“I didn’t want to be cruel.
I swear I am good, I am good,
I am kind.
I have love inside me.
Somewhere, far, far away.”
☆
The thing is, Regulus doesn’t know how to love or be loved in the right way. Not by his parents, who hurt him, break him into pieces, and still ask for more—ask for parts of him that no longer exist, parts they destroyed but demand to remain somehow.
Sirius loved him (loves him?), but their love was never ideal, too influenced by their parents’ “love.” The love he shared with his brother was destructive: yelling, broken toys, torn books, taking punishments for each other, painpainpain.
Regulus doesn’t think he knows anything that isn’t pain.
Pandora and Evan love him, but they don’t know how to love properly either. For them, love is a greedy mother, a dying father, an older brother—more loved, kinder—already gone.
Barty loves him. Love, for Barty, is a neglectful father who only sees your flaws and does nothing to help you, a sickly mother who loves you more than anything but lacks the strength to look you in the eye, bruises on your cheek, and justified rage.
Dorcas loves him, but love, for her, is a dead father, a grieving mother, a godmother who hurts her, who asks things of her that parents should never ask of their children, but I am not your child.
The light in Regulus’s life is limited, scarce. It brushes the tips of his fingers, teasing him with warmth, letting him taste what it feels like to be warmed, only to leave him in the dark and cold before it even reaches his wrist.
Regulus knows what it’s like to burn; he has burned his whole life. Not from fire or the sun, but from the cold of the ice surrounding him. He could never be anything else—not for himself, not for Sirius. Not with the shadow of Walburga and Orion looming over him, pulling him into the darkness.
Then his brother found his own sun, introduced to him on a train compartment, handed to him in a red dormitory: warm, comforting, home. No more cold, only heat. And Sirius may claim to be entirely different from them, but he’s just as greedy as anyone in his family—unable to taste something he likes without chasing it with everything he has.
Sirius chased James Potter the way a moth is drawn to the flame.
Regulus is still cold.