I Envy Not the Beast; Sirius/Regulus; R
Title: I Envy Not the Beast
Pairing: Sirius/Regulus, some Sirius/Remus
Rating: R
Warnings: Incest, (a spot of) non-con
Wordcout: 7,130
Notes: The title, one of the chapter headings, the text of the LJ cut, and many of the little poetic asides in this are references to poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all his friends, enemies, and relations belong to J.K. Rowling, and she can keep them. For that matter, I don't own the Tennyson either.
"I envy not the beast that takes
his license in the field of time."
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
nineteen seventy five
They are just boys, 14 and 13, stretched across a velvet coverlet, the first time it happens. The deep green of the bedding is gathering too much heat from the open window and the summer air is sticky, and Sirius wishes he could abandon Number 12, Grimmauld Place for the cooler, wider spaces of Gryffindor tower.
Regulus’s feet are gently pounding rhythms at the end of the bed; Sirius’s feet are on the pillow, next to Regulus’s face, because he’s never got the hang of doing things they way convention dictates. He is aware that they probably smell awful (his feet, that is: James always yells at him for stinking up the dorms when it starts to be summer, when none of them wear shoes except when they have to) but he can’t be bothered with such things. It’s his room, after all.
“Your feet are vile, Sirius,” Regulus says calmly, flipping a page forward in his book, and Sirius snorts and suggests that he move his face, then, because the feet aren’t going anywhere.
There is a moment of hesitation before Regulus’s eyes are at level with Sirius’ own. “Alright,” the younger Black drawls, having not looked up from the book in making the switch. Sirius hates him then: hates him for his easy grace (so fleeting in prepubescent boys), hates him for the smirk that plays across his lips, hates him for being younger and lighter and less of a Black sheep. Then the feeling is gone, and Sirius is staring at his little brother, whose eyes are open and wide, who has put down his book, who is not smirking at all (had he merely imagined it?) and it is painstakingly beautiful and heart-wrenchingly wrong.
Sirius kisses him.
Regulus kisses back.
It is summer, sticky and deep green, and brothers are rolling off the velvet coverlet and hoping their mother doesn’t find them.
♠
“We’re going to get caught,” Regulus hisses, pressed between his brother and a bookshelf. “I want to be a prefect next year and I’d rather not be-”
But Sirius doesn’t let him finish; Sirius doesn’t believe in following rules. He is pressing their lips together and sending furtive glances about the library and whispering something about never getting caught. Sirius is always saying that, saying he never gets caught, but it’s not true: Regulus has caught him, sure enough, caught him with his pants down and too attached and wrong.
It must be the thousandth time since summer: they had their birthdays (late August, both of them, always young for their years) and their first days and their secrets. Now they’re delaying the conversation about what will happen over Christmas, when Regulus will go and Sirius stay, about the inevitable schism that they must learn to build between them.
With his brother writhing against the bookshelf, face flushed with sweat like it is still July, pale skin contrasting brilliantly with his Black hair, Sirius almost wishes they could schism, like they are supposed to. He pines for the way things should have been…if only! They could pit against one another like fate would have insisted, Slytherin versus Gryffindor, loyalty versus morality.
This is not (Sirius believes) what fate would have insisted: this is not a story for the tapestries, this is not a family feud to be trumpeted and referenced and furthered for ages hence. This is (again, always) wrong, wrong like his Sorting, wrong like their mother’s wild eyes. Sirius knows the size and shape of Regulus’s cock almost as well as he knows the size and shape of his own, and wonders if it is a family thing, wonders if he will have children with freckled eyes and curved toes and hair darker than midnight. Wonders if he will have children at all.
“I’m going to come,” Regulus pants into his ear, and Sirius nods, readjusting his hand in his brother’s trousers to accommodate the sudden, sticky spilling. He whispers a cleaning spell as Regulus buries his hot face in his neck , waits until he feels muscles begin to tighten again, until he feels the heaving chest slow, to switch places.
Regulus lifts his head and Sirius can see the hate in his eyes, knows he is momentarily despised for his easy grace (so fleeting in prepubescent boys), for the smirk that plays across his lips, for being older and heavier and more of a Black sheep. Then Sirius sees the hatred fade, and he knows they are both caught up in the beauty of this, for all it is wrong.
“Don’t go,” Regulus says, pushing him away, and Sirius walks back to his tower with his hands curling to fists in his pockets.
nineteen seventy six
“You’re going to run, aren’t you.”
It isn’t a question, more a resigned statement of certainty, and Sirius nods reluctantly. He’d like to explain it to his brother (for my own sanity, you know she makes me crazy, I’m not who they want me to be, maybe it’s weak but…if they were like you I’d stay, if it was only you I’d stay, you can’t expect me to-it isn’t because I don’t love y--) but he knows it will be a waste of breath.
Regulus’s eyes are the color of the storm that is blossoming in the sky, and Sirius fists the grass beneath his fingers and wishes they were anywhere but their own backyard, where the windows will show their parents more than summer lightning. Being a tactile sort of person, Sirius wants to touch, to run traitorously aristocratic fingers across traitorously aristocratic cheekbones and apologize for his betrayal.
Regulus is not a tactile sort of person, Sirius knows, so he is caught by surprise when the boy launches at him, fury tangled and raw on his lips. They tussle unusually (which is to say: appropriately, which is to say: in the way in which brothers are supposed to tussle, which is to say: without caresses and low moans), and Sirius can feel the mud seeping through his clothes, can feel blood surfacing under his left eye where Regulus has hit him.
Thunder booms, and the storms breaks viciously over them. “I hate you,” Regulus gasps, though with the deafening sounds from the sky the second word might have been “love”-Sirius can’t tell. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” and Sirius hates him too, for the water on his cheeks that might or might not be rain and for the sudden loss of his easy grace, his patented smirk, and for being all at once so little and so much a reminder of everything he’s ever felt about his family.
Then their mother is calling, shrieking at them for ruining their clothes and for fighting (but mostly, tacitly, for allowing Regulus to get dirty along with Sirius, Regulus who is the better of the two), and as they walk inside not speaking they both know Sirius will go tonight.
Sirius scowls.
Regulus scowls back.
There is something more to be said, but Sirius is too tactile to know the words. They walk in because their mother calls them, and Sirius writes everything he means on a piece of parchment that he doesn’t leave behind.
♠
This is the closest they’ve been to each other since the night he ran, and Sirius thinks idly that he will have to punch Regulus more often, because he needs the excuse. This is a dungeon hallway, Slytherin territory, and that fact alone fills Sirius (who lives for danger) with a heady rush. Then again, Sirius (who lives for attention) is garnering a sensation just as heady from this physical deviation, this breech of their unspoken non-communicative agreement.
He recalls that his brother had said something rough, something unkind, about Remus, but beyond that he is lost; they are pressed together and there is blood pouring from the corner of Regulus’s lip and Sirius is besieged by the hot, awful desire to lick it. To hide this, he says something rough and unkind, an inquiry about home and Mother and whether anyone’s died yet, and Regulus smirks through the blood, hardens his eyes.
“Like you care, traitor,” Sirius hears, calm and biting, and for once he doesn’t react. Regulus is right: he is a traitor. Not to his mother or his father, of course, but to the blood that courses through his veins, the blood that pours from his brother’s mouth. He wonders at the sticking power of such things, the power of blood to trap him, always, in places he doesn’t want to be, but then Regulus is curling his upper lip and leaning close, so Sirius doesn’t wonder anymore.
It is warm and too sticky, salty (like tears and seed-it’s not fair, that such things should be as saline as the ocean, that each separate drop should taste too strong of memories and regrets)-Sirius remembers belatedly that each kiss they share is tainted with the faint taste of incongruity, of incest, and does not brace himself for it. Regulus’s inherent closeness rides waves of shame on his tongue and against his teeth, and then, if only to escape the awful sensation, Sirius is pushing them, gasping, into an empty classroom.
They’ve never fucked before, in all their fumblings. It seemed the final line, somehow, the one that could not be crossed without solidifying this unholy act. Sirius doesn’t think about that now; Regulus is bent over a hardwood desk with his trousers down, his shirt askew, it is harsh and tight and there might be blood because there’s always blood. And he’s growling, Regulus is growling, maybe they’re all canine, and he’s swearing so far under his breath that Sirius is sure he’s imagining it until he gives one final thrust and Regulus yells “Fuck” and flails like he’s drowning but fighting to surface.
The waves of Sirius’s orgasm are as shameful as the waves of his kiss, and he overcomes his bones (which would rather slide into oblivion and abandon him) to step unceremoniously from his brother and towards the door. Regulus looks up, and though he is sprawled and utterly undignified, his eyes are clear. “Traitor,” he repeats, and Sirius nods and slips out the door, biting his thumb as it clicks shut.
nineteen seventy seven
They’re in the library again. They haven’t met since the night in the dungeons, preferring the relative safety of avoidance and silence; now Sirius wishes they’d never ventured back. This place holds too much of Remus, Remus whom he has betrayed, Remus whom he has exposed, Remus who has forgiven him fantastically and involving his tongue. Remus, to whom he is not related. Remus, whom he is about to betray again.
Regulus’ face is always so pale. Remus’ would be too, reflected in this same moonlight, his head knocking against Tennyson and Keats (except that Remus wouldn’t be knocking against Tennyson and Keats, Remus would be demanding they not go that far here, really, Sirius, do you not have any sense of propriety, I have to do my homework here, if Pince catches us I’ll never come back and then you won’t have my homework to copy and oh, that feels good--).
Sirius stares at the book spine rather than at his brother and thinks of their childhood. He remembers their father reading to them from this very book, this particular volume of Tennyson, remembers hearing him explain the tragedy of such a brilliant wizard passing himself off as an inferior Muggle. Sirius had thought it rubbish, even then, but hadn’t complained; Orion had spoken of the sea in rich tones, read the words of the brilliant wizard who had lowered himself, and it was (though he was too young to understand) beautiful.
Regulus isn’t beautiful anymore, not the way he was the first time. It’s all too tainted; Sirius can’t look at him without guilt rising like bile in the back of his throat. It has caught them, as they knew it would. And yet-
-yet there is something still powerful and blazing in Regulus’ eyes, something still burning Black in his hair. Sirius hates him like he used to, just for a moment, for everything he’s ever been and everything he will be. He hates him and he doesn’t, and he says “I love you,” which is wrong; fraternal love has tangled with another kind, a darker kind, so that the words (which air so rarely) sound stilted and obscure.
Regulus gives him a cool, calculating stare, and replies “But you won’t again.” It is not a question, but Sirius nods anyway, keeping his eyes wide and focused though he’d rather look away. Regulus merely tilts his head and turns to leave, his hair still mussed from pounding against the Tennyson.
And then, with the reckless abandon that casually overshadows all his other flaws, Sirius grabs his brother by the arm, asks him (desperate) if he remembers Father and the days by the fire and the words of the ocean.
“Break, break, break,” Regulus whispers, “On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! / And I would that my tongue could utter/the thoughts that arise in me.”
There is a brief stutter in time, and Sirius feels the world rotate in shards beneath his feet. He allows his eyes to lock with his brother’s and breathes the mad intensity that is their common ground. Words would be futile, but it is clear that they communicate the same dread aloneness, the same reverberation of a sounding into the breach. Then the moment is past, and Regulus is gone, a reluctant witness to the formation of a chasm as ancient as time.
nineteen seventy eight
Sirius’ Leaving Ball is marred by the same thing Sirius’ seventh year has been marred by: war. War, war. James and Evans speak of it in the way they cling to each other on the dance floor; Remus speaks of it by pressing his fingers into the small of Sirius’ back. Peter speaks of it by glancing around like a rat, like he is being followed, and Sirius does not speak of it at all.
There are reasons for this, reasons for his quiet refusal to acknowledge the swell of disaster that everyone can see and hear and taste: Sirius cannot imagine fighting for the same sign as his brother, but he cannot imagine fighting for the opposite side, either. He knows how it will pit out, in the end, knows that this silent year they have passed is part of the inevitable schism that has finally overtaken them, but that doesn’t make him like it; he shrugs Remus’s fingers away and pulls him out of the Great Hall. They find a closet and they snog for England and it is not enough, and it is not enough when Remus moans under him, arching against a broom handle, it is not enough when Remus gasps his name. Sirius smiles and kisses delicately and makes his excuses, and then he runs through the hallways and down the stairs, because running is a particular talent of his, because running he has always been good at.
Regulus is leaning against a stone wall and smoking what looks like a cigarette. Sirius wonders if it is a Muggle or wizarding brand, wonders where his brother got it. He does not ask, slowing his steps, waiting for Regulus to notice his presence and react.
It is utterly bizarre, the way they relate to each other. Sirius has his right sleeve balled in his fist as Regulus takes a slow drag from the cigarette. “I’ll join him, when the time comes,” Regulus says, eventually, and Sirius nods with all the righteous fury he can muster. Then (because they are, in the end, brothers, and because Sirius is, in the end, a physical being, and mostly because it is the end, has been the end, will always be the end) Sirius shoves Regulus backwards into the nearest wall.
“Don’t touch me,” Regulus sneers, and then “Don’t touch me,” again, without any real rancor. Neither of them notices the round burn his half-smoked cigarette is leaving on Sirius’s arm, though Sirius feels the heat and imagines they are burning through their outer shells to become the stars for which they were named. “Who do you think you are,” Regulus gasps, even though they both know the answer. Sirius is a Black, and Regulus is a Black, and blood, despite the best efforts of those bound by it, is permanent.
When Sirius brings their mouths together it is not a kiss as much as a brand; he will mark his brother before the Dark Lord does, mark him with history and pain and inherent Black power of the worst kind. He shoves his tongue forward and touches every surface, feeling something like fire course through his veins and set him aflame. The incident in the library, those words, wrong on his tongue (Love I and You, in unfathomable order) seems but a myth, a broken memory long since faded-Sirius knows he will never say it again, cannot remember why he’d wanted to.
He steps back, shaking, staring, and sees uncertainty in Regulus’s eyes for the first time in years. He contemplates spitting something, something biting and harsh, something worthy of the name he is still forced to carry, but opts for silence instead, running up the stairs towards Remus and clean air and light.
nineteen seventy nine
Sirius does not attend his father’s funeral. He does not send flowers or condolences. He does not deliver the leather-bound volume of Tennyson he spent hours looking for in second-hand bookstores, though it looks and smells like the ocean. He does not owl, visit, or offer assistance. He does not cry.
He does spend several nights leaning against the side of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, wrapped in James’ invisibility cloak. There is no logic to this, none at all, but James doesn’t ask questions when he takes the cloak and Lily looks at him with terrible pity, and it’s the only thing he knows how to do, so he does it.
When he runs into Regulus one morning, he is shamelessly disheveled and not inclined to explain. The cloak has slipped over his knees in the night, and Sirius knows how he must look-a torso too familiar with nothing to indicate that there were ever legs attached, leaning against the side of a house he abandoned once. Neither brother inquires as to the other’s health, wellbeing, or sanity, and they have both mostly forgotten what it means to be intimate, to be close. It is only reluctantly that Sirius notices the startling change in his brother’s physique; once merely lithe, (the younger Black has evolved into someone gaunt and haggard. They pointedly do not look at each other, but Regulus eventually slumps against the wall, matching Sirius’s angle, if not his posture.
Sirius lights a cigarette with resignation, smoking easily and too hard. Regulus looks at him with something that might once have been curiosity and follows suit, and Sirius doesn’t comment. They sit in quiet contemplation until the smoke fades, and then, without anything better to do, they each light another.
There is little to be said between enemies, less between brothers months estranged, and Sirius doesn’t think he could speak if he wanted to. Then a dry laugh breaks the silence between them, and he absently glances over to the source of the sound. He remembers, too late, that he shouldn’t-Regulus’s gaze is as captivating as it once was, and Sirius can’t bring himself to look away.
“You’re doing alright, then,” he says, forcing his eyes shut. He means it as a question, but he doesn’t finish the linguistic arc that would make it one; he doesn’t really want to know the answer. Regulus emits that same strange, dry laugh but doesn’t reply, and Sirius’s relief is almost sickening.
“He died in his sleep,” Regulus says, finally, his voice hoarse but without emotion. Sirius nods, twisting strands of grass between his fingers. “I don’t think-“ Regulus coughs, once, twice, and continues, “I don’t think he would have wanted you here.”
The silence descends like a blanket, and does not lift for the hour they spend staring blankly at anything but each other.
“I’m a Black,” Regulus says finally, like it means something, brushing invisible dirt from his immaculate clothes as he stands to walk inside.
There are a thousand things Sirius could reply, but he doesn’t say them-he was always a tactile kind of person. He grabs Regulus’s hand instead, and is filled with a sad kind of certainty when his lip curls in involuntary disgust.
“Don’t,” Regulus hisses, “touch me,” and Sirius lets go.
♠
(Regulus dies on a Sunday, two days before the New Year. Sirius wishes he’d lasted until Tuesday, so that they could have at least put “1980” on his tombstone.)
When Sirius is told, Remus isn’t home, and James and Evans are…off, and Peter wouldn’t be much help in any case. Consequentially, Sirius empties not one but two bottles of Firewhiskey, attempting to drown his sorrows. He wishes he could cauterize his memories with the drink, which burns like Regulus’s tongue did in his mouth that last time, oh, how they’ll never again…
When Remus returns (Sirius doesn’t know what time it is, doesn’t know what day or week it is, knows only that Regulus is dead and he is sad, so sad, too sad to breathe) Sirius is curled up on the couch, gripping an empty bottle and trembling. “Sirius!” Remus gasps, shocked, horrified, and Sirius laughs. It is a cold, hollow sound, spanning years and speaking of schisms never mentioned anymore. He laughs and laughs, and Remus must realize what has happened, must Floo someone and ask, because soon he is prying the bottle from Sirius’s hands and pulling him close and whispering something unintelligible.
This is not, this is not-Sirius wants Black comfort, wants Regulus’ cold, detached voice telling him to stop with this ridiculousness already. But there will never be another chance at Black comfort, at Black…lovelessness…because he is what is left, now, and he burns too brightly to offer it.
Remus’ hands are rubbing warm circles on Sirius’s back and Sirius remembers that he chose this, that he wanted this Gryffindor…love…and goddamn it he doesn’t regret it; still, it is right and in this moment Sirius wants wrong, wants tainted and unspeakable. He grips the ends of Remus’ shirt and buries his face in Remus’ neck and sobs until his chest aches, until he is as empty as his bottle and his family, until he can’t remember what air tastes like without the subtle lacing of (tear blood ocean) salt-flavor.
“I love you,” Remus whispers, sounding helpless and terrified and wonderfully, heart-wrenchingly sincere, “I love you, I’m not leaving,” and Sirius hates that this is what he wants to hear, that this is almost as good as Regulus’ voice would be. He moans and lets himself fall asleep in Remus’ arms and has broken dreams, dreams that show only dark hair and pale skin and blood-dreams that feel like fratricide.
nineteen eighty
Harry is born in the wee hours of a Thursday morning, the arse end of July, and Lily’s wild bright hair is the exact color of heat. Sirius knows this to be true because it is the kind of revelation one only comes to when drunk, and Sirius is very drunk. Remus, too, is utterly sloshed, and Peter threw up in that elderly woman’s lap in the lobby, and James, despite having imbibed in none of the celebratory liquor, is the most inebriated of them all.
Lily is muttering something about miscreants and beaming, and James is beaming, and Sirius wants to kill someone. Hug them first, perhaps, and then maybe some dancing, singing, general joy-then death. Quick, immediate death. The world is out of balance when a small, gurgling bubble of flesh can ease seven months of cavernous aching, when there is a baby, not even HIS baby, that makes him want to grow up.
Grinning, Sirius takes James’ hand and pumps it emphatically, jumps up and down, and sits, knowing that if he stands for much longer the desire to be physically exuberant will overwhelm him and he will punch something. Lily looks as though she might pass out from exhaustion and happiness, and Remus has that sappy, drunken smile plastered across his face-that one that means he’s happy. They’ve none of them been this relaxed in months, not since…Oh, god, James is holding that baby, Prongs is a father, and this realization is so wonderfully bizarre that Sirius bursts out laughing.
And then a scream, short but brutal, pierces the façade of normalcy they’d almost cemented and mingles with Sirius’ dying laugh. The shift is immediate-James passes the baby to Lily and goes for his wand, Sirius stands so quickly he knocks over his chair, Remus casts sobriety spells on them all. Peter runs to the door as a grey faced Mediwizard bursts in, apologizes, asks for help, and the moment is shattered the way Sirius hoped it wouldn’t be.
The worst of it is that they’re still fighting, always fighting, and Sirius kills three people in black hoods just thinking about Lily’s hair. He wonders what would have happened if Regulus had lasted, if maybe fratricide would have been a reality rather than a concept, but then James is down so Sirius doesn’t think anymore.
♠
Sirius takes to laughing awkwardly, hollowly, at odd times. He knows it worries Remus when he falls into fits of mirth as he comes, throwing his head back and barking out a noise that sounds more animal then human, but he can’t help it. The grief is lurking just under the surface, waiting to climb up and strangle him, and the irony is choking and hysterical.
The moon rises full, bright over Sirius’s dark hair, and Remus is the traitor. It is the most obvious thing in the world, and the harshest, the most cosmically balanced betrayal imaginable. Of course, of course such treachery (Regulus, an echo cold and hollow like the laughter, caught in Sirius’s throat) would be served back to him, of course those calm golden eyes, chosen for their love, would hide…
(A voice that is just a shade more than familiar whispers “Break, break,”; a voice that is just a shade less than loving whispers “the tender grace of a day that is dead,”)
The sex is better because it feels more like the illicit days, before-and when-Sirius can’t think. He can’t think over the squall of Lily and James’ infant, can’t think over the deafening roar of all the silence, can’t think at all. It is winter and it is freezing and the sky is overflowing with the light from the wide orb and Moony is changing and Sirius is running but it will never be far enough.
nineteen eighty one
It’s strange, but under the burning anger, there is some comfort in the knowledge that he had been wrong all along. The heat from the fire feels deliciously, disastrously too intense for Halloween, though the creeping sense of horror is much worse than any Sirius has felt before. He knows too well what lies beyond the thick sable smoke, knows all he will find if he stays are the charred remains of those he dared to call family, those he dared stamp as related despite their different bloods.
Of course, he does not intend to stay-he knows his hands are already as dirty as Wormtail’s, that his treachery, however nobly intended, was treachery all the same. Oh, Remus, Sirius thinks, and then screams, howling sobbing on his knees in the burning ash to the sky, why, why, oh god, fucking fucking bastard of a god why-
But Sirius knows why. Sirius knows everything, now. This is the last act of an obvious tragedy, the bit where the less intelligent members of the audience gasp as they begin to understand the events that have come before. Sirius is not an unintelligent audience member-he is not an audience member at all-and the irony of this is thick on his tongue. Those signs he should have seen were muted and lost as he pursued his own pain, as he quietly allowed himself to be wrapped in his own plotline.
And now there is only one thing to do, and Sirius knows that too, knows his final task and what it will cost him. Remus will probably never understand, will probably carry the cross of Sirius’ betrayal to the end of his days, and that is almost wrong enough to overcome duty, and not wrong enough at all. In the end it comes back to blood, to requirements and the law of things, and while Sirius did his best to escape, there are some shackles never broken.
A Potter is dead, but a Black avenges.
(license in the field of time)
The darkness of Azkaban, while consuming, does not offer the immediate mental cleansing Sirius had imagined it might. The process of becoming mad, as it turns out, is a slow descent rather than an instantaneous jolt. There is no switch Sirius can flip, no happy button he can push to make it all fade in the face of hysteria; rather, he is forced to notice with horror that he monitors his own fingernail growth and gnaws at his wrists in his sleep.
The dreams are unbearable, but being awake is like dreaming, a thick coat of unreality draped over the torment of guilty memories. The faces begin appearing during Sirius’ waking hours about three weeks after his sentencing, jumping out from the stone walls in hazy, impossible shapes. At the beginning of the second month, they become recognizable-Lily, James, Remus, Wormtail, Harry. Sirius has stopped counting the days when they begin to talk. Remus cries, always (it’s worst when he tries not to, when he tries to be angry and breaks halfway) and Wormtail taunts. James is accusatory, angry, and Lily is brokenhearted. Harry does nothing but scream, loud and unbroken, a reminder of the parents, family, life he betrayed, and Sirius waits for Regulus’s face but it doesn’t show up.
At some point, long after Sirius has forgotten what time means, a woman is placed in the cell with him. “Cousin,” she hisses, wide mad flashing eyes like snakes staring him down from across the divide. “Traitor,” she spits, and for the second time in his life Sirius spends days laughing madly at the irony. Oh, that this woman, this creature this murderess this bitch, that she should know his innocence, that she should rot with him until the end of both their days.
Except that it’s not Bellatrix who rots with from Sirius, in the end. Bellatrix begins to fade after only a few hours (days months years who can tell), and of course it was all a cunning disguise because Sirius knows those feature, knows that face. He realizes now why his brother’s eyes have not haunted him, why Regulus has not come to him in his dreams. He’s here, fleshandblood not dead, with longer hair but it’s the right bone structure and that deep hatred blooming in his irises can’t be wrong.
“Brother,” Sirius says, carnality caught on his tongue between his teeth, “come to me, Brother,” and Regulus resists, squirms away.
“Filthy blood traitor, vile scum, don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” Regulus is hissing, so much the Slytherin, and Sirius had forgotten just how feminine the curve of his hips could be, had forgotten the swell of his chest that feels like breasts. There’s something so wrong about it, just like school, wrong and too close, and also not like school because Regulus’s body is different and softer and harder too. Sirius misses the long length pressed against his thigh, the throbbing need of familial largeness, but this cavity that’s grown is good too, a good place to bury himself.
“No, no, no, no, stop no” and Regulus fights so hard for something he wants, fights so hard to make himself feel again, poor dead brother can still scratch and bite and scream with the best of them can’t he oh, oh, Sirius is filling him and pushing hard enough to break him. He hopes he does break him, hopes he breaks himself, and even as he comes there are the faces staring at him-Lily James Remus Peter Harry and now Regulus, only Regulus’s face is real, revolted and tear crusted and bloody and bitten.
“I hate you,” Regulus spits, and Sirius grins at him and nods and falls asleep and dreams like always and it burns to close his eyes just as it much as it burns to open them, and he hears someone keening over and over again it feels like rape, and he’s a traitor still.
♠
He wakes up once, some day (month year era who can tell) that is as black as ever and Regulus is gone and Sirius wants to cry, but he doesn’t remember how.
♠
He doesn’t mean to turn into Padfoot. He’s actually-well, he’s forgotten about Padfoot in favor of decomposing slowly into sick mad emptiness, and he’s dreaming of that battle, the one where Remus had run off and Sirius had been so angry because he was the traitor and so he’d transformed to run faster and follow and-
He wakes up…not in pain. Not with faces taunting him on the wall, not staring at his own hands like they are foreign and strange. He wakes up uncomplicated and panting and wondering what has happened, and also furry. And he isn’t cold, and he isn’t quite so alone, and he isn’t gnawing on that wide raw spot on his wrist, either.
He stays as Padfoot for a long, long time. When he changes back, it isn’t so difficult to say his own name, and it isn’t so difficult to remember numbers and letters and words. Sirius teaches himself to speak again slowly, practicing in the constant darkness and transforming when it all starts to blur again.
Cornelius Fudge is his first test. “I think I raped someone at some point in here, you bastard, this isn’t humanity,” is not a particularly constructive thing to say, so Sirius asks him for his newspaper instead. He plans to spend days relearning to read, but he doesn’t have the time-because that’s Peter, that’s Peter and he’s going to get Harry.
It’s easier to think when he’s got a mission, because it feels like it only takes Sirius a minute to read the word Hogwarts and plan an escape. The cool salt water tastes like blood, feels new, soothing, in Padfoot’s fur.
nineteen ninety three
Sirius (who has never, never understood the reasons behind the rules) is the library. He knows he shouldn’t be, that the easiest way to get caught is to linger like this, but he couldn’t not stop and remember, if only for a moment.
This place should make him think of Remus-who turns out to be teaching here, how funny, Sirius can smell him everywhere and laughs with a thick snorting sound-but it doesn’t. Remus is but a faint echo here, deafened as always by the howls of family and blood. It’s the memory of thick dark hair (so like his own) thumping against the Tennyson and Keats, it’s the sweet sick taste of Black saliva, it’s his shaking hands reminding him of all that he was and wasn’t as a child.
Sirius wishes in an obscure kind of way that Regulus had survived, and is obscenely glad he didn’t. After all, Sirius mostly didn’t survive--there’s so little left, now, of the reckless teenager that shoved his own brother into bookcases and pulled him off where anyone could have seen. This reckless adult that remains, sprawled naked across two tables because Padfoot doesn’t take clothes with him, this fugitive with haunted eyes is no one’s brother.
Sirius can hear mice scurrying in the walls and under his feet and resists the urge to catch one and eat it. Regulus would not have liked that impulse, and Remus would have understood it, and neither of them would have been able to watch him do it. Oh, these tangled webs, the irony of it all, (and it must be said that the idea that Sirius could have escaped Azkaban without going at least almost entirely mad is utter, utter folly).
“Break, break, break,” Sirius whispers, and transforms back to Padfoot before someone can follow his voice, can send him back to hell.
nineteen ninety five
Things Sirius missed in Azkaban include (but are not limited to) nicotine, and he smokes like a chimney at Grimmauld Place. Remus doesn’t like it, and Molly won’t let him do it in front of the children, and Dumbledore just smiles like he knows anything at all, which he doesn’t. Sirius respects Dumbledore more than he has, perhaps, ever respected anyone, but that doesn’t mean the man knows what he’s asking-what it means, what does to him to be in this house.
Once-before-there was a portrait on the second floor landing, painted of Sirius and Regulus the summer before Sirius left for Hogwarts. He’d hated it when he was younger, hated it like he’d hated everything here, but he wants to see it now with a fierce and desperate aching. He searches the basement and the attic and when he finally finds it under the bed in Regulus’s room, spared from his mother’s vengeful wrath, he doesn’t cry but he wants to.
The Regulus in the portrait is a tiny, inquisitive fellow, looking with wide eyes between his painted brother and his destroyed one. “But you-you’re not serious! You can’t be--” he gasps, appalled, when Sirius tells them who he is; for a moment, they all refuse to say anything at all. Regulus stares out of his frame in horror and then buries his face in his sibling’s painted shirt, and the younger Sirius throws a protective arm around his brother and tells himself to get the fuck out.
They are so realistic that it burns, and Sirius remembers that Regulus had lost the tendency to bury his face in his shirt while Sirius was at school. And he remembers that Christmas too, that first Christmas back, when Regulus hadn’t know how to be with him and his parents were frigid and cruel and Sirius had wanted to yell “I couldn’t help it,” but instead had yelled “I wouldn’t have helped it if I could have.” Oh, and Sirius remembers the feeling, how that was his first time being a traitor, that Christmas when he came home swathed in red and gold.
Sirius waits up one night for Remus, who is tired and sick and needs to sleep, and drags him up to his childhood bedroom. Sirius hasn’t slept here a single night, hasn’t even opened the door, but there’s something he needs to do, so he spells the dust off the deep green velvet coverlet. He pushes Remus down on the bed and then lies down next to him, the opposite way, with his feet on the pillow next to Remus’s face. He doesn’t say anything but holds his breath and there is something cold and dark seeping into his bones and he wants to scream shatter shake-
“Your feet are vile, Sirius,” Remus says, almost sadly, and Sirius wants to cry, so he does.
nineteen ninety six
Sirius wakes up and knows he is going to die. It’s not a pressing sense of anything, not a desperate bid for life on the part of his body; it’s just a sense, for the first time in his life, that he is mortal and he will perish. Even in Azkaban, when he longed for death on the coldest nights, when deep madness ran through his veins and whispered his futility and his loss-even then, Sirius had known in some small part of himself that he was going to live, and now he doesn’t know at all.
“Moony,” says Sirius to Remus, who is curled on the other side of the bed because prison cured Sirius of being a tactile kind of person, changed him someone ill equipped to handle the touch of another body, “Moony, I’m going to die.”
Remus looks at him with wide, fierce eyes and says “Sirius, no you’re not,” with a conviction he wouldn’t have had, once. Sirius wonders what could have happened to the boy he loved, what could have made him into this hard, practical man, and then remembers: I did.
“No, not-not today,” says Sirius, gesturing madly with his hands, “or at least probably not today but, you know, eventually. Someday I too shall cease my prattling.”
Sirius can see the tension seep out of Remus’s shoulders, and for a moment he looks like that boy, the one who was only tainted because Sirius had tainted him. “Oh,” Remus says, wrinkling his nose, “well, yeah, Padfoot, of course you,” and Sirius kisses him, firmly, without thinking of Azkaban or guilt or Regulus or any of it. For the first time in weeks they don’t go downstairs to sit, awkward and silent, in front of the fire.
♠
Harry is going to die and it will be my fault, Sirius thinks, and the rage is so blinding that it drowns that strange mortality he woke with. Harry is going to die like James died, like Regulus died, and I didn’t kill Peter and it will be my fault. He knows nothing but the anger and it feels good, it feels like being 17 and 18 and 19 again, he has an enemy and he will destroy them.
He’s laughing and he can feel the rough spot on his cheek where Remus hit him this morning, when he insisted on coming along. That had been…unusual, Remus hitting him, with wells of color lighting up his eyes and in Sirius’ own bedroom. Hadn’t stopped him coming, of course, and had reminded him of the days when he was tactile, and also of Regulus, who is advancing on him now with a wand.
Only that isn’t Regulus, that’s Bellatrix, stirring faint memories of something…strange…with her dark hair and empty eyes and high cheekbones. I’m going to die, Sirius realizes again, only with a more dire, immediate spin, and he laughs and fires a curse at his cousin who looks like his brother.
“Avada Kedavra,” Bellatrix snarls, but then she curls her lip, and it’s Regulus again, Regulus always and forever, watching him as he cascades backward and through the veil.
Pairing: Sirius/Regulus, some Sirius/Remus
Rating: R
Warnings: Incest, (a spot of) non-con
Wordcout: 7,130
Notes: The title, one of the chapter headings, the text of the LJ cut, and many of the little poetic asides in this are references to poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all his friends, enemies, and relations belong to J.K. Rowling, and she can keep them. For that matter, I don't own the Tennyson either.
"I envy not the beast that takes
his license in the field of time."
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson
nineteen seventy five
They are just boys, 14 and 13, stretched across a velvet coverlet, the first time it happens. The deep green of the bedding is gathering too much heat from the open window and the summer air is sticky, and Sirius wishes he could abandon Number 12, Grimmauld Place for the cooler, wider spaces of Gryffindor tower.
Regulus’s feet are gently pounding rhythms at the end of the bed; Sirius’s feet are on the pillow, next to Regulus’s face, because he’s never got the hang of doing things they way convention dictates. He is aware that they probably smell awful (his feet, that is: James always yells at him for stinking up the dorms when it starts to be summer, when none of them wear shoes except when they have to) but he can’t be bothered with such things. It’s his room, after all.
“Your feet are vile, Sirius,” Regulus says calmly, flipping a page forward in his book, and Sirius snorts and suggests that he move his face, then, because the feet aren’t going anywhere.
There is a moment of hesitation before Regulus’s eyes are at level with Sirius’ own. “Alright,” the younger Black drawls, having not looked up from the book in making the switch. Sirius hates him then: hates him for his easy grace (so fleeting in prepubescent boys), hates him for the smirk that plays across his lips, hates him for being younger and lighter and less of a Black sheep. Then the feeling is gone, and Sirius is staring at his little brother, whose eyes are open and wide, who has put down his book, who is not smirking at all (had he merely imagined it?) and it is painstakingly beautiful and heart-wrenchingly wrong.
Sirius kisses him.
Regulus kisses back.
It is summer, sticky and deep green, and brothers are rolling off the velvet coverlet and hoping their mother doesn’t find them.
♠
“We’re going to get caught,” Regulus hisses, pressed between his brother and a bookshelf. “I want to be a prefect next year and I’d rather not be-”
But Sirius doesn’t let him finish; Sirius doesn’t believe in following rules. He is pressing their lips together and sending furtive glances about the library and whispering something about never getting caught. Sirius is always saying that, saying he never gets caught, but it’s not true: Regulus has caught him, sure enough, caught him with his pants down and too attached and wrong.
It must be the thousandth time since summer: they had their birthdays (late August, both of them, always young for their years) and their first days and their secrets. Now they’re delaying the conversation about what will happen over Christmas, when Regulus will go and Sirius stay, about the inevitable schism that they must learn to build between them.
With his brother writhing against the bookshelf, face flushed with sweat like it is still July, pale skin contrasting brilliantly with his Black hair, Sirius almost wishes they could schism, like they are supposed to. He pines for the way things should have been…if only! They could pit against one another like fate would have insisted, Slytherin versus Gryffindor, loyalty versus morality.
This is not (Sirius believes) what fate would have insisted: this is not a story for the tapestries, this is not a family feud to be trumpeted and referenced and furthered for ages hence. This is (again, always) wrong, wrong like his Sorting, wrong like their mother’s wild eyes. Sirius knows the size and shape of Regulus’s cock almost as well as he knows the size and shape of his own, and wonders if it is a family thing, wonders if he will have children with freckled eyes and curved toes and hair darker than midnight. Wonders if he will have children at all.
“I’m going to come,” Regulus pants into his ear, and Sirius nods, readjusting his hand in his brother’s trousers to accommodate the sudden, sticky spilling. He whispers a cleaning spell as Regulus buries his hot face in his neck , waits until he feels muscles begin to tighten again, until he feels the heaving chest slow, to switch places.
Regulus lifts his head and Sirius can see the hate in his eyes, knows he is momentarily despised for his easy grace (so fleeting in prepubescent boys), for the smirk that plays across his lips, for being older and heavier and more of a Black sheep. Then Sirius sees the hatred fade, and he knows they are both caught up in the beauty of this, for all it is wrong.
“Don’t go,” Regulus says, pushing him away, and Sirius walks back to his tower with his hands curling to fists in his pockets.
nineteen seventy six
“You’re going to run, aren’t you.”
It isn’t a question, more a resigned statement of certainty, and Sirius nods reluctantly. He’d like to explain it to his brother (for my own sanity, you know she makes me crazy, I’m not who they want me to be, maybe it’s weak but…if they were like you I’d stay, if it was only you I’d stay, you can’t expect me to-it isn’t because I don’t love y--) but he knows it will be a waste of breath.
Regulus’s eyes are the color of the storm that is blossoming in the sky, and Sirius fists the grass beneath his fingers and wishes they were anywhere but their own backyard, where the windows will show their parents more than summer lightning. Being a tactile sort of person, Sirius wants to touch, to run traitorously aristocratic fingers across traitorously aristocratic cheekbones and apologize for his betrayal.
Regulus is not a tactile sort of person, Sirius knows, so he is caught by surprise when the boy launches at him, fury tangled and raw on his lips. They tussle unusually (which is to say: appropriately, which is to say: in the way in which brothers are supposed to tussle, which is to say: without caresses and low moans), and Sirius can feel the mud seeping through his clothes, can feel blood surfacing under his left eye where Regulus has hit him.
Thunder booms, and the storms breaks viciously over them. “I hate you,” Regulus gasps, though with the deafening sounds from the sky the second word might have been “love”-Sirius can’t tell. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” and Sirius hates him too, for the water on his cheeks that might or might not be rain and for the sudden loss of his easy grace, his patented smirk, and for being all at once so little and so much a reminder of everything he’s ever felt about his family.
Then their mother is calling, shrieking at them for ruining their clothes and for fighting (but mostly, tacitly, for allowing Regulus to get dirty along with Sirius, Regulus who is the better of the two), and as they walk inside not speaking they both know Sirius will go tonight.
Sirius scowls.
Regulus scowls back.
There is something more to be said, but Sirius is too tactile to know the words. They walk in because their mother calls them, and Sirius writes everything he means on a piece of parchment that he doesn’t leave behind.
♠
This is the closest they’ve been to each other since the night he ran, and Sirius thinks idly that he will have to punch Regulus more often, because he needs the excuse. This is a dungeon hallway, Slytherin territory, and that fact alone fills Sirius (who lives for danger) with a heady rush. Then again, Sirius (who lives for attention) is garnering a sensation just as heady from this physical deviation, this breech of their unspoken non-communicative agreement.
He recalls that his brother had said something rough, something unkind, about Remus, but beyond that he is lost; they are pressed together and there is blood pouring from the corner of Regulus’s lip and Sirius is besieged by the hot, awful desire to lick it. To hide this, he says something rough and unkind, an inquiry about home and Mother and whether anyone’s died yet, and Regulus smirks through the blood, hardens his eyes.
“Like you care, traitor,” Sirius hears, calm and biting, and for once he doesn’t react. Regulus is right: he is a traitor. Not to his mother or his father, of course, but to the blood that courses through his veins, the blood that pours from his brother’s mouth. He wonders at the sticking power of such things, the power of blood to trap him, always, in places he doesn’t want to be, but then Regulus is curling his upper lip and leaning close, so Sirius doesn’t wonder anymore.
It is warm and too sticky, salty (like tears and seed-it’s not fair, that such things should be as saline as the ocean, that each separate drop should taste too strong of memories and regrets)-Sirius remembers belatedly that each kiss they share is tainted with the faint taste of incongruity, of incest, and does not brace himself for it. Regulus’s inherent closeness rides waves of shame on his tongue and against his teeth, and then, if only to escape the awful sensation, Sirius is pushing them, gasping, into an empty classroom.
They’ve never fucked before, in all their fumblings. It seemed the final line, somehow, the one that could not be crossed without solidifying this unholy act. Sirius doesn’t think about that now; Regulus is bent over a hardwood desk with his trousers down, his shirt askew, it is harsh and tight and there might be blood because there’s always blood. And he’s growling, Regulus is growling, maybe they’re all canine, and he’s swearing so far under his breath that Sirius is sure he’s imagining it until he gives one final thrust and Regulus yells “Fuck” and flails like he’s drowning but fighting to surface.
The waves of Sirius’s orgasm are as shameful as the waves of his kiss, and he overcomes his bones (which would rather slide into oblivion and abandon him) to step unceremoniously from his brother and towards the door. Regulus looks up, and though he is sprawled and utterly undignified, his eyes are clear. “Traitor,” he repeats, and Sirius nods and slips out the door, biting his thumb as it clicks shut.
nineteen seventy seven
They’re in the library again. They haven’t met since the night in the dungeons, preferring the relative safety of avoidance and silence; now Sirius wishes they’d never ventured back. This place holds too much of Remus, Remus whom he has betrayed, Remus whom he has exposed, Remus who has forgiven him fantastically and involving his tongue. Remus, to whom he is not related. Remus, whom he is about to betray again.
Regulus’ face is always so pale. Remus’ would be too, reflected in this same moonlight, his head knocking against Tennyson and Keats (except that Remus wouldn’t be knocking against Tennyson and Keats, Remus would be demanding they not go that far here, really, Sirius, do you not have any sense of propriety, I have to do my homework here, if Pince catches us I’ll never come back and then you won’t have my homework to copy and oh, that feels good--).
Sirius stares at the book spine rather than at his brother and thinks of their childhood. He remembers their father reading to them from this very book, this particular volume of Tennyson, remembers hearing him explain the tragedy of such a brilliant wizard passing himself off as an inferior Muggle. Sirius had thought it rubbish, even then, but hadn’t complained; Orion had spoken of the sea in rich tones, read the words of the brilliant wizard who had lowered himself, and it was (though he was too young to understand) beautiful.
Regulus isn’t beautiful anymore, not the way he was the first time. It’s all too tainted; Sirius can’t look at him without guilt rising like bile in the back of his throat. It has caught them, as they knew it would. And yet-
-yet there is something still powerful and blazing in Regulus’ eyes, something still burning Black in his hair. Sirius hates him like he used to, just for a moment, for everything he’s ever been and everything he will be. He hates him and he doesn’t, and he says “I love you,” which is wrong; fraternal love has tangled with another kind, a darker kind, so that the words (which air so rarely) sound stilted and obscure.
Regulus gives him a cool, calculating stare, and replies “But you won’t again.” It is not a question, but Sirius nods anyway, keeping his eyes wide and focused though he’d rather look away. Regulus merely tilts his head and turns to leave, his hair still mussed from pounding against the Tennyson.
And then, with the reckless abandon that casually overshadows all his other flaws, Sirius grabs his brother by the arm, asks him (desperate) if he remembers Father and the days by the fire and the words of the ocean.
“Break, break, break,” Regulus whispers, “On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! / And I would that my tongue could utter/the thoughts that arise in me.”
There is a brief stutter in time, and Sirius feels the world rotate in shards beneath his feet. He allows his eyes to lock with his brother’s and breathes the mad intensity that is their common ground. Words would be futile, but it is clear that they communicate the same dread aloneness, the same reverberation of a sounding into the breach. Then the moment is past, and Regulus is gone, a reluctant witness to the formation of a chasm as ancient as time.
nineteen seventy eight
Sirius’ Leaving Ball is marred by the same thing Sirius’ seventh year has been marred by: war. War, war. James and Evans speak of it in the way they cling to each other on the dance floor; Remus speaks of it by pressing his fingers into the small of Sirius’ back. Peter speaks of it by glancing around like a rat, like he is being followed, and Sirius does not speak of it at all.
There are reasons for this, reasons for his quiet refusal to acknowledge the swell of disaster that everyone can see and hear and taste: Sirius cannot imagine fighting for the same sign as his brother, but he cannot imagine fighting for the opposite side, either. He knows how it will pit out, in the end, knows that this silent year they have passed is part of the inevitable schism that has finally overtaken them, but that doesn’t make him like it; he shrugs Remus’s fingers away and pulls him out of the Great Hall. They find a closet and they snog for England and it is not enough, and it is not enough when Remus moans under him, arching against a broom handle, it is not enough when Remus gasps his name. Sirius smiles and kisses delicately and makes his excuses, and then he runs through the hallways and down the stairs, because running is a particular talent of his, because running he has always been good at.
Regulus is leaning against a stone wall and smoking what looks like a cigarette. Sirius wonders if it is a Muggle or wizarding brand, wonders where his brother got it. He does not ask, slowing his steps, waiting for Regulus to notice his presence and react.
It is utterly bizarre, the way they relate to each other. Sirius has his right sleeve balled in his fist as Regulus takes a slow drag from the cigarette. “I’ll join him, when the time comes,” Regulus says, eventually, and Sirius nods with all the righteous fury he can muster. Then (because they are, in the end, brothers, and because Sirius is, in the end, a physical being, and mostly because it is the end, has been the end, will always be the end) Sirius shoves Regulus backwards into the nearest wall.
“Don’t touch me,” Regulus sneers, and then “Don’t touch me,” again, without any real rancor. Neither of them notices the round burn his half-smoked cigarette is leaving on Sirius’s arm, though Sirius feels the heat and imagines they are burning through their outer shells to become the stars for which they were named. “Who do you think you are,” Regulus gasps, even though they both know the answer. Sirius is a Black, and Regulus is a Black, and blood, despite the best efforts of those bound by it, is permanent.
When Sirius brings their mouths together it is not a kiss as much as a brand; he will mark his brother before the Dark Lord does, mark him with history and pain and inherent Black power of the worst kind. He shoves his tongue forward and touches every surface, feeling something like fire course through his veins and set him aflame. The incident in the library, those words, wrong on his tongue (Love I and You, in unfathomable order) seems but a myth, a broken memory long since faded-Sirius knows he will never say it again, cannot remember why he’d wanted to.
He steps back, shaking, staring, and sees uncertainty in Regulus’s eyes for the first time in years. He contemplates spitting something, something biting and harsh, something worthy of the name he is still forced to carry, but opts for silence instead, running up the stairs towards Remus and clean air and light.
nineteen seventy nine
Sirius does not attend his father’s funeral. He does not send flowers or condolences. He does not deliver the leather-bound volume of Tennyson he spent hours looking for in second-hand bookstores, though it looks and smells like the ocean. He does not owl, visit, or offer assistance. He does not cry.
He does spend several nights leaning against the side of Number 12, Grimmauld Place, wrapped in James’ invisibility cloak. There is no logic to this, none at all, but James doesn’t ask questions when he takes the cloak and Lily looks at him with terrible pity, and it’s the only thing he knows how to do, so he does it.
When he runs into Regulus one morning, he is shamelessly disheveled and not inclined to explain. The cloak has slipped over his knees in the night, and Sirius knows how he must look-a torso too familiar with nothing to indicate that there were ever legs attached, leaning against the side of a house he abandoned once. Neither brother inquires as to the other’s health, wellbeing, or sanity, and they have both mostly forgotten what it means to be intimate, to be close. It is only reluctantly that Sirius notices the startling change in his brother’s physique; once merely lithe, (the younger Black has evolved into someone gaunt and haggard. They pointedly do not look at each other, but Regulus eventually slumps against the wall, matching Sirius’s angle, if not his posture.
Sirius lights a cigarette with resignation, smoking easily and too hard. Regulus looks at him with something that might once have been curiosity and follows suit, and Sirius doesn’t comment. They sit in quiet contemplation until the smoke fades, and then, without anything better to do, they each light another.
There is little to be said between enemies, less between brothers months estranged, and Sirius doesn’t think he could speak if he wanted to. Then a dry laugh breaks the silence between them, and he absently glances over to the source of the sound. He remembers, too late, that he shouldn’t-Regulus’s gaze is as captivating as it once was, and Sirius can’t bring himself to look away.
“You’re doing alright, then,” he says, forcing his eyes shut. He means it as a question, but he doesn’t finish the linguistic arc that would make it one; he doesn’t really want to know the answer. Regulus emits that same strange, dry laugh but doesn’t reply, and Sirius’s relief is almost sickening.
“He died in his sleep,” Regulus says, finally, his voice hoarse but without emotion. Sirius nods, twisting strands of grass between his fingers. “I don’t think-“ Regulus coughs, once, twice, and continues, “I don’t think he would have wanted you here.”
The silence descends like a blanket, and does not lift for the hour they spend staring blankly at anything but each other.
“I’m a Black,” Regulus says finally, like it means something, brushing invisible dirt from his immaculate clothes as he stands to walk inside.
There are a thousand things Sirius could reply, but he doesn’t say them-he was always a tactile kind of person. He grabs Regulus’s hand instead, and is filled with a sad kind of certainty when his lip curls in involuntary disgust.
“Don’t,” Regulus hisses, “touch me,” and Sirius lets go.
♠
(Regulus dies on a Sunday, two days before the New Year. Sirius wishes he’d lasted until Tuesday, so that they could have at least put “1980” on his tombstone.)
When Sirius is told, Remus isn’t home, and James and Evans are…off, and Peter wouldn’t be much help in any case. Consequentially, Sirius empties not one but two bottles of Firewhiskey, attempting to drown his sorrows. He wishes he could cauterize his memories with the drink, which burns like Regulus’s tongue did in his mouth that last time, oh, how they’ll never again…
When Remus returns (Sirius doesn’t know what time it is, doesn’t know what day or week it is, knows only that Regulus is dead and he is sad, so sad, too sad to breathe) Sirius is curled up on the couch, gripping an empty bottle and trembling. “Sirius!” Remus gasps, shocked, horrified, and Sirius laughs. It is a cold, hollow sound, spanning years and speaking of schisms never mentioned anymore. He laughs and laughs, and Remus must realize what has happened, must Floo someone and ask, because soon he is prying the bottle from Sirius’s hands and pulling him close and whispering something unintelligible.
This is not, this is not-Sirius wants Black comfort, wants Regulus’ cold, detached voice telling him to stop with this ridiculousness already. But there will never be another chance at Black comfort, at Black…lovelessness…because he is what is left, now, and he burns too brightly to offer it.
Remus’ hands are rubbing warm circles on Sirius’s back and Sirius remembers that he chose this, that he wanted this Gryffindor…love…and goddamn it he doesn’t regret it; still, it is right and in this moment Sirius wants wrong, wants tainted and unspeakable. He grips the ends of Remus’ shirt and buries his face in Remus’ neck and sobs until his chest aches, until he is as empty as his bottle and his family, until he can’t remember what air tastes like without the subtle lacing of (tear blood ocean) salt-flavor.
“I love you,” Remus whispers, sounding helpless and terrified and wonderfully, heart-wrenchingly sincere, “I love you, I’m not leaving,” and Sirius hates that this is what he wants to hear, that this is almost as good as Regulus’ voice would be. He moans and lets himself fall asleep in Remus’ arms and has broken dreams, dreams that show only dark hair and pale skin and blood-dreams that feel like fratricide.
nineteen eighty
Harry is born in the wee hours of a Thursday morning, the arse end of July, and Lily’s wild bright hair is the exact color of heat. Sirius knows this to be true because it is the kind of revelation one only comes to when drunk, and Sirius is very drunk. Remus, too, is utterly sloshed, and Peter threw up in that elderly woman’s lap in the lobby, and James, despite having imbibed in none of the celebratory liquor, is the most inebriated of them all.
Lily is muttering something about miscreants and beaming, and James is beaming, and Sirius wants to kill someone. Hug them first, perhaps, and then maybe some dancing, singing, general joy-then death. Quick, immediate death. The world is out of balance when a small, gurgling bubble of flesh can ease seven months of cavernous aching, when there is a baby, not even HIS baby, that makes him want to grow up.
Grinning, Sirius takes James’ hand and pumps it emphatically, jumps up and down, and sits, knowing that if he stands for much longer the desire to be physically exuberant will overwhelm him and he will punch something. Lily looks as though she might pass out from exhaustion and happiness, and Remus has that sappy, drunken smile plastered across his face-that one that means he’s happy. They’ve none of them been this relaxed in months, not since…Oh, god, James is holding that baby, Prongs is a father, and this realization is so wonderfully bizarre that Sirius bursts out laughing.
And then a scream, short but brutal, pierces the façade of normalcy they’d almost cemented and mingles with Sirius’ dying laugh. The shift is immediate-James passes the baby to Lily and goes for his wand, Sirius stands so quickly he knocks over his chair, Remus casts sobriety spells on them all. Peter runs to the door as a grey faced Mediwizard bursts in, apologizes, asks for help, and the moment is shattered the way Sirius hoped it wouldn’t be.
The worst of it is that they’re still fighting, always fighting, and Sirius kills three people in black hoods just thinking about Lily’s hair. He wonders what would have happened if Regulus had lasted, if maybe fratricide would have been a reality rather than a concept, but then James is down so Sirius doesn’t think anymore.
♠
Sirius takes to laughing awkwardly, hollowly, at odd times. He knows it worries Remus when he falls into fits of mirth as he comes, throwing his head back and barking out a noise that sounds more animal then human, but he can’t help it. The grief is lurking just under the surface, waiting to climb up and strangle him, and the irony is choking and hysterical.
The moon rises full, bright over Sirius’s dark hair, and Remus is the traitor. It is the most obvious thing in the world, and the harshest, the most cosmically balanced betrayal imaginable. Of course, of course such treachery (Regulus, an echo cold and hollow like the laughter, caught in Sirius’s throat) would be served back to him, of course those calm golden eyes, chosen for their love, would hide…
(A voice that is just a shade more than familiar whispers “Break, break,”; a voice that is just a shade less than loving whispers “the tender grace of a day that is dead,”)
The sex is better because it feels more like the illicit days, before-and when-Sirius can’t think. He can’t think over the squall of Lily and James’ infant, can’t think over the deafening roar of all the silence, can’t think at all. It is winter and it is freezing and the sky is overflowing with the light from the wide orb and Moony is changing and Sirius is running but it will never be far enough.
nineteen eighty one
It’s strange, but under the burning anger, there is some comfort in the knowledge that he had been wrong all along. The heat from the fire feels deliciously, disastrously too intense for Halloween, though the creeping sense of horror is much worse than any Sirius has felt before. He knows too well what lies beyond the thick sable smoke, knows all he will find if he stays are the charred remains of those he dared to call family, those he dared stamp as related despite their different bloods.
Of course, he does not intend to stay-he knows his hands are already as dirty as Wormtail’s, that his treachery, however nobly intended, was treachery all the same. Oh, Remus, Sirius thinks, and then screams, howling sobbing on his knees in the burning ash to the sky, why, why, oh god, fucking fucking bastard of a god why-
But Sirius knows why. Sirius knows everything, now. This is the last act of an obvious tragedy, the bit where the less intelligent members of the audience gasp as they begin to understand the events that have come before. Sirius is not an unintelligent audience member-he is not an audience member at all-and the irony of this is thick on his tongue. Those signs he should have seen were muted and lost as he pursued his own pain, as he quietly allowed himself to be wrapped in his own plotline.
And now there is only one thing to do, and Sirius knows that too, knows his final task and what it will cost him. Remus will probably never understand, will probably carry the cross of Sirius’ betrayal to the end of his days, and that is almost wrong enough to overcome duty, and not wrong enough at all. In the end it comes back to blood, to requirements and the law of things, and while Sirius did his best to escape, there are some shackles never broken.
A Potter is dead, but a Black avenges.
(license in the field of time)
The darkness of Azkaban, while consuming, does not offer the immediate mental cleansing Sirius had imagined it might. The process of becoming mad, as it turns out, is a slow descent rather than an instantaneous jolt. There is no switch Sirius can flip, no happy button he can push to make it all fade in the face of hysteria; rather, he is forced to notice with horror that he monitors his own fingernail growth and gnaws at his wrists in his sleep.
The dreams are unbearable, but being awake is like dreaming, a thick coat of unreality draped over the torment of guilty memories. The faces begin appearing during Sirius’ waking hours about three weeks after his sentencing, jumping out from the stone walls in hazy, impossible shapes. At the beginning of the second month, they become recognizable-Lily, James, Remus, Wormtail, Harry. Sirius has stopped counting the days when they begin to talk. Remus cries, always (it’s worst when he tries not to, when he tries to be angry and breaks halfway) and Wormtail taunts. James is accusatory, angry, and Lily is brokenhearted. Harry does nothing but scream, loud and unbroken, a reminder of the parents, family, life he betrayed, and Sirius waits for Regulus’s face but it doesn’t show up.
At some point, long after Sirius has forgotten what time means, a woman is placed in the cell with him. “Cousin,” she hisses, wide mad flashing eyes like snakes staring him down from across the divide. “Traitor,” she spits, and for the second time in his life Sirius spends days laughing madly at the irony. Oh, that this woman, this creature this murderess this bitch, that she should know his innocence, that she should rot with him until the end of both their days.
Except that it’s not Bellatrix who rots with from Sirius, in the end. Bellatrix begins to fade after only a few hours (days months years who can tell), and of course it was all a cunning disguise because Sirius knows those feature, knows that face. He realizes now why his brother’s eyes have not haunted him, why Regulus has not come to him in his dreams. He’s here, fleshandblood not dead, with longer hair but it’s the right bone structure and that deep hatred blooming in his irises can’t be wrong.
“Brother,” Sirius says, carnality caught on his tongue between his teeth, “come to me, Brother,” and Regulus resists, squirms away.
“Filthy blood traitor, vile scum, don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” Regulus is hissing, so much the Slytherin, and Sirius had forgotten just how feminine the curve of his hips could be, had forgotten the swell of his chest that feels like breasts. There’s something so wrong about it, just like school, wrong and too close, and also not like school because Regulus’s body is different and softer and harder too. Sirius misses the long length pressed against his thigh, the throbbing need of familial largeness, but this cavity that’s grown is good too, a good place to bury himself.
“No, no, no, no, stop no” and Regulus fights so hard for something he wants, fights so hard to make himself feel again, poor dead brother can still scratch and bite and scream with the best of them can’t he oh, oh, Sirius is filling him and pushing hard enough to break him. He hopes he does break him, hopes he breaks himself, and even as he comes there are the faces staring at him-Lily James Remus Peter Harry and now Regulus, only Regulus’s face is real, revolted and tear crusted and bloody and bitten.
“I hate you,” Regulus spits, and Sirius grins at him and nods and falls asleep and dreams like always and it burns to close his eyes just as it much as it burns to open them, and he hears someone keening over and over again it feels like rape, and he’s a traitor still.
♠
He wakes up once, some day (month year era who can tell) that is as black as ever and Regulus is gone and Sirius wants to cry, but he doesn’t remember how.
♠
He doesn’t mean to turn into Padfoot. He’s actually-well, he’s forgotten about Padfoot in favor of decomposing slowly into sick mad emptiness, and he’s dreaming of that battle, the one where Remus had run off and Sirius had been so angry because he was the traitor and so he’d transformed to run faster and follow and-
He wakes up…not in pain. Not with faces taunting him on the wall, not staring at his own hands like they are foreign and strange. He wakes up uncomplicated and panting and wondering what has happened, and also furry. And he isn’t cold, and he isn’t quite so alone, and he isn’t gnawing on that wide raw spot on his wrist, either.
He stays as Padfoot for a long, long time. When he changes back, it isn’t so difficult to say his own name, and it isn’t so difficult to remember numbers and letters and words. Sirius teaches himself to speak again slowly, practicing in the constant darkness and transforming when it all starts to blur again.
Cornelius Fudge is his first test. “I think I raped someone at some point in here, you bastard, this isn’t humanity,” is not a particularly constructive thing to say, so Sirius asks him for his newspaper instead. He plans to spend days relearning to read, but he doesn’t have the time-because that’s Peter, that’s Peter and he’s going to get Harry.
It’s easier to think when he’s got a mission, because it feels like it only takes Sirius a minute to read the word Hogwarts and plan an escape. The cool salt water tastes like blood, feels new, soothing, in Padfoot’s fur.
nineteen ninety three
Sirius (who has never, never understood the reasons behind the rules) is the library. He knows he shouldn’t be, that the easiest way to get caught is to linger like this, but he couldn’t not stop and remember, if only for a moment.
This place should make him think of Remus-who turns out to be teaching here, how funny, Sirius can smell him everywhere and laughs with a thick snorting sound-but it doesn’t. Remus is but a faint echo here, deafened as always by the howls of family and blood. It’s the memory of thick dark hair (so like his own) thumping against the Tennyson and Keats, it’s the sweet sick taste of Black saliva, it’s his shaking hands reminding him of all that he was and wasn’t as a child.
Sirius wishes in an obscure kind of way that Regulus had survived, and is obscenely glad he didn’t. After all, Sirius mostly didn’t survive--there’s so little left, now, of the reckless teenager that shoved his own brother into bookcases and pulled him off where anyone could have seen. This reckless adult that remains, sprawled naked across two tables because Padfoot doesn’t take clothes with him, this fugitive with haunted eyes is no one’s brother.
Sirius can hear mice scurrying in the walls and under his feet and resists the urge to catch one and eat it. Regulus would not have liked that impulse, and Remus would have understood it, and neither of them would have been able to watch him do it. Oh, these tangled webs, the irony of it all, (and it must be said that the idea that Sirius could have escaped Azkaban without going at least almost entirely mad is utter, utter folly).
“Break, break, break,” Sirius whispers, and transforms back to Padfoot before someone can follow his voice, can send him back to hell.
nineteen ninety five
Things Sirius missed in Azkaban include (but are not limited to) nicotine, and he smokes like a chimney at Grimmauld Place. Remus doesn’t like it, and Molly won’t let him do it in front of the children, and Dumbledore just smiles like he knows anything at all, which he doesn’t. Sirius respects Dumbledore more than he has, perhaps, ever respected anyone, but that doesn’t mean the man knows what he’s asking-what it means, what does to him to be in this house.
Once-before-there was a portrait on the second floor landing, painted of Sirius and Regulus the summer before Sirius left for Hogwarts. He’d hated it when he was younger, hated it like he’d hated everything here, but he wants to see it now with a fierce and desperate aching. He searches the basement and the attic and when he finally finds it under the bed in Regulus’s room, spared from his mother’s vengeful wrath, he doesn’t cry but he wants to.
The Regulus in the portrait is a tiny, inquisitive fellow, looking with wide eyes between his painted brother and his destroyed one. “But you-you’re not serious! You can’t be--” he gasps, appalled, when Sirius tells them who he is; for a moment, they all refuse to say anything at all. Regulus stares out of his frame in horror and then buries his face in his sibling’s painted shirt, and the younger Sirius throws a protective arm around his brother and tells himself to get the fuck out.
They are so realistic that it burns, and Sirius remembers that Regulus had lost the tendency to bury his face in his shirt while Sirius was at school. And he remembers that Christmas too, that first Christmas back, when Regulus hadn’t know how to be with him and his parents were frigid and cruel and Sirius had wanted to yell “I couldn’t help it,” but instead had yelled “I wouldn’t have helped it if I could have.” Oh, and Sirius remembers the feeling, how that was his first time being a traitor, that Christmas when he came home swathed in red and gold.
Sirius waits up one night for Remus, who is tired and sick and needs to sleep, and drags him up to his childhood bedroom. Sirius hasn’t slept here a single night, hasn’t even opened the door, but there’s something he needs to do, so he spells the dust off the deep green velvet coverlet. He pushes Remus down on the bed and then lies down next to him, the opposite way, with his feet on the pillow next to Remus’s face. He doesn’t say anything but holds his breath and there is something cold and dark seeping into his bones and he wants to scream shatter shake-
“Your feet are vile, Sirius,” Remus says, almost sadly, and Sirius wants to cry, so he does.
nineteen ninety six
Sirius wakes up and knows he is going to die. It’s not a pressing sense of anything, not a desperate bid for life on the part of his body; it’s just a sense, for the first time in his life, that he is mortal and he will perish. Even in Azkaban, when he longed for death on the coldest nights, when deep madness ran through his veins and whispered his futility and his loss-even then, Sirius had known in some small part of himself that he was going to live, and now he doesn’t know at all.
“Moony,” says Sirius to Remus, who is curled on the other side of the bed because prison cured Sirius of being a tactile kind of person, changed him someone ill equipped to handle the touch of another body, “Moony, I’m going to die.”
Remus looks at him with wide, fierce eyes and says “Sirius, no you’re not,” with a conviction he wouldn’t have had, once. Sirius wonders what could have happened to the boy he loved, what could have made him into this hard, practical man, and then remembers: I did.
“No, not-not today,” says Sirius, gesturing madly with his hands, “or at least probably not today but, you know, eventually. Someday I too shall cease my prattling.”
Sirius can see the tension seep out of Remus’s shoulders, and for a moment he looks like that boy, the one who was only tainted because Sirius had tainted him. “Oh,” Remus says, wrinkling his nose, “well, yeah, Padfoot, of course you,” and Sirius kisses him, firmly, without thinking of Azkaban or guilt or Regulus or any of it. For the first time in weeks they don’t go downstairs to sit, awkward and silent, in front of the fire.
♠
Harry is going to die and it will be my fault, Sirius thinks, and the rage is so blinding that it drowns that strange mortality he woke with. Harry is going to die like James died, like Regulus died, and I didn’t kill Peter and it will be my fault. He knows nothing but the anger and it feels good, it feels like being 17 and 18 and 19 again, he has an enemy and he will destroy them.
He’s laughing and he can feel the rough spot on his cheek where Remus hit him this morning, when he insisted on coming along. That had been…unusual, Remus hitting him, with wells of color lighting up his eyes and in Sirius’ own bedroom. Hadn’t stopped him coming, of course, and had reminded him of the days when he was tactile, and also of Regulus, who is advancing on him now with a wand.
Only that isn’t Regulus, that’s Bellatrix, stirring faint memories of something…strange…with her dark hair and empty eyes and high cheekbones. I’m going to die, Sirius realizes again, only with a more dire, immediate spin, and he laughs and fires a curse at his cousin who looks like his brother.
“Avada Kedavra,” Bellatrix snarls, but then she curls her lip, and it’s Regulus again, Regulus always and forever, watching him as he cascades backward and through the veil.