Regulus is face down on the kitchen table, when Sirius finds him.
He could be sleeping, he thinks, it would be just like him to fall asleep on the table, but nowadays Regulus is shaking whole whenever he sleeps, wakes up gasping for air, and Sirius won’t ask, ever—because it’s scary to think that the war has damaged them both in ways they can’t voice. Because if he asks, he has to face that his brother isn’t the brother he knew. Because if he asks, the question might be returned. One of these things is scarier.
His dark, unruly hair is all over his face, and Sirius catches sight of few grey hairs—
which can’t be right; his brother is fourteen, not one day older since Sirius ran away, which can’t be right; his brother is eighteen, has been reported missing, is presumed dead, which can’t be right; Regulus is a grown man, thirty-three years old, and teaches Charms at Hogwarts while Sirius hides in Grimmauld Place and fights with him through the Floo Network, which can’t be right; Sirius is locked up in Azkaban, which can’t be right; Sirius is locked up in Grimmauld Place, which can’t be right; he promised to never set foot in this house again, which can’t be right
—as he grabs him by the shoulder, feeling the protruding bone grind underneath his own thin hands and stick fingers, and shoves him back.
Regulus doesn’t wake. He’s deathly pale, a trail of blood running down his nose, head tilted back by the force of Sirius’ shove, the column of his neck skeletal, but now his left hand is on display on the table, and the source of his hurt is evident.
Every Death Eater from Voldemort’s inner circle has the Dark Mark. Regulus is—was, he corrects himself, frowning, but that also makes it sound as if Regulus is dead, which he isn’t, because he is right here, Sirius, though he might be dying in front of you if you don’t do something quickly don’t stop debating his Death Eater status—a Death Eater from Voldemort’s inner circle.
Whatever’s left of his forearm that can be barely called that, doesn’t bear the Dark Mark in the traditional sense. The skin is all mangled and wrong; there is white at some places that looks like bone which brings bile to his throat, glistening scars like the London train map all over the open wound that is his forearm. And somewhere between all of that, there is ink too, damning fucking ink that marks his little brother up, his little brother that is too smart, too dumb, too sharp and too soft for his own good, and Sirius would like to scream at him, and then at whoever hurt Regulus, but he is also so, so afraid that it is Regulus who hurt Regulus, so he swallows the scream down and calls madam Pomphrey instead.
It takes her an hour to come over. The door knocks; he jolts from the chair he had almost fallen asleep on—irony you motherfucker—and runs through the dark corridors of the haunted house of his childhood to open it. She doesn’t look very pleased to have been woken up at this hour, but whatever she sees in his expression makes her purse her lips and nod tightly at him, clutching a first-aid kit close to her chest.
The floorboards creak under their quick feet, and she talks as they walk, filling the dreadful silence that Regulus finds so enjoyable but that drives Sirius mad. People in Azkaban would scream at first, which wasn’t all that bad; when they went quiet, someone was giving up; the Dementors would sense it and crowd outside of the silent cell, feasting on the prisoner’s misery until they were a husk of foggy memories. Foggy, painful, deadly memories. Sirius had been so, so afraid of forgetting; he had clang to his innocence, he had clang to James’ and Lily’s happy—dead—faces, to the baby they had left behind that would grow to be a good man like his dad, and in the quiet, he had shamefully clang to his brother too.
He thinks Regulus visited him once, but he isn’t sure, and doesn’t want to ask, because if the answer is no he can no longer trust his mind, and if the answer is yes, there is a can of worms he doesn’t feel like opening as of yet.
‘I had to explain to the Headmaster why I was leaving the school without a nurse during the Christmas holidays; do you know how many students get sick in winter? And now, the Triwizard Tournament taking place in Hogwarts brings too many tourists to Hogsmeade, and the Floo Network is cramped,’ madam Pomphrey is saying, her strict voice accompanied by the sharp staccato of her short heels. ‘Why did your brother choose to leave the school anyway? Most professors are staying for the holidays this year.’
She doesn’t sound too happy with the Triwizard Tournament, and Sirius gets it, he really does. The Dark Mark is cast at the World Cup, a Muggle family hanging upside down in the air; Harry’s name entered by an unknown person in the Tournament, and he risks his life during every task, but survives; the Dark Mark has started to burn, burn, burn. Something isn’t right, something dark is brewing, and he wants to know.
The mindless, one-sided chatter continues until they reach the kitchen. Kreacher is nowhere to be found, thank Merlin, and he ushers madam Pomphrey in, slamming the door behind him without thinking. It wakes up his mother’s portrait, making him wince, and it is with the screams of BLOOD-TRAITORS AND DEAD SONS, I WILL HAVE NONE OFTHEM IN MY HOUSE that they hastily leave through the Floo, Sirius turning into Padfoot before he disappears into the fire because they will Floo directly to the Three Broomsticks, and he is still an escapee on the run, after all.
Being Padfoot helps, in a way, to leave behind his worries; they don’t go away completely, but they are less intense, less agonisingly blurred from his time in Azkaban, which is how he blinks and they have already reached the hospital wing. He doesn’t remember arriving at the Three Broomsticks, or how they get from there to Hogwarts; he just settles on the bed with the white sheets where madam Pomphrey places Regulus with a gentle flick of her wand.
He looks very thin and very tired, his brother, all skin and bones and scars, and that bleeding forearm, that fucking Mark on it that he tried to—he tried to—
Even as Padfoot, he can’t make himself face it, so when she says it out loud for him, he is both grateful and not.
‘He tried to cut it off,’ she says, carefully examining the wound, her hand closed from tip to tip around Regulus’ wrist. The bones are sticking out, and something metallic lingers in the air, heightened by Padfoot’s sense of smell. He wrinkles his nose, puts his toes under his snoot, stays as close to Regulus as he can.
The thought has been articulated, made real. Hetried to cut it off. His brother had tried to peel the skin of the Mark off, as if that made perfect sense, and Regulus is supposed to be smart, Merlin’s balls, so why did he do it? How do you take a knife to yourself and think it can end well for you? Unless—unless he knew that, but he didn’t care. Unless he wasn’t thinking at all. Unless he was thinking, but the kind of thinking that is twisted and mad, the kind of madness that runs in the family, that made Elladora Black cut off her house-elf’s head when it was too old to carry tea trays, and hang it on a plaque on the wall, that made his mother burn off her son from the tapestry, that made his father hang himself.
(Regulus had found him. Regulus was never the same afterwards, but neither was Sirius, nor was Walburga, and then he had run away so it didn’t matter, because he had a family not of blood but of love that wasn’t crooked and didn’t make him sick to his stomach like it does now.)
When he wakes up, madam Pomphrey suggests finding him a therapist—again, apparently. Regulus laughs her off, claims the dead don’t need a therapist, and Sirius takes a look at his grey, murky eyes and knows that he believes it, that he’s dead, gone, not here, and something cracks inside him a little more, the ruins of a childhood left to decay, an abandoned temple for gods he no longer believes in.
‘You aren’t dead, Regulus,’ she says quietly at last, with the kind of resignation that makes Sirius think this has happened again, ‘you know that.’
(This family that makes him sick to his stomach. There had been nothing complicated about Effie’s and Fleamont’s love, it had just been that. No terms, no conditions, no expectations, no disappointments—but, most importantly, no madness that makes a Black scratch their skin until they find bone just to feel something, because tattoos stopped working at twenty-one, and although you can get a tattoo in Azkaban if you know the right person, it isn’t the same as the pain of feeling. And so he had scratched.
So maybe it isn’t the family he wants, but it’s the family he has, and it’s the family he knows deep down that he belongs to.)
After she leaves, Sirius climbs onto his brother’s chest and curls up like he can hold him down there and never let him do something like that ever again; the thought comes from an obsessive, compulsive fear, don’t ever leave me alone like that, and there it is, the madness again, and maybe Regulus understands what he doesn’t say—too clever, too sharp in the wrong edges—because he absent-mindedly pets his head and Sirius growls angrily, and they are brothers again, they survived, but at what cost, and was it worth it?
It has to be, or they both should have died so that better people survived instead. But life isn’t fair like that, so they live.
The Quidditch pitch is unrecognisable, turned into a maze for the day. He is watching the third task in his Animagus form from the stands, curled up beside Hermione and shaking with anticipation despite the warm weather. The process feels rather unceremonious and tiresome, since nothing is happening that they can actually see. He would rather be patrolling the outside of the maze alongside Regulus, and he had said so to Dumbledore, who had shook his head and insisted that he sit this one out.
A safety measure. Right.
He doesn’t like the idea of Regulus on his own; his brother has been behaving odder than ever. He doesn’t like the idea of Harry on his own in there either, facing the unknown. He doesn’t like this, generally speaking, and it appears that he has good reason too, because soon there is a commotion at the edge of the maze and then everyone is talking all at once and he can’t see Harry, he has no idea where Regulus is, and Dumbledore is nowhere to be found. People pay no mind to a dog wandering around, so he leaves the stands and comes closer, only to hear the whispers of he’s dead, and his heart stops for a terrifying, devastating moment, then restarts, pounding in his ears like a drum, because not James’son, it isn’t fair, Sirius never got to tell him everything he meant to, and he did, he meant to say to him so much—about his parents, about the Marauders, about the secret jokes and the nicknames and the memories and the matching tattoo with James and the ring with Remus and—and—
Someone steps on his tail, making him howl in pain, and another foot brushes past his ribs, and he can’t see what’s going on, there are too many people and he’s only a black dog, and people pay no mind to a dog, why would they; then his ears catch the name, Diggory, Cedric Diggory, the boy is dead, and he has never been more relieved to learn of a person’s death, because it means that Harry might still be alive, it means—it means—
that Sirius doesn’t have to live alone with all these memories that are blurred and twisted and wrong in his head, his fucked up mind that was fucked up even before Azkaban, because you can run away from Grimmauld Place, Number12, but you’re a fool if you think you can leave the Black family behind, boy, and he’s a fool, he’s a fool, but right now he wants to know where the fuck his godson is, and also where the fuck his brother is, someone who will understand the whirlpool of his brain
—then spider hands lift him off the ground, and he kicks his feet, panicking, no one pays mind to a dog, but catches sight of pale, gaunt features, cloud-grey eyes and a strict expression like their father’s, and thinks, of course.
Regulus carries him like a shack of potatoes over his shoulders, and Sirius can feel the bones of his back moving beneath the skin. They get away from the crowd, reach the school and then get into a classroom, and Sirius bears the humiliation of it with dignity because he wants to know what’s happening. His brother sets him down on a desk, and Sirius shifts to his human form with his heart in his throat.
‘Regulus, what the fuck happened—is Harry alright, are you, what—’
His brother raises the left sleeve of his robes and shows him the somewhat healed forearm. Sirius frowns and wonders what he is supposed to be seeing, since the Dark Mark is all mangled up.
‘What—’
‘It’s burning, Siri,’ Regulus says quietly, the old nickname said so easily it must have slipped, and his eyes are mad, glazed—from the pain, he realises, feeling sick to his stomach as his eyes look at the damaged forearm yet again. The dots are connecting like constellations that should never meet. ‘It’s burning like when I tried to burn my hands to stop the itching.’
He barely registers the words at first. Then he does. ‘You did what?’ he asks incredulously, and his brother shrugs.
‘He’s back,’ he says, voice strangely steady, ‘he’s back, I know he’s back because it’s burning, burning like when I tried to burn my hands to stop the itching. Sirius. He’s back.’
Regulus fixes his sleeve and clutches at its hem until his knuckles whiten. He looks young like this, shivering and pale, looking at Sirius like he can fix the world, and it’s been a while since that happened. His eyes are wide and stormy, and Sirius doesn’t know how to tell him he can’t fix shit, he never did know how to tell him that and so he lied and broke his impossible promises that he never should have made in the first place, and this is how you give a kid trust issues, Merlin—
‘He is going to kill me, when he realises what I’ve done,’ Regulus whispers to himself more than anything, wild eyes darting from one point to another, and then focussing on Sirius, who feels locked under their spell, immobilised. ‘You won’t let him, will you, will you? Sirius?’
He is shaking like a leaf, his little brother who died at eighteen and came back but stayed gone, and Sirius finds himself yet again making promises he cannot keep, because he is a cunning, ambitious liar who begged the Sorting Hat to put him to Gryffindor, and when he says—
‘No fucking way.’
—he knows he is just reinforcing the circle of bullshit, not breaking it.
He crushes his brother into a hug and feels his ribs beneath his robes as they both tremble and shudder, and knows himself to be a Black first and above all.
So Voldemort’s back, Harry is traumatised and frustrated with having to live with his Muggle relatives, Regulus should be in a psych ward of Saint Mango’s, but that won’t happen because Dumbledore apparently needs him here for whatever reason and, anyway, Sirius would be right beside him in the psych ward, so it’s not worth fighting over unless he wants to be in the psych ward too, and also, he’s been locked in the bathroom for half an hour now and Sirius would like to pee, thank you very much, and he is also starting to get freaked out.
‘Hey, I’m coming in, you better be decent,’ he yells warningly, before he knocks the door down and barges in.
Regulus is curled into himself like paper beside the bathtub, his clothes looking uncomfortably soaked and sticking to his skin, and he is coughing water and his chest is heaving, and Sirius is not equipped to deal with this because if they had any sense they would both be in Mango’s with Alice and Frank, only that would be shitty, because his cousin put them there, and he’s been told oh Sirius, you look just like her enough times not to want to do that to them, he isn't that selfish, he isn't.
His brother doesn’t look up when he enters the bathroom, walking on tiptoes because these shoes aren’t brand new but he likes them either way. Sirius crouches next to him and pulls his head into his lap, and Regulus doesn’t fight it, eyes tightly shut like he’s locked in a nightmare, which he probably is, tears streaming down his face and he trembles, and he looks so young like this—
seven and Siri I had a bad dream, ten and you’re really leaving for Hogwarts, thirteen and just a nightmare, why do you care, fourteen and you’re leaving, said by a blank face with a numb voice, not sounding surprised, because of course Regulus had known Sirius would leave before Sirius knew it himself, of course he’d known, but how
—and there are wrinkles on the corners of his eyes and over his brows, thin lines, barely there because Blacks don’t age (they die before they do), and when they do they do it beautifully, and he had never thought he would see Regulus reach thirty-three, but the bastard did, and Sirius isn’t equipped to deal with this but he is the only one his brother will allow near, so he does.
Regulus looks frantic as he sits up, white as a ghost, staring through Sirius and seeing past him, almost slamming his forehead on Sirius’, who flinches and falls back. His eyes are lost until they catch matching grey, and when he looks at Sirius they regain some of their clarity.
‘I’m dead,’ he says, like it’s the most normal thing to say after whatever this episode is.
Sirius’ eyebrows furrow. ‘No, you’re not. We’re stuck with each other in our parents’ house, and I know you secretly hate it.’
‘But—’ stormy eyes wandering down, looking at his own hands, and Sirius wonders for the hundredth time, what do you see when you look at your hands that makes you think you’re dead, because this has happened before.
He takes his brother’s bony wrists and gently lowers them. ‘No buts. Stuck with me, remember?’
A sharp nod. Regulus exhales. ‘Barty wasn’t dead.’
Carefully concealing anger at the sound of that name: ‘So I’ve learnt.’
‘But he is dead now, isn’t he, Sirius?’ unreadable eyes, waiting for some kind of reaction, and Sirius is going to fail this test, because it’s happened before. ‘They told me the Dementors took his soul.’
And Sirius hugs him, his head nestled on the space between Regulus’ shoulder and neck, and he locks eyes with his reflection on the foggy mirror and sees rage and sorrow. He isn’t sure for whose sake the hug is, but maybe it is for the both of them.
Bellatrix’ laughter still echoes in his ears when the spell hits Sirius on the stomach.
It sends him flying back, and when he catches Regulus’ expression for the last time, his brother is thirty-four and you’re leaving me again.