Chapter 11
[Sirius POV]
Sirius had Remus’ tongue halfway down his throat and his husband’s fingers in irredeemable places when his damned phone rang the ringtone he’d reserved specifically for James. Without a thought, he silenced the device, but it continued to vibrate on his nightstand.
He answered it without removing his mouth from Remus’ for longer than the second required to grit out a “what the hell could you possibly want at one in the morning?”
“I’m worried about Regulus.”
Sirius groaned and extracted himself from Remus’ grasp. “Way to kill the fucking mood, Prongs.”
Remus flopped onto the bed next to Sirius and wiped his hands on Sirius’ shirt. “Hey, James.”
“Do you know what your parents did to him?” James asked, ignoring Remus. Sirius sat up, knowing James only passed up on the opportunity to make crude jokes when he was really upset. Usually, he’d have a dozen disgusted remarks and jokes at the expense of Sirius and Remus loaded and ready.
“What are you talking about, James?” A car horn echoed through the line. “And where are you? It sounds like you’re in the damn street.”
“Reggie started dissociating after the show and…and I couldn’t get him back. The band is with him.”
Sirius blinked once, twice, three times, absorbing that information. “What?”
James sighed harshly, the forceful exhale crackling through the speaker. “Why—why did you leave him in that house? It wasn’t safe and you knew it.” James spat the words with conviction seldom heard from the man. The next heavy breath James let out was shaky and caught in his throat. “God, I’m sorry, this is just…a lot.”
Remus took the phone when Sirius didn’t speak. “James, where are you?”
“Shit, I don’t know? I just started walking.”
“Well, what do you see?”
There was a pause and another car horn blasted through the speaker. “I’m still downtown. By the 24/7 cafe at the edge of the city.”
Remus nodded, dragging gentle fingers through Sirius’ hair. Sirius didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, still stuck on James’ words: it wasn’t safe and you knew it.
Blood pulsed through Sirius’ ears, drowning out everything but the memories flicking like a terrible movie through his head. Regulus was everything to him, he was the only member of the Noble House of Black that truly lived up to the name.
The day he left, he’d returned home from school and Mother was already setting the table for dinner. She set out four placemats but only three plates. Sirius knew better than to question her, so he went to Regulus’ room. He was pouring over a notebook in the corner of the room, practicing cursive. His hands were red and blistered and Sirius nearly threw up.
He turned on his heels and marched back to the dining room.
“What did you do to him?”
Mother didn’t look up from where she was studying wine bottles, searching for the best one to accompany their meal. “Why have you left your room, Sirius?”
Sirius wanted to smack the woman over the head with a wine bottle, but he wanted an answer more. “The blisters?”
With a sigh, Mother turned around and glanced down her sharp nose at Sirius. “His lack of progress with his studies was shameful,” she stated listlessly, as if she were commenting on the weather. “I believe he learned his lesson.”
Sirius seethed and clenched his fists, forcing himself to remain still. “Did you put his hands in boiling water?”
Mother was back to studying wine bottles. “His fingers, yes.”
“What is wrong with you? He’s eight!”
“Do not yell at me, Sirius,” Mother said, and fuck her for not yelling, why didn’t she care? Why couldn’t she cut the cowardly act for once?
Sirius could barely breathe through his anger. “Do you hurt him? When I’m at school, do you hit him?”
Mother picked up a bottle with a gold wax seal and set it on the table. Sirius followed her, and when she turned around, her hand swung out, hitting Sirius square in the cheekbone. “I would not hit my own child,” she said.
Sirius held his searing cheek and tried to make sense of her words. “What?”
Mother clicked her tongue as if she were dealing with an insolent child. “Would you like to know what I heard today? This afternoon, I got a call from the Malfoys, the ones with a boy in your class. Apparently their little boy came home babbling about two boys in his class holding hands.”
Sirius’ blood went cold. No. This wasn’t happening.
“Now, Sirius, how do you think I felt when Mrs. Malfoy informed me that it was you who her little boy had seen holding hands with another boy?”
Mother’s voice was even and emotionless, and it was perhaps the most terrifying thing Sirius had ever heard. He was a deer in headlights—he had no idea what was about to happen, but he was certain it would be irreversible.
“Was it worth it? Holding that boy’s hand?” Mother asked, bringing the back of her hand down again to meet Sirius’ face. He barely registered the pain before Mother knocked him backwards and he crashed onto the table. The table cloth wrinkled and the bottle of wine trembled.
Mother was on him again in an instant, hitting and kicking and finally, she was yelling.
“You’re a disgrace, Sirius. You need to be fixed, before the cancer spreads,” she hissed, striking Sirius hard enough to crack the wood below them. A loud creak sounded and Sirius was falling with the china plates and the silverware and the wine bottle shattered against his head before he could bring his hands up to shield himself. He wasn’t sure what was blood and what was wine, but he wasn’t sure it mattered—he was having difficulty breathing and his head was swimming.
There was a hand on his throat.
A scream echoed upstairs and Mother’s momentary distraction was long enough for Sirius to muster his remaining energy, kick Mother away from him, and grab his backpack from beside the door.
He looked back once, just once, and saw Mother with a kitchen knife gripped in her claws, her dress stained with wine and blood. Above her, in the window above the front door, a small set of eyes watched him. And Sirius, drunk on adrenaline, did the only thing he could think of: he ran.
Sirius snapped back to the present when he heard a woman’s voice. He blinked once, twice, and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
Pandora was in his bedroom—
Regulus was in his bed.
Sirius shot up, but to his relief, he was fully clothed. Regulus was laying, asleep, beside him, and James was sitting against the headboard on the other side of the man. Remus was on the other side of Sirius, and Pandora, Barty, and Evan were sprawled randomly around the bedroom. What the fuck?
Pandora raised an eyebrow at him, smirking. “You missed the chaos.”
“Why is everyone in my room?”
“It’s our room, darling. I let them in,” Remus murmured, looking unfairly unaffected by the additional five people in the small bedroom. “Don’t wake Regulus.”
“Why is everyone in our room?” Sirius whisper-shouted.
James snorted. “You’ve got the worst bed-head, Padfoot.”
Sirius opened his mouth to go off on James but Pandora cleared her throat, stealing the room’s attention. “Last night, after we got Regulus out of his episode, he kept asking for you. I don’t think he was fully back in the present because he looked terrified.”
“Shit,” Sirius groaned, running a hand through his hair. And yeah, James had a point—his hair was a mess.
“When he wakes up we’re gonna leave you two to…sort shit out, I guess. Regulus needs to talk to someone, and so do you. This can’t go on anymore,” Evan said, his face weighed down by a frown that turned his eyes glossy.
Right, Sirius thought, because I’m good at heart-to-hearts. Especially with people who hate me.
[Regulus POV]
Regulus felt like shit. No, worse than shit—Regulus felt like flaming shit that’d been run over by half a dozen semi trucks. Perhaps even a dozen semi trucks.
His pride was desecrated like roadkill, mowed down and left for dead on a well-traveled road for passersby to gawk at and pity for the fraction of a second it took to disappear down the street. Except his brother was there, the fucked-up, hot-cold mess of a man who didn’t dare pity him because he too had been sliced in two by the searing grills of a man and a woman on a msiguided mission. Sirius was there.
Wait—
The fuck?
“Sirius? Est-ce que je suis dans ton putain de lit?” That wasn’t what he meant to say.
Sirius, who was propped up against the headboard a few feet away, put his phone down. “Don’t blame me, it was your damn bandmates’ idea,” he grimaced and ran a hand through his tangled hair, “apparently we need to have a talk.”
Regulus scoffed. “You were nominated for a heart-to-heart? With me? That can’t be right.”
A ghost of a smile graced Sirius’ lips before a tight frown took over. “They said you were asking for me last night, and…shit, Reggie—” Sirius swallowed hard, “they’re all so worried about you, especially James.”
“I told them not to worry—”
“What did they do to you in that house, Reggie? What happened to you?”
He didn’t bother hesitating, for he was not afraid of his brother—there were many things he wanted to say to the older man, and though he’d bite his tongue in the beginning, he would not control his anger if provoked. Sirius did not deserve control.
Sirius.
It was still strange, after so many years of hating him, to meet his brother’s eyes. To really look at the person his brother had become, and know Sirius was doing the same. Reggie took a measured breath and willed his anger back.
“Reggie,” Sirius said again.
“Regulus,” Reggie corrected, voice clipped and cold.
Sirius swallowed loudly and nodded, his eyes never leaving Reggie. God, Reggie wanted to punch him.
“How are—”
“Why are we here, Sirius?” Reggie interrupted. The older man’s eyes flitted to the floor for a moment, and Mother’s voice echoed through Reggie’s head, chastising the boy’s display of what she’d deem “weak will and spineless cowardice.” Reggie’s mouth soured.
“I miss you, Regulus.”
Something hot and sharp flared beneath Reggie’s ribs, searing and tearing through muscle and sinew. It ruptured veins and severed nerves and Reggie was sure if he looked down that his sweater would be stained with blood. And that blood would paint the scarred skin below his clothes just like it did when he was eight and his brother was at the door, lips parted with promises he wouldn’t keep and cheeks slick with tears Reggie would forever hate.
Sirius left, and he hadn’t returned. He hadn’t been there when mother screamed and yelled and burned and cut and starved and beat and—Reggie was not free, not like Sirius was, and he never would be. He’d begged the walls of his room for Sirius to return, and he begged Mother for forgiveness every time he went home; he begged until his throat was sore and his voice broke, and it was pathetic, ugly, and everything Sirius had never been.
Until he’d left.
And then Reggie wasn’t sure who he was supposed to look up to, who he was supposed to try to be, because the Regulus Black Mother hurt so, so much, and the Regulus Black his brother knew hadn’t been enough to come back for.
Reggie had endured as some version of a person for years. He took what he was given and never complained, because Before, he’d complained and cried and clung to his brother’s side. Maybe that was what made him unlovable?
He got up and made his way to the bedroom door. “If that’s all you have to say to me—”
“Regulus, wait!” Sirius breathed.
“Sirius. I am only going to say this once,” Reggie stared at his brother unflinchingly, daring him to interrupt, “I do not owe you anything. I do not owe you my time, I do not owe you kindness, and I will not sit here and provide you relief from the guilt that ought to be eating you alive. I know exactly what kind of person you are, and if you think I’m going to offer you an ounce of the companionship or familiarity we had before you left, then I encourage you to think again.”
Sirius’ mouth was open, gaping like a trout, but Reggie wasn’t done.
“Do not pretend to care for what I’ve been through now, Sirius. Even after I learned to expect nothing of you, you disappoint me.”
Silent tears glistened on Sirius’ cheeks when Reggie reached for the door, but there was anger there too, under the glossy eyes and hurt. “You don’t understand, Regulus. Please, let me explain. Please.”
Reggie didn’t know why he let go of the doorknob. He didn't want to listen to his brother spout pretentious bullshit, but he stayed. Because he wasn’t going to be someone who left. Even when he was losing his control. “Tell me what exactly it is that I don’t understand.”
Sirius swallowed loudly again. “I had to leave, Reggie—”
“Regulus.”
“—Right, Regulus. You were the favorite, you are the favorite. You didn’t see the things Mother did to me, the things she said, the way she never, ever looked at me with anything but disgust. After she found out about Remus, I knew she’d kill me, Regulus. And then you were free of the person Mother was around me, Regulus. She told me she’d never hit you, and if I were you, I wouldn’t’ve wanted out, either.”
The stretch of silence after Sirius said his piece was heavy, it pressed on Reggie’s chest like hysteria, and he was certain he was going to lose his mind. Sirius’ words pingponged around his skull like bullets, leaving his ears ringing and his head pounding.
“Sirius Black,” Reggie hissed, “again I’ve overestimated your ability to be a decent fucking human being.”
The mentioned made a choked sound, but no intelligible words made it past his again gaping lips.
“Do you genuinely believe Walburga Black to be capable of kindness?”
“Regulus, you don’t know what she did—”
Reggie blinked slowly at his brother, his face surely an impressive reflection of the pure hatred pulsing red-hot through his veins.
“Vous pensez vraiment que j'ai eu la vie facile?” Did Sirius actually believe Regulus had it easy? Was his head that far up his own ass?
“Regulus—”
“Tell me, Sirius, what did she do to you that I couldn’t possibly fathom? Please, enlighten me.”
Sirius’ eyes shifted away from Reggie’s advancing form, but Reggie snapped his fingers and the eldest brother refocused. “You don’t know what you’re asking, Regulus. You’re the favorite, you always have been.”
“You’re still fucking hung up on that little idea, aren’t you? That I’m the goddamn ‘favorite,’ as if that guarantees untouchability—”
“I heard they took you fucking skiing in the winter! I can’t imagine a world where they even let me leave the house.”
Reggie froze, his breathing uneven and shallow. His ruined eye ached in its useless socket. “Tu crois ça?” He whispered, the confusion and frustration on his brother’s face enough to tip him over the edge. Hysterical laughter bubbled up his throat and he didn’t bother restraining it.
He laughed like a maniac, and honest-to-god tears dripped from his eyes as he dragged a trembling hand through his hair. In the next room over, his friends were probably on the edge of their seats, staring at the door, and he laughed harder.
Sirius’ expression was a pinched mess of confusion, anger, and concern, and Reggie felt himself slipping—pinpricks of numbness tingled up his arms and itched the edges of his mind. He was tired, and he was tired of being angry. Reggie didn’t owe Sirius anything, but he was overcome with the desire to shut him and his ‘you’re the favorite’ up.
And, afterall, maybe he did want to watch Sirius shatter into pieces when he saw what he left Reggie with, when he saw what being the favorite really meant; Reggie wanted his brother to understand, to hurt like he had, to be consumed by self-hatred and suffocating emptiness.
“What did they do to you, Sirius?”
Regulus saw his brother’s eyebrows jump, saw his teeth clench. The man didn’t—couldn’t?—look at Regulus. “Dad ignored me. Mother…was crazy. One wrong step and she was yelling and hitting. Whenever I left my room she’d be on me, shouting and cursing. She mostly just hit and kicked. Sometimes she’d lock me in my room without food. You remember that, I’m sure.”
Was his heart decayed and rotten in his chest? Regulus wondered, prodding his wrist until he found his pulse. So, his heart was there—then why did he feel envious of Sirius? Well, he knew why, but surely envy shouldn’t have been the most prevalent emotion in his mind, right? Wasn’t he supposed to feel some degree of empathy or—or sadness? Sympathy?
“A-t-elle déjà utilisé un couteau?”
Sirius choked on air. “A knife?”
“Ou des cigarettes?”
“Cigarettes? The ones Father smoked?”
“Est-ce qu'elle a déjà fait venir les cousins et les a envoyés dans votre chambre?”
Regulus didn’t know if Sirius was breathing.
“And would she lock the door? When they—when…when they—”
The sobs started suddenly, spilling from Regulus’ throat so urgently that his words were suffocated altogether.
“How could you think they’d just leave me alone if you left?” Regulus whispered. “And then you didn’t even bother to check in! You were afraid you were wrong, weren’t you? You were a coward and you thought ignoring me would help your chances.”
“Regulus—”
“I accepted years ago that you were just as much of a child as I was, that you saw your chance and took it. I get it, I do. I probably would’ve done the same.”
Regulus swallowed his remaining laughter and stood. He shrugged out of his sweater, tossed it onto the chair behind him, and started on the buttons on his undershirt. Sirius remained silent while Reggie slipped each button open, and when the last one popped undone, Reggie let the shirt fall to the ground.
The room wasn’t very bright, but the flickering from the fireplace in the corner deepened each of the scars littering Reggie’s body. He held his arms out and turned slowly, embracing the fire beside him as it breathed warmth onto his bare skin.
Sirius was crying again when Reggie completed his circle. His eyes were glued to the younger man’s spine, where the rows and rows of burns pocketed his flesh, and he stood up brokenly, as if the motion wasn’t a conscious decision. The hoops in Sirius’ double-pierced ears moved with him, clicking against each other—
Click.
The eldest brother wrapped his arms around Reggie and pulled him into a tight hug. Reggie flinched at the contact, but when his brother didn’t let go, his traitorous body melted into the embrace and buried his nose into Sirius’ neck. Sirius was sobbing silently, his chest hitching at random intervals while his face remained pressed into Reggie’s hair.
Click.
“Oh, god,” Sirius choked out, muffled and ugly. “I’m so, so sorry, Regulus.”
And there, in Sirius’ voice, it was: the self-hatred, the hurt, the emptiness, the understanding. But Reggie didn’t feel an ounce of satisfaction. He couldn’t feel much of anything beyond the numbness threatening to take over and the warmth of his brother’s tears against his skin.
Click.
“Reggie, baby—” Sirius whispered, his voice breaking with another sob, “I left you in that house. I left you with those—those monsters.” Sirius rocked them gently from side to side, holding Reggie as if they’d both fall apart if he let go. “I convinced myself that they wouldn’t hurt you, I called you lucky, again and again.” Sirius was a muttering mess of “I thought you didn’t understand” and “I abandoned you when you needed me the most, didn’t I? Oh, god,” and “What did Mother do when—”
Reggie pulled away from the hug and wiped his leaking eyes. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” Reggie warned. Sirius’s bloodshot gaze fell again to Regulus’ scars and his fingers followed suit, ghosting over the skin but never touching down.
“Can I?”
With half a mind to say no, Reggie nodded. He hated Sirius, he really did, but his touch was kind. And Reggie couldn’t possibly turn that down.
A calloused thumb found his cheekbone. “How’d this one really happen?”
Reggie sucked in a sharp breath. “Mother heard from the Malfoys that I was friends with a girl on food stamps. She sewed my mouth shut, too, when I said something stupid.”
“Holy shit,” Sirius whispered, fresh tears flowing down his face. “Mon étoile.”
The nickname, the way Sirius breathed it, stabbed through Regulus’ head, excruciatingly painful as it tore up memories left and right, unearthing long-buried nightmares and—
“I’ll call you mon étoile, then. So you never, ever think I’m like them.”
“Mon étoile, stay here. I’ll talk to Mother, I’ll fix this.”
“It’s not your fault, mon étoile. I promise it doesn’t hurt, Mother wouldn’t hit hard enough to really hurt me.”
“I love you. No matter what they tell you, I love you, mon étoile.”
God, Reggie missed Sirius. He missed his soft voice and loud emotions, his overflowing passion and unyielding pride, his stubbornness and his ability to love so much. Reggie missed the way Sirius gently twisted his hair when he was thinking too hard, the way he let all his feelings pour out freely, the way he ran with every impulsive thought he had.
Sirius existed in a way so foreign to Regulus that it toed the line between magnificent and dangerous. Sirius was so much where Reggie was a shell of a human—he felt like an echo of the man, the hollow, fleeting leftovers of an incredible song.
Click.
“I know my apologies are worthless right now, but I’m here for you, mon étoile, and I’m never, ever going to leave you again. Never.”
Worthless?
Regulus wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond to that, but he wanted to believe Sirius’ words. If he let himself believe them and Sirius left again, however, Regulus would shatter. He’d be the roadkill mashed into the tires of every car that did not bother to slow down or question why the air turned rancid when the windows rolled down. He’d be a stain on a nameless road, washed away with the next rain.
The numbness creeping through Regulus’ body had not ceased its journey, and Reggie could not help feeling inhuman. If he looked down, would he recognize his own hands? Would there even be hands attached to the ends of his arms? Or would there be nothing there, a testament to the contents of his mind? In the mirror above the bathroom sink, would he find a face he knew, two eyes and a mouth? Or would there be unmarked flesh, perhaps merely empty space in between ears he could not feel? Would he even see at all? Or would his vision be of memories and dreams and everything that could not be proven?
Worthless.
Click.
Reggie tried to curl his toes. He could not do it, but he did not expect to be able to. It was almost comforting to be capable of nothing, to be nothing.
He was nothing, an untamed dog, just as Mother had carved into the pale expanse of his back: worthless.
Cigarettes, the lighter in the desk drawer. Belts unbuckling, a locked door. Burnt flesh sizzles, putrid in the study. Wrists rubbed raw, cold hands on his thighs. Handcuffs on the bed frame, sewing needles from the sitting room. Cold hands on his chest, fire up his back. Be good for me?
He’d suffer the consequences for disobeying Mother, but not now. He couldn’t take it anymore, not when unconsciousness was so close to where he wobbled in the home he’d made for himself on the edge, overlooking a painless unknown.
From the depths, a siren called to him, easy and enticing:
Worthless, worthless, worthless.