's peaceful face, his features smudged in the dark. Sirius left the room.
(They're going to find me, Regulus said. I know, Sirius said.)
When he returned, after midnight, Sirius left the door open an angle so orange hall-light filtered in, in a weak gradient, cutting across the room but not the bed and not reaching Regulus's eyes. He did not wake up when Sirius kissed him. He did not wake up when Sirius drew his wand to Regulus's temple.