If I died last night, what would people think.
Is there even someone who would be sad?
Would there be someone, unknown to me, who would look up at the stars and realize that one is gone from existence?
I don’t think so, after learning that the light of stars can need millions of years to reach the earth. So even if someone noticed, then they could only do it after quiet some time passed.
Remus told me about it in one of the thousand boring history lectures from Professor Binns, while I was copying his astronomy homework. How happy
I was back then, how ungrateful I was.
Even the thought of him now hurts me, where his gaze brought me peace, is now a battlefield of emotions. Where his smile brightened my day is now an old, familiar cold.
I am not sure what was the thing that broke me, the look on his face the moment he realized what I had done to him or the words he spoke after that.
´´Old habits die hard, Sirius, toujurs pur.``
After that the darkness returned, heavier and darker than ever.
My moon, oh my moon now did not shine for me anymore.
And the sun stayed beside him, and I can’t be angry that James, of course, would stick beside our Moony and not at my side.
I feel like the boat that rescued me from the toxic waters that were my family has thrown me off into the cold water that is familiar and, at the same time, not recognizable.
I don’t know how I didn’t hear him coming, or why he is here with me but it seems like this is no coincidence.
It looks like a planned thing because I can not identify a single part of him that is surprised to see me here.
´´What are you looking at?`` he asks like this would be the most normal thing to say to your brother after refusing to talk to him in over two years.
My bother, the sound of it opens an old not yet healed wound, my brother is sitting next to me without looking at my direction.
Not James but my first brother, my little baby brother is next to me closer than we got, since his first school year.
Since he became a snake and our devil like parents tried everything to tear us apart.
Then I remember his question.
´´I don’t really know, just wondering about life.``
´´And, come to any brilliant conclusions that I should know about? Oh and don’t come at me with: Reggie did you knew that my star is the brightest in the whole sky?``
´´Come on I grew out of this phase a long time ago, Reggie.`` the sound of this old nickname ignites something old in me that I long thought to be dead.
´´Really, you sure about that?`` Regulus, smirking as if he knew something hidden, asks with astonishment.
´´What are you even doing here, it’s after curfew?``
´´ Don’t even know, maybe because you are all alone since the last two weeks, wandering around the castle with nobody at your side. Or maybe because you look like a ghost inside of a living body. Or maybe it’s just because all of your like this proclaimed friends are ignoring you and nobody has a clue what happened, so I will ask you this only once. What the fucked happened to your self created new, better family?``
´´You don’t know anything. Stop trying to give me a bad conscience. Why are you even here, I don’t need your bullshit right now.``
´´ I am here because for a moment I hoped that you had reflected your behavior, after you seemingly lost all of your friends because of whatever reason there is. I am here right now because you are visible lost and have no one to talk to and I-``
´´But what do you care for Merlins sake, what do you care how I feel or what happened? And what do you mean by new, better family? Like you did not also found a very effective way of replacing me with Crouch.``
´´Oh I am very sorry to have the decency of getting worried about the well being of my brother, I didn’t realize that you can handle it all by yourself.``
´´Oho so now I am your brother again but last year you wanted me to die and let you live your life without my annoying existence anywhere near you.``
´´Yes because you don’t know how much I hate you. But you are my brother and I don’t even know myself why I am here right now.``
On this Sirius thoughts died on the tip of his tongue and he collapsed. Regulus was just another person that hated him, like James, like Peter and Mary, like Marlene and Lily, like Remus. Why else would Regulus be here, not because he really cared but rather because he hoped to get something new, another reason for him to hate Sirius.
Why fight against it?
´´I told someone the one secret that nobody except my friends knew about, I told it someone who could destroy Remus life with it and of-``
´´Wait you told someone that Remus is a werewolf?``
´´Why do you know about this, who told you?``
´´Remus himself told me, you know that we’re friends right?``
´´Since when do you two talk, like if you know what he is-``
´´You really live in your own little world, I can’t believe you never realized. We are friends, since he saw me in the library and it was nowhere else a free seat for him because everybody else didn’t want him to come near them.``
At this the voices inside his head grew louder, more precise they now destroyed what was left of Sirius.
´´I really didn’t know, I am a terrible friend.``
´´I cannot say something else, you are a real shit of a friend. But you don’t mean that, it is not like you are being cruel on purpose. You learned it, someone who is even more crueler than you teached you, and nobody, regardless of how much you hate them, can change the impact of the trauma of their childhood. But I need you to understand that now jumping of this giant of a tower will not fix anything.``
´´H-How do you-?``
´´You really think that I didn’t think about doing it myself too?``
´´But when, you have your friends, you are best in every classes of you and mother loves you?``
´´You are really as self centered as I thought, yes I have my friends and yes I am best in all of my classes but mother doesn’t love me. She just is really relieved that I didn’t turn out to be a little copy of you.``
´´I always believed that you had the best life, but seemingly I can’t even get that my brother is going through some real shit and-``
´´Hey, I survived didn’t I, so get yourself together, I am not here for you to have another breakdown. I just know what is going on in your head right now. And I want you now to really understand what i will say to you: I need you to want your life. I need you to believe that someday you will look back and realize that it was worth it. That keep living was the right choice.
It is something near to impossible to imagine right now. I know that.
But I need you to believe that it will get better, because if it doesn’t then you don’t know the worth of your own life.
I need you to want to look back to see the progress that you made.
You need to keep living and then to look back and see that all this struggling changes, it changes and becomes less.
That is something you really need to want to experience, the feeling of realizing that I got it, that it got better and that I can look at myself without all these nasty thoughts.
It should not feel like torture, you know, life should be something incredible, something that makes their owner happy.
Your life right now might doesn’t feel like any of this, it is just a void that sucks everything it can get in.
And you now can’t seem to change it, you seemingly cannot change the way you react. And certainly you can’t stop right away.
But that doesn’t matter, right in this moment I need you to hold onto your life and just keep living, even though you only do it because I want you to. I know that it is not ideal but it is the only way to get through this.``
The tears that were rushing down now were the evidence that Regulus needed to see, it showed that there was still hope for his brother.
´´You know, I can’t even remember telling Snivellus, it is just not there inside my head and its like a part of this day just is lost behind dark clouds-``
´´Wait what, what do you mean by that?``
´´Why are you making this an even bigger deal than it already is? It’s just like I cannot remember even meeting him.``
´´Sirius are you really as stupid as I think you are? What you are describing right now is the typical response to receive an spell who forces you to do something or say something that you don’t want to tell. Severus told me about it a couple of months ago, he created it himself.``
´´ You’re kidding, right Reggie?``Sirius voice trembled and inside of him was a cold cry of agony, maybe there was still hope. Maybe he didn’t told Snape everything because he was a terrible person. Maybe his friends could look at him again, not with hatred but with the love he craved so much.
´´ Tell me that this is a cruel joke of you, right? Because if it is not, then-``
´´Regardless of my hatred for you, about this I would never joke, not when it is as important as this.``
For a moment both are looking at each other, and for a moment they’re just two brothers. There is only this bond between them that is as old as time itself. As old as their blood and as old as the stars they are named after.
There is no dislike and certainly no hate. Regulus knows that Sirius just needs one more push and he knows that this might be the push that will break this bond between them forever because Sirius always was triggered whenever this topic was brought up.
But he wanted for his brother to be happy again, and he was happy when he was planning pranks and joking around with his friends, he was more happy with them than he could ever be able to be with his blood family. Ist was something that would hurt Sirius and just completed the picture he painted himself as the boy who hates his older brother for being in the wrong house.
´´That’s the thing, isn’t it, you want people to like you, to accept you and to actively engage with you. You said that you hate all of them, but that is not really the case, I guess that it is just easier for you to not acknowledge your wishes and desires, maybe you think that you don’t deserve to get them.
You think that the silence that washes over the room the moment you appear is because no one likes you and they don’t want you to be a part of their group, because of our family.
But in reality it’s more like when kings and queens walked to their throne.
We know who you are, or who you pretend to be, we know why you look at us the way you do and we know that you are not like us, you are some special kind of individual existence and we don’t know how to communicate with you without being the total opposite of what you deserve.
You are more than we will ever be and of that we are jealous, jealous, because you just say what you think and not give a damn about the opinions of others.
And even though there is a possibility that all this is just an act of hiding your true self, but you do it like your are yourself and even if some people would get that all this is just a farce of you trying to manipulate us into thinking that we hate the real you, they would not know the truth.
And there comes the problem, because there are people in this world who would treat you like you deserve and love you like you need to be loved, with respect of your boundaries and admiration about the way you live.
But if you always keep a distance, even if it seems little it can always make the difference between conditional and unconditional love, you will never get what you obviously desire the most.
So let people in, after quiet some time, after many trials, after they saw what you can’t even face alone, it is just important to let people in. There are people who want to love you unconditionally and there are people who want to destroy you, but you only know what they want when they are deep enough.
I know that it is scary, that you maybe don’t even know how to let yourself fall apart in front of others, but I can assure you that your friends will not pick some pieces and leave.
They will not leave, they will learn how to heal you, how to love you right. The didn’t left the picture frame, you just didn’t realize that they made space for you to grow.``
On this Sirius heart clenches in his chest and deep inside of him his soul begins to cry, because this is all to much and exactly what he needs, because he never thought that Regulus of all people would tell him that.
And all he can think right now is how grateful he is for having him. There was a part of him that always craved his little brother, because James could not fill the hole inside of his heart, not because he didn’t try but rather because blood sometimes is thicker than water and that was something that Sirius never acknowledged to himself.
Maybe if he died today there would be someone feeling it, there would be someone that would look up in the sky and realize that the brightest star next to the sun had gone from existing, his light vanished.
Maybe he would leave people behind that needed him, even if they needed to tell themselves that they hated him.
This maybe was the thing that got him to stand up and go back to his friends, back to the life he wanted. But this walk was also a step forward, towards a new beginning of familiar things.