Starlight

Starlight

I will be chasing a starlight 

Until the end of my life

I don’t know if it’s worth it

Anymore

Starlight - Muse

Clattering sounds from the kitchen and Regulus rolls over on his bed. 

“Regulus, honey! It’s nearly time to leave! Get your little ass in the car!”

He lets out a long breath and stands up, grabbing the already packed backpack and walks out of his room, closing the door behind him. 

The house he lives in now is so much… warmer than the one he used to live in. 

Regulus thinks it’s sad he can’t call either of them home. 

Annie smiles when he climbs into the car. 

“How’s the binder, love?”

“Good. Thanks, Annie”

“Ach, don’t worry, babe. We’re in this together now, yeah?”

“Yeah” 

He’s starting to really realise that this is really it for him. 

Annie is his family now. 

Annie’s house is his house. 

This car is their car. 

This is his life now. 

With one adoptive parent, no brother and a shit new school with no friends.

They stare up at the ugly building.

“Well. At least it’s free?”

Regulus looks over to Annie, smiling politely because he doesn’t really know what else to do. 

He never knows what to do anymore. 

Annie sighs. “Oh, darling, don’t look so scared,” she reaches out to touch him, though he never finds out where because he flinches back. 

Her hand stills in the air, and Regulus looks down at his feet. 

He expects a hit. He honestly expects her to just hit him right there. 

But she doesn’t. 

“Regulus… if you want me to pick you up, just call me okay? Anytime. For anything. If it’s too much, you call me, okay?”

Regulus still doesn’t look at her. “Okay”

“Okay. Now, you go out there and give it your very best, alright?”

Regulus nods once, waits for her to say something, and when she doesn’t, he opens the car door and slips out. 

When he walks into the school, he almost thinks everyone will turn to him and start pointing or something, but they don’t. 

Nothing happens as Regulus clutches the small paper with his locker combination. 

He follows the steady stream of kids, headphones turned up as loud as possible. 

A girl brushes past him and Regulus recoils, bumping into another person who swears at him. 

His locker is grey. Of all the other blue ones, he got a grey one which has a fucking penis drawn on it. 

Regulus stares at it for a full minute before he opens it up, combination still fresh in his mind even though he looked at it last night.  

It smells. He doesn’t know of what but it smells.

Regulus doesn’t really want to put his things inside. 

When he enters his classroom, people do stare and Regulus wishes more than anything that Barty and Evan were here. 

But they’re not. 

Regulus is completely alone here. 

He sits down at the back, where no one can see him. He slips his headphones off, even though it’s the last thing he wants to do. 

The notebooks that Annie bought him are made out of a strange material and Regulus uses the sleeves of his jumper to pull them out of his bag, careful not to let his skin brush against them. 

Regulus doesn’t know why he’s like this. 

But sometimes he can’t touch stuff. Sometimes he can’t talk. Sometimes he just sits in his room, eyes squeezed shut and shaking until the horrible feeling either passes or he faints. 

Or at least he used to do that in his room. 

He hasn’t at the new house yet. 

Regulus misses his room. He misses the smell of it, the light that filtered through his green curtains. The way the door muffled all the yelling. The floorboards he could hide things under. 

Now he has blinds and a linoleum floor. 

But he promised himself, that once the school year started, he’d stop thinking about That Night. The night he lost everything. 

It’s better now, with Annie, he tells himself. And it is. Annie doesn’t starve him. She doesn’t hurt him. She doesn’t scream at him. She doesn’t make him wear dresses out of fabric that makes him itch all over. She doesn’t make him wear dresses at all. She bought him a binder, for god’s sake. 

But she’s not Sirius. 

Don’t think about him. 

Do you really want to start crying in front of everyone on the first day?

His teacher seems nice. He prefers Slughorn, but Regulus has come to terms with the fact he’ll probably never see Slughorn again. 

He draws a little snake next to his name on his name tag. No one comments on it, but he doesn’t expect them to. 

Who’d talk to the weird, new, anxious kid at the back called Regulus? And as if that’s not enough, his teacher comments on Regulus’ ‘rough past’ and that everyone should be nice to him. 

It still seems surreal that Regulus has a rough past. Three months ago he was a posh, rich kid who was intimidating and the top of his class, with a ‘nice’ family and a mansion as a home.

Now he’s, as he said, the weirdo at the back who looks two seconds away from having a full on meltdown, only has his foster mother Annie to look out for him, no friends, no brother, and nothing about him intimidating nor even mildly impressive. 

Lunch is a soggy substance with a slightly less soggy substance. Regulus only manages two bites before feeling sick, so he sits in the canteen, staring up at the clock that takes 61 seconds to move the handle instead of 60. 

The clattering of cutlery rings in his ears as he counts, second after second after second. 

He wonders if the clock is even right. Because 3600 minutes after it started getting slower it will be a whole hour slow, and who’s to say that didn’t already happen?

But the time is only off by two minutes from the one on his phone. So only 120 minutes then. 

Regulus leaves the lunch hall soon after. The corridors are mostly empty now, which Regulus greatly prefers, and he wanders around the school, headphones on full volume. 

Sometimes Regulus doesn’t like headphones. Sometimes he doesn’t like that he can’t hear some things, it makes him feel sort of vulnerable. 

But in moments like these, where his fingers keep moving back to the spot on his arm he scratches at, the loud music calms him. It sort of… separates him from the world. From That Night. 

If Regulus is honest, he should’ve expected this. 

He’s standing in front of his locker, which someone has already written the word ‘tranny’ on in pink marker. 

Is it really that obvious? 

Regulus finds himself frozen, staring at the word. 

I still look like a fucking girl. 

He feels it coming long before it starts. He knew it was coming the second he saw the word. 

Regulus stumbles away from his locker, ignoring the distant snickering he can hear from presumably whoever did this, and tries to look even a little normal as he rushes towards the exit of the school. 

He pulls his headphones on as he tries to make his way through the mass of people, which somehow gets bigger and bigger and bigger. 

Regulus feels like everyone is taller than him, like he’s just a tiny thing they can squash. No, they don’t even know they’re squashing him. 

Regulus’ breaths become shorter and shorter as he fights his way through the crowd, people constantly brushing against him. 

It takes three tries for him to push open the heavy doors, and when he breathes the hot summer air, everything somehow gets worse. 

He can already feel himself start to sweat, and the feeling prickles all over his skin. 

He fumbles for his phone and clicks on his playlist, turning it as loud as possible and it’s still not loud enough. 

Regulus lets himself slide down to the floor on the stairs, clutching at the railing for dear life and tries to make himself stop shaking. 

“You can’t be out here, miss”

Miss. 

He doesn’t recognise the teacher, though he doesn’t really look at her. He can’t look at her. 

“Alright, back inside with you, now”
She sounds mad, and Regulus squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself to get it together and stand up, but when he opens his eyes again he’s still on the floor. 

“Lass, I’m not telling you again. Back inside.”

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t-

She’s yelling now but Regulus can’t really hear her. 

Regulus finds it a bit funny when teacher say stuff like, “You respect me, I’ll respect you”

See, there are two forms of respect. The authority kind, and the human kind. 

So what the teacher really mean is more like, “If you don’t respect me as an authority, I won’t respect you as a person”

When Annie walks out of the principal’s office, she looks mad. 

Regulus doesn’t look at her when she sits down on the waiting bench next to him. 

“Reg?”

Regulus angles his head, which seems to be enough for Annie. 

“I think we need to pay the doctors a visit.”

What?

“And if that bitch ever talks to you again, you tell me and I’ll show her how we deal with her kind back in Glasgow.” 

Regulus smiles slightly, and he turns his head so Annie won’t see, but she does anyway. 

“Aww, love, come here” 

And even though Regulus just had a full on meltdown, after which he usually doesn’t let people touch him for like three weeks, he shuffles closer to her and plops his head on her shoulder. 

Annie runs her hand up and down his back gently, “Why were you out there anyway, bug?”

Regulus shrugs, which makes Annie tut, “No point lying to me, lad. I know everything.”

“Then why do I need to tell you if you already know?”

That makes Annie laugh, bright and happy, and she buries her nose in his hair. “Oh, you’re a funny little thing. Now talk.”

“I just panicked”

“Because…?”

“Someone wrote ‘tranny’ on my locker” 

Annie stiffens so suddenly it makes Regulus jump slightly, “Oh, those sick little bastards,” she spits, looking like she’s about to bite someone or something. 

Regulus doesn’t know what it means that he still feels safe with her despite that. 

Annie shakes her head, “Come on,” she gets up and pulls Regulus through the halls until they’re standing in front of his locker, which now has even more comments, such as ‘fag’, ‘sick’, ‘die, princess’, ‘fairy’ and ‘don’t be such a momma’s girl, Ray’. 

The last comment makes Regulus pause. 

Sirius said that. All the fucking time. 

Suddenly, the snickers he heard as he was running earlier sound terrifyingly familiar. Dread pools in his stomach and he looks around frantically, but the halls are empty except for him and Annie, who’s already using disinfectant to wipe away the wiring. 

Just as she erases the messy scrawls, Regulus recognises that swirl of the ‘y’.