Chapter 3
Their next show was only 20 miles from Regulus’ hometown, a fact he helped his brain forget by downing a healthy shot or four of vodka while they got ready in the dressing room. He ignored Pandora’s concern and put the finishing touches on his makeup, leaving a hickey or two on his collarbones just visible enough to drive the fans wild. Their outfits for this show were all dark red: Barty had a crimson button down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, Evan had a cropped t-shirt, Pandora had a black mesh jacket over a red bodysuit with holes cut into the sides just above her hips. Regulus had a button down similar to Barty’s, but his was shimmery—courtesy of Pandora’s scheming—and had a heart-shaped hole cut into the back of it.
He finished his eyeliner—the only band member who didn’t use waterproof eyeliner—and swiped a thin layer of Pandora’s lipgloss on his lips around his lip piercings. He looked hot, and Pandora and Evan had gone above and beyond with the rest of their outfits, too, down to their shoes: steel-toed platform boots, crisp converse, bright red stilettos, and leather combat boots. It was their biggest show yet, and they were ready .
The crowd ate their dramatics up, screaming wildly at all the right moments, and when the final chords of the encore rang through the venue, the audience was ear-splitting. Reggie was tipsy and euphoric, stumbling twice between the stage and their dressing room. The blood on his skin was drying into thin tendrils reaching up his wrists.
Barty was on him before he even sat down: “Reggie, you didn’t turn your head! When I kick you, you’re supposed to turn in time with my foot—we practiced it a dozen times!”
Regulus melted into the couch and, for the first time, registered the blood on his face and the pain radiating from his nose.
“Shit, I didn’t realize…”
“You didn’t notice your nose breaking?” Evan asked, his voice strangely quiet. Regulus wished he’d yell. “Are you okay?” he asked, handing Reggie a bag of ice from the freezer.
He couldn’t feel his hands, but he wasn’t sure he ever could. Didn’t all the blood mean it was supposed to hurt more?
A knock on the door drew Regulus from his head. Pandora stood up and peered through the crack in the door. “There’s a man out there? Did any of you invite someone to the show?”
Evan snorted, “let him in, Pandora—some of us like men. Is he hot?”
Pandora rolled her eyes and opened the door.
“Can I help you?”
Sirius Black, Regulus’ older brother, stepped into the room.
The man who abandoned Regulus in hell, the man who left Regulus behind and never once looked back.
Fuck no.
His eyes zeroed in on where Regulus was sprawled across the couch.
“ Reggie ,” he breathed, hands buried in the pockets of his jacket. “I can’t believe I found you.”
“I wasn’t fucking hiding,” Reggie said, sitting up. And maybe that wasn’t entirely true, but he certainly wasn’t going out of his way to hide from Sirius, of all people. “And it’s Regulus , to you.”
Sirius’ jaw hung agape and he swayed a bit on his feet.
“Would you like to come in?” Pandora asked, motioning for Sirius to take a seat on the couch next to Regulus.
Before Sirius could respond, Regulus was on his feet, his glare never wavering. “No, I think he was just leaving, actually.”
“Shame,” Barty muttered dryly. Evan snickered and elbowed him in the ribs.
Sirius had yet to recover from whatever shock-adjacent emotion he was experiencing, which made it that much easier to close the door. Reggie dragged a folding chair from the corner and propped it under the door handle to secure the room.
“Don’t let that man near me again, Panda, please,” Reggie said, stalking back to the couch. Why the hell had he shown up at all?
Pandora nodded with wide eyes, “I’m so sorry, Reg. I didn’t recognize him.”
Evan was staring at Regulus, his eyebrows pinched in thought. “ Oh ,” he whispered, “he probably saw you on the news last night, when the interviewer asked us about our next show,” and fuck , Evan was right.
The band was blowing up, but why did Sirius care now? Had Sirius really thought Regulus would let him in? After everything that bastard had done?
After everything he’d left Reggie to handle on his own?
After everything?
And he was back in that house, in that room where he’d died again and again and again. Where he’d been killed again and again and again. Where he’d been burned and bruised and beaten and cut and starved and tortured and—
Reggie was fourteen and his hands were shaking.
That itself wasn’t entirely unusual—Reggie liked to pick fights he wouldn’t win and thus his joints never seemed to move without protest—but his hands were clasped together in prayer. Reggie didn’t pray, not even on holidays when his mother would drag him to church or in moments of weakness when he was certain he’d die without supernatural intervention.
He was praying with hands all bone and bloodless, stretched-taut skin, and he was shaking like a leaf caught up in a late summer storm that was destined to tear him to shreds. And he was crying.
Reggie had only cried once, after his brother left. He had no tears to spare after that, and never had an injury proved to be worth crying over, not even when he’d needed his entire left ankle reconstructed. Reggie fought and lost, fought and lost, fought and lost, and at no time had he cried because of it.
Reggie’s hands were shaking where they were clasped in prayer, his cheeks were wet with tears, and there was blood dripping from a large gash down the left side of his face. Blood soaked through the back of his shirt from some unseen injury, and deep purple bruises were already developing around his bone-white neck.
He remained motionless for a moment more before heavy steps outside his bedroom door pulled him from his trance. If his mother caught him on the floor, he’d be punished severely, but he didn't have the energy to stand. The doorknob turned and Reggie tried to turn towards the door. Perhaps, if Reggie had been able to recall the last time he ate, he could’ve worked up the courage to move or speak or something, but his stomach was rebelling against the rest of his body and his lips were sewn closed.
Ah, that was another thing—Reggie’s praying hands were shaking, his cheeks were stained with foreign tears, his left eye wouldn’t open, he was drenched in his own blood, and his lips were sewn tightly closed with the thread his mother had dug from his father’s desk drawer and the needle she’d plucked from her sewing kit while Reggie had thrashed against the marble tile of the kitchen floor.
Truthfully, Reggie had been praying for death. He had no way of accomplishing the task on his own, given his barren room and locked-from-the-outside door, and he knew his mother would never finish the job.
Reggie’s vision swam when a hand found his hair and yanked him across the floor. His back met the wood beneath him with a dull thud that sent red-hot fireworks across his closed eyelids. Reggie could not hear his mother’s voice, and he was not entirely sure he could hear anything at all.
Time was an awful thing, and Reggie hated it with all his might. It flowed like tar at the best of times, and often, Reggie was certain that it simply didn’t move. The intervals between Reggie’s heartbeat were slowing, and the throbs of pain through his body followed suit, fading into something numb and tingling and empty. Reggie couldn’t find it in himself to fear the numbness, or what his mother would do while he was unaware of anything and everything, and he welcomed the emptiness like an old friend. It wasn’t warm or kind, but it didn’t hurt, and that was more than enough.
Reggie came to in an instant, and again time exercised its merciless cruelty, dousing him in excruciating pain without a hint of respite. By some miracle, he did not scream, but he still flinched at the hand in his right-side peripheral vision. His left eye did not open.
The hand was calloused and the nails were dirty—it was the doctor’s hand, the family physician whose silence had been bought by a crisp check Reggie had pretended not to see. The doctor, though a small and unimpressive man, had infinite spite and hatred packed into his boxy frame, something Reggie knew intimately; the doctor was aggressive with his every movement, he stabbed needles and yanked IVs and shoved thermometers and forced pills he never gave name to through Reggie’s lips.
“This is not fixable, ma’am,” the doctor said, jabbing a hand towards the left side of Reggie’s face. “The stitches will need to come out tomorrow, and the lips, too, if you want it healed by the time the child returns to school.”
Had he the capacity to process the words spoken by the doctor, Reggie might’ve wondered how long he’d been numb or just how irreversibly his mother had disfigured him. Instead, he closed his eyes and fought his tender lungs for air that tasted of pennies and salt. Such a taste was nostalgic, for Reggie’s childhood was made of blood and tears and broken skin and shattered bones. It was familiar, but in the hopeless sense grief always seemed to be, more so a burden than a welcomed thing.
The first thought Reggie’s mind summoned was a question, a rhetorical one that never would be asked— could he ever feel without pain? Was there such a thing as a feeling devoid of pain at all?
At school, Reggie did not exist without pain, or at least without the promise of such whispered against his scarred skin and shaping his every decision. It was a constant, so much so that he’d made it something of his own at school. Fighting was his, and the pain of a punch in the jaw from a hand the size of his own was something else entirely from the blades of his mother’s kitchen knives or the rings on her fingers. Of that, Reggie was certain.
Reggie tried to distract himself from the doctor’s poking and prodding with good memories. His friends would be waiting for him at school when winter break was over, they’d exchange gifts and stories by the fireplace in the common room and it’d be warm—god, it was always so cold at home, it was as if all heat was sucked from Reggie’s bones upon reaching the manor. Reggie wondered how the house could be so damn freezing if it was hell. The only flames to be found were the ones in his mother’s eyes, but she’d never had any warmth for him.
When Reggie was getting ready for the trip back to school, he finally braved a glance in the bathroom mirror. His movements were stiff and slow, and his head hurt from the strain of only having one working eye, but he faced himself nonetheless.
Had he enough food in his system to be sick, Reggie would’ve thrown up. He dry heaved nothingness, his hand ghosting over the partially healed cut stretching from an inch above his eyebrow to two inches below his left eye. His eye itself was white and red, the pupil and iris covered by cloudy scarring. Reggie turned around, swallowing loudly and watching the new thin scars around his neck bob with the action.
His back, over the canvas of old wounds, was painted in bruises and deep not-yet-healed gashes from belt buckles and knives alike. God, what a mess.
There was a swift knock on the door and Reggie lurched into action, throwing on his shirt and sweatshirt, and flipping his hood up. He met his mother outside the bathroom, and she gave him a long look before nodding and disappearing into the hallway.
Reggie wondered what his friends would say. Would they accept his emotionless lies? Would they press him for more information? Would they let him die?
The chauffeur was silent the entire two and a half hour drive, and Reggie was glad. He didn’t know if his voice still worked after weeks of nothing but screaming and silence. There were snacks in the pocket behind the driver’s seat, and Reggie knew his mother had not placed them there. They were the kind his friends brought to movie nights and parties, the kind he’d never been allowed to have even when his mother deemed him worthy of food.
Reggie couldn’t bring himself to eat, for the hunger clawing at his insides was drowned out by the pain of his back against the seat and the pounding behind his eye.
They were nearly to the school’s front gates when Reggie couldn’t fight it anymore: he thought of his brother, how he’d react if he saw Reggie’s injuries, if he’d care at all.
He’d left years ago, during a fight that Reggie had been unable to join, locked away in his room. He hadn’t even said goodbye.
Reggie didn’t try to reach out to him. Sirius had left. Sure, Sirius deserved better than their mother, but he hadn’t even brought Reggie with him, he hadn’t even offered. He didn’t come back for him, not when Reggie had nearly bled out on the kitchen floor, not when their mother had carved ugly words into his skin, not when Reggie’s lips had been sewn closed, not when—
“ Reggie , c’mon. Let’s get out of here,” Barty grumbled, getting up and peeking his head out of the dressing room, “the coast is clear.”
The hotel they were staying at wasn’t far from the venue, and they settled into the room silently. Regulus was one wrong move from dissociating, and the rest of the group was well-versed in his body language.
Pandora and Evan slipped out to the hall, and Reggie headed to the bathroom, dousing his face in icy water.
“He’s an asshole,” Barty said, leaning on the bathroom door frame. Regulus didn’t speak, opting instead to splash another handful of frigid water onto his skin. “Let’s go to the roof,” Barty murmured, holding out his hand—the gesture usually would be slapped away, but Regulus wiped his face and took Barty’s hand, uncaring for the rare softness he preferred to ignore.
Barty was good at picking locks, and the roof door proved to be no exception, partially because it was already unlocked. Evan and Pandora were sprawled out in the corner against an electrical box, rolling blunts. Regulus almost smiled.
The four of them had grown up together, and though Barty, Evan, and Pandora were older than Regulus, they’d attended the same schools. Their band began when Regulus was in eighth grade, when he was angrier than ever and needed somewhere to put his rage. Pandora was the one to suggest the idea, and they fell into their roles in an instant.
From the beginning, they were there for each other, and Reggie still remembered dragging himself to school after a particularly brutal winter break spent with stitches in his lips and welts on his back. His friends would argue back and forth easily when tension in Reggie’s shoulders wouldn’t ease, when something too big to name sat heavy deep in his bones and in the back of his throat when he tried to speak. It was often like that, after a long stretch with his parents, where he wasn’t able to relax for days. He jumped at every noise and kept the doors in view at all times, and it was exhausting.
Pandora would always break the ice first, usually with a warm hand on his shoulder. “Are you doing okay, Reggie?” She would ask, eyes soft with gentle worry that made Reggie hate himself. “I promise I won’t ask again.”
They would walk together to the roof of the boarding school dorms, the secluded spot they reserved for late-night gossip sessions and sharing the occasional blunt when Barty could get his hands on some weed.
Reggie would put his feet in Pandora’s lap and lay his head on one of Evan’s thighs, and Barty would take the other. It was nearly dark, and the sky was a beautiful ombre of deep red and orange.
“My parents took me to the house in France, the one in the outskirts of Paris.”
Reggie’s friends listened silently, and Evan’s hand found Reggie’s hair.
His eyes slipped closed. “My mom was mad about last semester. Said she heard about my friends and their ‘impure practices.’ She wanted to make sure I knew what would happen if I caught Pandora’s ‘sickness.’” Regulus spat the words with venom, the homophobic language tearing his heart apart just like it had the first time he’d heard it.
Reggie shuddered and Pandora’s fingers rubbed soothingly up and down his shin. “She was so mad—” Reggie’s voice broke and he forced back the lump in his throat. “I was stupid, I thought that maybe she’d…she’d spare me the brunt of her anger because for once it wasn’t me who’d fucked everything up in her eyes. God, I was so fucking stupid.”
“Don’t say that about yourself, honey,” Pandora whispered. “Walburga is the stupid one, always. Every time.”
“I said something dumb, I don’t even remember what.”
“And that was that?” Barty asked.
Reggie hummed. “Skiing accident is an easier story.”
“You ever even been skiing, Reggie?”
“Mother would never let me. I’ve never been sledding or anything, either.”
“Skating?”
“Nope.”
“Snowshoeing?”
“The fuck is that?”
Evan snorted, “It’s like tennis racquets on your shoes, so you can stand on top of snow.”
Reggie lifted his head to look at Barty and Evan. “You’re lying.”
Pandora threw her head back and laughed, loud and open. “It’s a real thing. Mum took me once.”
“Bullshit. Don’t gaslight me.”
Barty was laughing, too, shaking his head. “Google it, Reggie.”
Regulus found himself laughing, somehow, and he thanked the god he didn’t believe in for his friends .
And at the hotel after the show, the scene was similar to the one they’d lived out a million times at school. Weed and late-night conversations on rooftops brought out the truth. The ugly, ugly truth.
Regulus inhaled deeply, taking a long drag from the blunt Evan expertly prepared. He sighed and his eyes slipped closed.
“I can’t stop thinking about Him,” Regulus whispered, his voice scratchy and breaking.
No one asked who “Him” was. They knew better.
Evan’s nails scratched Reggie’s scalp lightly and he shivered.
“That’s normal, I’d imagine,” Barty said, passing back the blunt he’d taken from Reggie.
Pandora hummed. “You’re allowed to miss him, even though he’s a dick.” Her words came out with little puffs of smoke, each one shaped like Reggie’s inner turmoil.
“He’s a fuckhead, but he’s your brother. Those bonds don’t just disappear, even if it’s been like twenty years,” Barty added.
It hadn’t been twenty years, but Reggie wondered if it made a difference. He still felt the same way he did when Sirius left; it was as if, the moment Sirius left, everything inside Regulus had been irreparably shattered.
God, he was pathetic .
Reggie rubbed his eyes, groaning. “This is fucked,” he muttered.
“At least we don’t have another show for a few days. You can sleep on it,” Pandora said, her hand warm and grounding on Reggie’s leg.