Sirius I
Sirius Black is declared godfather-to-be at dusk on the second of December. Lily proudly (and very patiently) casts the spell proving her pregnancy multiple times over the evening for each close friend who drops by. She is so happy that she does not complain even once when Sirius suggests reuniting the Marauders, nor when the reunion is taken outside of the small safe house in Topperley that is serving as the newlywed Potters’ hiding spot.
She is already up drinking black coffee and reading a book whose title swims before Sirius’ eyes when James and he return at six the next morning, and agreeably offers a cup to each before putting James to bed and politely suggesting Sirius do the same elsewhere. Feeling a bit guilty but mostly just horrendously nauseous, Sirius apparates home to Richmond, and passes out on his doorstep.
When he awakens, the darkness has pealed away into a cold, crisp December morning. A little snow has fallen around him and melted into his dark coat. Frost coats the branches and his doorknob is wet and slippery as he fumbles his way inside, casting a warming spell as he does. It has been some time since he and James managed to get properly drunk together and although he still finds his way out most nights he isn’t on Order business, he never gets quite as drunk as when James is there to egg him on.
Unable to risk going out in Wizarding London or Hogsmeade, they’d hit a town outside of Manchester and spent the early morning terrorising local muggles with worsening imitations of various northern accents. Remus had left about three and Sirius’ anger, ever-ready to flow over where the werewolf was concerned, had violently erupted. He owes a bottle to both James and Peter for putting up with the screaming match he treated them to over Remus’ increasingly erratic and inexplicable behaviour.
He pours himself a cup of cold tea out of last night’s pot and adds a shot for good luck as he mulls over the Remus situation more soberly. James won’t take him seriously, insisting last night that Dumbledore’s word on the matter is final. Peter tentatively agreed with James, but Sirius could see enough unease in Peter’s drunken face to know that privately Peter is worried about Remus’ strange disappearances and growing caginess too.
For the last four months, Remus has clamped down on sharing any information with them at all. In the year and a half since they left school, the four of them and Lily have shared everything—every scrap of information, every location they’ve covered, every Death Eater they’ve laid eyes on. They’ve shared this information with the Order, too, of course, but privately and with much more insignificant and irreverent detail with each other. It’s become a way to pass the time when sat indoors itching for their former Headmaster or Moody or Shacklebolt to come knocking and give them something practical to do. Occasionally, as when Lily’s snide remark on a Death Eater’s peculiarly short and crooked wand led to the arrest of Trevor Avery, their talks even proved useful. Remus, who rarely went on the same assignments as they did, still took part when he could, tiredly explaining the workings of the wild packs and the strange societies of the other Dark creatures he was sent to implore to not join allegiance with Voldemort. Sirius privately doubted Remus was the man for the job, werewolf or not. He had often entreated Sirius and James to restrain themselves back at Hogwarts, to very little avail.
His boring, logical arguments are just about as likely to persuade a vampire not to listen to Voldemort’s bold pledges as they were to stop us going for Snivellus, he thinks, rather glumly. Any memory of the greasy, skinny boy who had haunted the corner of Sirius’ vision at Hogwarts was unfortunate. The recollection of the misery on Snape’s face after mosts encounters is more pleasant.
Sirius is still a little nervous, somewhere in the back of his stomach, that he himself is the reason for Remus’ turning traitor. Nearly four years ago, he had nearly sentenced Remus to Azkaban for murder by sending Snape out to find him in werewolf form. Only James’ quick thinking had saved Snape from a brutal death or life as a werewolf himself. James and Peter had quickly forgiven him—it was Snape, after all—but Remus had taken a while to cool off. Some days, Sirius gets a very strong sense from both Remus and Lily that they wonder what he’s even doing in the Order at all.
Disliking me is hardly reason to go crawling to Voldemort, he thinks, rolling his eyes and finishing his tea. He isn’t narcissistic enough to think Remus’ life revolves that closely around him. But wanting a pack—a real pack, that doesn’t involve me—that might just be enough.
It takes him an hour to feel like a wizard again, draining the remainder of his Hanchill’s Hangover Solution and downing some coffee and toast. A small gathering of the Order is scheduled for midday, and Sirius is brimming with anticipation. An assignment is long overdue.
———————————————————
His disappointment when the meeting turns into Moody reporting on what Shacklebolt had already unofficially bitched to him about yesterday is immeasurable. James and Lily manage to pretend to not be bored out of their minds admirably, and McKinnon and Fenwick do a decent job of looking interested in how the Department for the Improper Use of Magic’s new scheme for protecting muggle objects from magical interference might aid in the fight against Voldemort. Moody, to his credit, barely even sounds sarcastic. Sirius’ ears only prick up when Moody finally turns to reporting on actual incidents—Sirius’s cousin Bellatrix is mentioned, having been sighted on Wednesday cursing a muggle witness to an altercation between herself and Fenwick. Bellatrix had pursued Benjy over a whole county before retreating after he was joined by the grim Auror Edgar Bones. Sirius nods to himself, vaguely pleased. It wouldn’t do for her to be murdered by the likes of Benjy Fenwick—nice, bumbling Fenwick. She deserves a better killer. Like me.
Moody closes with by urging them to stay cautious and not engage in unnecessary combat. “We need every last one of you,” he says solemnly. “The Wizengamot is where we bring these creatures to justice. Not the battlefield. Avoid unnecessary combat. No provocations. Don’t give them justification. Stay alive.”
Sirius doesn’t manage to not roll his eyes as he leaves with James and Lily. Peter is presumably still asleep somewhere and Remus is, of course, mysteriously elsewhere. They go for a raucous lunch in Cardiff and stay out until early evening, arguing about baby names and nursery room colours and whether Shacklebolt and McKinnon are shagging and how many galleons to kiss Moody. Sirius is in a much better mood when they apparate back to Topperley, where they find Peter near tears exiting the Potters’ front door.
“I’ve been sent to find you!” he shouts, the moment he sees them. “We’re to get to Benjy’s now—there’s about ten of them going for his house!”
The magic that thunders through Sirius’ veins in eager response is glorious—he barely notices Lily and James’ brief argument about whether she should come with them and surges ahead to Peter, grabbing his arm to Side-Along him to the grey cottage in Northumberland. As James appears beside him, Lily-less, Sirius spares a moment to think how often the three of them have drunk and suppered here with Fenwick, who’s truly an alright chap. His elderly parents spoiled him hopelessly and would play-bicker hilariously with each other to entertain visitors. Benjy constantly worried about leaving them alone if he should die fighting—but they’d understand, he’d say, grimly and with no self-pity. It’s worth it, for the cause.
The house doesn’t look as it should do, though. A chunk is torn out of the gable over the front entrance, and the front door is askew and blackened.
And then he sees Bella.
Hears her, before he sees her. Hears her laugh, higher and colder than his own but otherwise much similar. Feels his magic pulsing along his skin and into his wand as he starts to run—she hurtles out of the doorway just as he runs into the garden, her own wand aloft as she screams mosmordre!
The green skull and snake that leap from her wand cast an eerie glow in the dusk light. His first two hexes are cast aside in sharp movements of her crooked wand but the third catches her, and her howl as she crashes back against the door is dulled by the heavy foliage that surrounds the Fenwicks' house, but it echoes ever so sweetly in Sirius’ ears. More Death Eaters have come around the side of the house, masked, and Peter and James are giving them hell beside him. He can focus entirely on Bella and the twist of pain on her beautiful face.
She’s back up before he can land another, and returns his hex with a twisted curse and a low-aimed balance hex that nearly brings his legs out from under him. She counters his bone-vanishing curse and he sends her eye-bursting hex in a nearby bush, whose leaves shrivel and die in seconds flat.
“I’ve seen you,” she pants, hands blurring behind the flashing spells. “Over and over—and I’ve wanted—so badly—so see you dead—for so long—.”
“Same here,” he snarls. “You bitch—what you did to Edgar’s sister—you’ll rot for that!”
She howls with laughter, eyes wide and childlike with joy. Another curse lands and shatters the bone above her cheek; the low moan she makes vibrates in Sirius’ teeth and his moment of hesitation earns him a cutting curse across his collarbones.
It’s the first time they’ve engaged in a true, life-or-death duel. They sparred often as children, both desperately lusting for conflict and happily creating it if it didn’t already exist. As time wore on, the tension between them turned into something nastier and far more vicious; Bella outpaced him very quickly shortly after she married Rodolphus Lestrange but he compensated by channeling the brutal anger that was growing hotter by the day as he chafed more and more against their family. Sirius didn’t lay eyes on her for three years, and in that time he found plenty of other outlets to distract his fury. Keeping James and Lily alive, and despising anything that might bring them harm—including Bella—even brings him some measure of calm these days.
Calm that even seeing her threatens to destroy. Somewhere in his peripheral vision, he knows that James and Peter have been joined by other Order members and that their battle is being won. It assuages the guilt in his stomach, for, in this moment, he would choose slicing a line of spurting red into her throat over shielding James. There is blood sliding down the broken side of her face, matting the black curls to her snarling mouth as she shrieks curse after curse, her wrist snapping unnaturally to guide endless malevolence his way.
Sirius has no clue how long they remain locked like that, but the spell that has enveloped them and made them blind to the rest of the world ends as James appears beside him and sends a bombardment spell at the fragmented wall behind her. The shrapnel catches her off-guard and sends her flying. With a snarl she is up again in a moment to hurl a final garbled hex at Sirius before her eyes widen: she is the only Death Eater remaining in the small grove and she apparates away with a shattering crack.
Her hex lands true: Sirius doubles up with a shout. When he prises up his shirt the skin underneath is gone. The waxy and blackening flesh of his stomach smokes creepily and James gags at the smell.
“Bring him inside,” says Moody brusquely, grabbing one of Sirius’s arms and gesturing for James to do the same.
Sirius is feverish as he staggers along into the house: he dreads seeing the true extent of the Death Eaters’ visit but nothing prepares him for Benjy Fenwick’s dead mother lying on her tiled kitchen floor. No expression graces her face and her eyes are fixed unseeingly on the ceiling. Moody steers him away into the open sitting room and pushes him roughly onto the sofa, Vanishing his shirt and grimly setting about examining his wounds. James hovers at the end of the sofa, casting aghast looks both at Sirius and behind him at the corpse in turn. Choking laughter slips unbidden out of Sirius, but he has to stop with a shudder as the pain in his stomach spikes.
“Strange day, James?” he coughs out. He needs to hear James say something. To prove that he’s alright.
James swallows and nods, his eyes refocusing. “What’s wrong with him, Alastor?” He asks, leaning over the sofa to take a closer look.
“Nothing we can’t fix,” says Moody. He casts a spell Sirius doesn’t recognise, that envelopes the wound with a balm that cools and soothes, causing Sirius to groan. “She’s your cousin, yes?”
Sirius stares up at the ceiling and says nothing as Moody carries on casting. Moody isn’t expecting an answer. He knows exactly who Sirius is and what kind of family he comes from: Sirius has no interest in defending his appalling relations or being linked to them by people who have no fucking right to judge him. Moody, by the Order’s standards, is no saint, but Sirius still knows deep down that even he questions Sirius’s presence in the Order. Two years of endless missions, of largely impeccable behaviour, and he still knows that everyone, everyone—except James and Peter, of course—expects him to snap one day and start shrieking about mudbloods and blood traitors and cursing them all indiscriminately.
Sometimes, when he’s alone and the lights are off, he wonders to himself if his mother and Bella and Regulus and all of them were born rabid or if, in between the side glances and dread and judgment of strangers, they just decided it was easier to fall in line with their family’s bloody reputation. He left them all behind three years but he still fears, desperately, that he can never outrun the blood that still lives inside him. If the magic that lives in him—that rushes and thrills wildly when it’s directed to curse and harm—is so permanently tainted from generations of ill-use that he is fated to become everything he has despised since childhood.
And sometimes: if it wouldn’t be easier to just give in. To do what he knows is easy—what his blood makes easy for him.
He tears his eyes away from the ceiling and meets James’ brown gaze. His closest friend’s face is twisted by a worried frown. James knows all too well what goes through Sirius’ head whenever people like Moody mention his family. Knows the boiling rage that curls in his stomach at having to prove himself time and again as being normal and sane. Knows that even when Sirius isn’t normal and sane, how hard he tries to be—to crawl back and find his footing again each time he loses it. Is willing to be there at his side every time, to lend a hand and to never judge.
Gratitude curls in Sirius’s stomach, and something in his own gaze must soften, because James looks less worried and comes to kneel beside him, gently healing another cut that Sirius hadn’t even felt.
“Did you see anyone else?” he asks softly.
James shakes his head, black curls shadowing his eyes. “Nope,” he answers. “All masked. Besides her.”
Sirius sighs and closes his eyes. “Benjy?”
James is silent for a moment too long. Moody abruptly cuts in instead. “Dead. His dad, too.”
Sirius tries to swallow around the dryness in his mouth.
“I’m glad in a way,” James says, awkwardly. “It would have killed them slowly to lose him, anyway. Better they went quickly.”
Sirius and Moody have been doing this long enough to not point out that none of them should have died and just nod instead.
—————————————————————
Sirius goes home first with James, who tells Lily about the evening. Two Aurors had carried Benjy’s father’s body past Sirius’s improvised triage bed just as Moody finished healing him, but there hadn’t been enough left to recover of Benjy’s body. Just bits of him left, Moody had said gruffly, after he returned from examining the scene upstairs. Lily, who had been closest to him out of all of them, sits at her writing desk to pen a letter to Benjy’s sister and begin the funeral arrangements. Halfway through she curls roughly into a ball and starts sobbing; James goes to comfort her and Sirius slips awkwardly out as soon as he’s sure they’re too wrapped up in each other to notice he’s gone.
The tiredness that sinks into Sirius’ bones as he apparates to Richmond is nearly unbearable. He stumbles straight into his sitting room and shifts papers and dirty dishes until he’’s finds a whiskey bottle. Lighting the fire, he sits and stares for a long, long time as the flickering flames, until the birds’ chatter dies down and an owl starts to huff softly outside. Curiously, he lifts his shirt up again to peer at the half-healed skin beneath, running his fingers over it and shivering at the sting that results. Anger stirs in his gut.
I should have been better than her, now, he thinks. I haven’t done enough.
Sirius cannot face the guilt that seeps into him as he sees Bellatrix apparate away, over and over again. The flames twist into her face, and the ghostly echo of her laughs sounds amidst the crackling. She’s the one who killed Benjy, he knows. Moody’s description of what remained of him is her style exactly. Vengeance, for slipping though her fingers the other day. Petty bitch.
Next time, he thinks. I’ll be ready. The next time I see her will be her last. I’ll obliterate her.
It’s this more pleasant thought that carries his exhausted feet upstairs and he crashes tipsily onto his soft bed and finally shuts out the world.
———————————————————————
If he’d been asleep for a little longer, the gentle knock might have slipped straight into Sirius’s dream. It takes him a blurry moment of questioning whether he really did hear anything, before adrenaline courses through his veins and paranoia takes hold. His address is an open secret; his safety guaranteed more by his ancient blood than by proper warding. Nobody wants to be responsible for spilling his blood—except her, of course. She would have no such compunctions.
He is on his feet a moment later, his shirt and wand in his hands as he charges for the stairs, grunting as he leaps down two and three steps at a time. No other knock has sounded, and for the first time he considers how absurd it would be for her to knock—let alone knock gently. Probably Peter, he thinks, rolling his eyes, the adrenaline lessening. He glances at the clock that reads two in the morning, and grumpily bends to shout out, “what kind of time is this? Who the fuck is that?” through the letterbox. He isn’t in the mood to deal with Peter, right now, and half hopes the blond will just slink away.
“Regulus,” says a stiff, haughty voice, muffled from behind the door but sharp enough to be unmistakeable.
The adrenaline that had receded nearly chokes Sirius as he flings open the door and sends his brother flying down the pathway. Regulus’s wand is in his hand before his brother has even started to cry out, and Sirius secures his wrists behind his back lest the brat try wandless magic to recover his wand, peering out into the darkness to see if Regulus has brought any other unsavoury companions with him.
“Sirius—please—listen—!”
“I’ve done all the listening I’m ever going to do to you and yours,” he snarls, striding to grab his brother and examine his bound wrists. He marvels for an uncomfortably long moment at how tall his brother has grown—he is nearly eye-to-eye with Sirius and something in his stomach twists. Seeing two members of his family—the two people he was closer to than anyone else besides his friends—in one day, after not speaking to either for three years, is nearly too much. Regulus, like himself, looks much like Bella. In the moonlight and with golden streetlights softening harsh cheekbones, Regulus looks angelic. No trace of the rot within shows on his exterior, but Sirius remembers all too well the vitriol and filth that those curved lips have spat at him previously, and feels no mercy as he grips the thin wrists harshly enough to bruise.
Over Regulus’ shoulders, a bedroom window suddenly illuminates, and Sirius shoves his brother towards the door, ordering him inside. It wouldn’t do to piss off his muggle neighbours again, not when any number of them might have heard Regulus’s shrieks and take it upon themselves to summon their muggle Aurors. Regulus walks strangely but meekly, and says nothing as Sirius wards the door, taking care to loudly add a special blood-boiling curse should Regulus try to leave with permission.
Sirius isn’t at all sure he’ll be letting his brother leave, as he shoves him into the sitting room. Regulus might be taller but he seems thinner and frailer than ever. All of the Blacks run tall, but half were well-built, like himself, with well-curved women and broad-shouldered men. The other half, the Reguluses and Narcissas, ran willowy—elegant and graceful when in good health, but too easily turning unpleasantly thin and frail when stressed or ill. It is this, and only this, that stops Sirius from finding unholy pleasure in immediately tearing the Death Eater in front of him from limb to limb. Something is eating Regulus, and Sirius would like to find out who is responsible, if only to congratulate them.
He seats Regulus amidst the piles of crap he has amassed and never bothers to clear, and nearly laughs at how stiffly his starched brother sits amongst the rubbish. Regulus’s wand goes inside his pocket for safe-keeping. Perhaps he’ll keep it as a memento after he’s stuffed Regulus back piece by sorry piece through Grimmauld’s letterbox.
“How did you find me?” he asks, watching Regulus’ throat bob as he swallows dryly. His brother’s mouth twists and his breathing falters, but no sound comes out. Long lashes flicker downwards and Sirius feels disgust rise in him. At least Bella knows what she is, he thinks, and lives it truly. This spineless little shit doesn’t even have the guts to face what he’s let himself become.
“Well?” he snaps to the silent figure before him. He threatens Regulus with the Ministry, and watches with interest as his face goes from scarlet to white alarmingly quickly. Filthy coward.
“Can I have some water?” is the first thing his brother says, and for a moment Sirius just gapes openly, before deciding his brother’s voice sounds so gratingly dry that it’s worthwhile granting the request. Administering the water is awkward, and feeling Regulus’s hot breath on his hand as he drinks is far more contact than he wishes for. He makes up for it by jamming his wand into the soft hollow of his neck, and enjoying the soft wince as Regulus flinches.
Regulus closes his eyes for a moment, and his voice is smoother and more haughty again as he says, “Kreacher showed me here. Apparently he can still find you.”
The mention of Kreacher infuriates Sirius anew. The elf was his mother’s most loyal ally as a child, and caused him no end of trouble. He threatens Kreacher’s life viciously and barely listens as Regulus starts to say something about needing to speak to him—as if—.
“I think I can guess,” he interrupts, sneering. “If you’re not ambushing me to kill me then either you’re here on Voldemort’s orders to try and recruit me again—or you’ve turned chicken now that you’re out of school and actually having to get your hands dirty. Spit it out, which is it?”
Regulus clearly doesn’t know that Voldemort tried to have Narcissa persuade him of the merits of their cause, and the incredulity on his face shows he at least knows Sirius far better than Voldemort seems to. He mutters instead that it is something more like the second that has brought him to Sirius’s door, and Sirius’s stomach twists with bitter satisfaction.
Regulus was a gentle child—as much of a favourite for his calm nature in Orion and Walburga’s tumultuous household as Narcissa had been in Cygnus’s. Bella and Sirius had laughed themselves sick at his credulity as a small child, and had got in trouble many times for telling him horrendous lies he would then innocently repeat at inopportune times. At some point, Regulus grew cleverer and meaner, but no less undiscerning. The casual hatred of muggles and muggleborns espoused by their parents and the rest of their family took unusually strong root in him, and from the time he was fourteen his own hatred took on a more active role than their parents had ever intended. If Sirius was unpopular for his liking of muggles and friendships with muggleborns, he understood their parents felt a similar degree of alarm about how involved Regulus was becoming with Bellatrix and Lucius. Nonetheless, Regulus learned quickly to carefully conceal the worst parts of what he was sneaking off to do, and by the time Sirius had had enough of his family, Regulus was once again throughly in their good graces.
Despite knowing full well what Regulus was concealing during that last year at Grimmauld, Sirius still held out some hope that his brother might learn to think better of following Bella into active service to Voldemort—at the very least just to avoid risking Black blood spilling. His disappointment when Regulus cold-shouldered him during his last two years at Hogwarts, and his growing horror as it became clear how feverishly devoted Regulus and all of his idiotic friends at school were to their Dark Lord, were both immeasurable. The tiny child who had toddled after Sirius and been both endlessly sweet and kind was long, long gone by the time Sirius left Hogwarts, and he since counted his brother as dead to him, in a far more serious way than he did their parents or Narcissa.
But still, some hope must have remained, for warmth spreads inside him at the tentative admission that for whatever reason, Regulus is retreating from Voldemort’s cause.
“I was sort of expecting you, I think,” he says, surprising himself with how true that rings. “I reckoned you would be too much of a coward to stick it out after the Aurors published your name in the paper.”
He sits down adjacently to Regulus, thoughtful now. “Alright, then,” he says, trying to sound more gentle. “I’ll hear whatever you’ve got to say for yourself. But if I get wind that you’re leading an ambush or if anyone else mysteriously appears at this hour, I’ll hang your head on the kitchen stairs next to Flunky and Lacky.”
Regulus hesitates for a long moment, but says, very carefully, “this evening—I was looking out for the stars. Yours—it was dull—duller than I’ve ever seen it—I worried…that you were injured, perhaps, and I wouldn’t know…”
Sirius, to his credit, resists rolling his eyes. His brother’s superstitions were much like Bella’s and Andy’s—overdrawn and boringly dramatic. Rather than provoking Regulus, he explains that he’d been injured earlier by a mysterious hex whilst trying to help a friend in Northumberland. And the moment that Regulus hears the county, Sirius sniffs out the guilt that flickers across that thin face like a bloodhound, and feels his anger flare up.
“Oh, really?” slips out of that lying mouth, trying far too hard to sound casual.
“Yes,” Sirius snaps. “And I’ve a bloody good idea who cast it, too, if the shrieking after I was hit was anything to go by. Did you know about this evening? You little shit—do you know what they’ve done—to Benjy Fenwick! Gentle Benjy and his old parents! There weren’t even pieces of them left when we got there—just blood and half a house!”
Regulus twitches and he shrinks back. “I didn’t know where they were going—.”
“Bella was there! She’s the one who cursed me—.”
“And?” Regulus interrupts him, snappishly. Sirius is surprised enough at his brother’s interruption that he shuts up. “I’m not responsible for what she does. It’s not like I could rock up and warn you. Besides I didn’t know what they were planning.”
There’s no way the little shit isn’t lying, but there’s no way of proving it and no point even if he did. There must be endless blood on those hands. What’s three more lives?
“I don’t know why I’m letting you breathe a second longer,” he says instead, glaring at him but shutting up and gesturing for Regulus to continue explaining.
“I just was worrying,” Regulus says, slowly, “about you. Because…I might not be here for much longer…”. His brother trails off, unconvincing.
Anger sparks in Sirius’ stomach, cold and merciless. “And?” he spits. “What I am supposed to care what happens to you? You haven’t spoken to me in four years—you did everything at Hogwarts to pretend you didn’t know me and that I didn’t even exist—you didn’t come to Uncle Alphard’s funeral—none of you did, I might add, just me and Andy—to be quite frank, Regulus, it’s like you’re already dead to me. I don’t give a fuck when finally you stop breathing.”
Regulus’s eyes turn pink and sparkle as he splutters excuses, but Sirius is having none of it. He calls Regulus spineless and takes vicious pleasure in the hot flush that spreads across his brother’s face. Regulus persists though, chokingly spluttering about taking mercy on their mother, and harsh laughter bubbles up inside Sirius. “And you think I’ll crawl back to look after her?” he howls. “Are you mental? I’d say I’d kill her but I reckon it’s fairly likely she’d off me first.”
Regulus pleads on, and Sirius has had quite enough. He has no intention of punishing their mother any further—no interest anymore in tormenting her or even lowering himself to think of her. He’s under no illusion that he’s already done the worst thing possible to her by removing himself from her life. “I won’t starve her to death. Does that make you happy? Now fuck off out of my house and go die.”
He makes to grab Regulus but the little shit twists and flops to one side, wincing as his wrists pull behind his back.
And then come words that Sirius has never before heard from his proud little brother’s mouth, and the shock stays his hands from grabbing him and shoving him out the door. “I need your help,” he spits, the words sounding like they’ve been wrenched from the depths of his throat. “Don’t look at me like that. I don’t like it anymore than you do.”
Sirius’s jaw is hanging open, he knows, but he can’t get it to shut. This must surely be the strangest day of his life. Is Regulus possessed? Ill? Demented?
“Help you?” he repeats. “Who the fuck do you think I am? Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Someone who wants the Dark Lord dead!” comes the answering gasp, sounding more heartfelt than anything that his brother has said previously, and now Sirius is certain that someone is pulling his leg. He pulls Regulus back up from the half-lying position he has fallen to, and stands looking down at the pathetic figure in front of him. Cowardice, Sirius had expected. Repentance, maybe. A way out of having to bother to actually do all the things he threatened as a kid, certainly. But actual, active malice towards his precious Dark Lord? That is far beyond what Sirius had any power left to imagine, anymore.
“What in the seven hells are you on about,” he settles for saying. “You—you, who used to scribble the Dark Lord’s sigil in your schoolbooks—you want him dead?”
Regulus fixes his eyes on the floor, swallowing. “Sirius—the things—the horror I’ve seen—just in the past months. He’s brutal—and there’s nothing, no boundaries he won’t cross.”
Sirius knows exactly what Regulus means by crossed boundaries. Pure blood spilling. He suppresses a snort.
“What does it mean—any of it, if we’re dying alongside everyone else? I know what he says—what he’s always said—but what’s really happening is so different. I can’t cope, Sirius, with seeing people I might not like, but who we grew up with, die because of him. It isn’t right. And he’s cruel, too—too cruel to even give them quick deaths…” Regulus shudders. “Argyl Selwyn was tortured—for an hour—with Menas watching. I had to curse him, with my own wand. And even—,” and here Regulus hesitates for a long, long moment, “even the muggles and the mudbloods—there was supposed to processes…ways of dealing with them officially, not just watching them—."
Regulus seems to run out of speed here, and Sirius sits down heavily on the table in front of him to pull at a snagged nail and focus on the prick of pain as the skin rips. It reminds him of the dull ache around his ribs, and he suddenly feels decades old.
“How,” he says wearily, “are you going to be any use in bringing about Voldemort’s death? And don’t say you’ll turn spy. Nobody has any reason to trust you.”
Regulus’s grey eyes widen and fix boldly on Sirius’s own. “Because I know a secret,” he says, with great fervour. “Something I don’t think anyone else alive knows. Something that the Dark Lord himself doesn’t know I know—I only discovered it by accident. I shouldn’t know—if he finds out that I do, he’ll kill me and everyone I’ve told.”
Sirius finds this enormously funny. So Regulus has dug himself into a hole he can’t get out of, and he brings this problem to Sirius of all people, because of course Sirius can be counted on to be a big enough idiot to walk right into fire. “So you bring your little problem to my door,” he says, bitterly. “I always suspected you wanted me dead, and here’s some proof finally.”
Regulus seems disconcerted and stammers a rebuttal. “You might have another perspective on the matter. A solution. That means neither of us have to die.”
Sirius chooses not see that Regulus is indirectly calling him clever, and threatens him with death instead. He’s rather surprised when Regulus perks up in response.
Excitedly, his brother says, “Alright—let me tell you something else first. Something useful. If I were to deny I’m a Death Eater, how would you disprove me?”
Instantly, Sirius is interested. The problem of proving a suspected Death Eater has been enormous for the last few months especially—repeated raids and lengthy investigations turn up evidence that is at best circumstantial. Moody rages constantly about brilliant leads that are shaken off as unconvincing by a Wizengamot that is terrified of retaliation. “Veritaserum?” he asks, before adding a sarcastic jibe. “Torture you into admitting it?”
Regulus grins back at him, and Sirius is struck momentarily by how pleasantly the thin face transforms whilst smiling. “There’s a much simpler way,” he says. “A foolproof way—that can’t be concealed. Let me loose and I’ll show you.”
Sirius frowns but he’s too intrigued—no matter how stupid it is to let even a wandless Death Eater loose in his home, he knows his brother, and he suspects there are still some lines Regulus would be very reluctant to cross. Namely, anything that spilled Black blood. He releases the curse with twist of his wand, and raises it to eye level, watching as Regulus rubs his wrists gingerly.
“What I’m about to show you is supposed to be kept deathly secret,” Regulus says. “But since I’m as good as dead anyway there’s no reason why I mightn’t tell you—only so you understand how serious I am about this. I truly want him dead—for my own reasons, fine—and I’ve only come to you because you’re the only person who I thought might even give me a second to explain myself—not because I want you dead. This—,” and here he shoves his left sleeve up in one swift motion, “—is how we identify each other. Only Death Eaters have this Mark—and none of us are allowed to share it with anyone else. It’s not a guarantee—sometimes spies or other random accomplices don’t carry it. But if someone has this, I can promise you they deserve Azkaban.”
Sirius’s eyes are glued to the bizarre replica of the twisting symbol left wherever the Death Eaters have killed. It writhes and swells, pulsing through Regulus’s thin skin like rushing blood. The skull’s mouth is stretched absurdly open to fit the fat red serpent through, and its jawbone twitches as if to bite each time the tail thrashes through. Sirius has a violent urge to touch it, to feel if the scales are as textured under his fingers as they look. “It’s the same as what they leave over their kills,” he says, his hand rising before he can stop himself. “May I?”
He feels Regulus nod, and brushes warily against the red scar—almost disappointed to find the skin feels smooth and unblemished to touch.
“It can summon him,” Regulus says, quietly. “If I want it to. And he can call us to him at anytime.”
Sirius withdraws his hand and forces himself to focus on what Regulus has been saying. “Deserve Azkaban?” he says. He’s genuinely curious to hear Regulus’s own view of himself as he asks, “are you amongst that number, too?”.
Regulus’s mask is back in place, and his cold voice flat and even as he replies, “I think you know I am.”
Sirius expected nothing less, and furiously refuses to react. His voice is as calm and even as his brother’s as he says, “alright, then. You’ve given me something big there. I’m listening. What’s this great secret that only you know?”.
——————————————————
Two hours later, Sirius is sat on the stone wall that separates his front garden from the pavement. He adds another cigarette to the steadily growing pile suited in the cracks between the stones, and lights another. Regulus sits beside him, blinking up at the sky. The sun is far from rising, and the stars glitter strangely clearly for a wintery English night. Sirius the star vanished behind the houses in front of them a half hour ago and Regulus the star twinkles lonely above them.
Regulus had explained the monstrous splicing of his soul that the Dark Lord had undertaken to become immortal, and the state in which Kreacher returned from the Dark Lord’s mission. He detailed the outlandish protections that Kreacher had witnessed guarding it; the mind-altering potion and the zombified army that lurks beneath the waters. Sirius has developed a very unwilling and tentative respect for the miserable elf, if only for his tenacious commitment to remaining alive to spite Sirius.
His brother’s voice had finally cracked as he admitted that he could see no way to recover the Horcrux without killing either himself or Kreacher.
“There’s no-one else I could bring,” Regulus had said, miserably. “So I can’t see any way out. There’s a slim possibility Kreacher could apparate me out but if there’s a total block on Wizarding apparition that won’t work. If Kreacher can’t get me to focus once I’ve drunk the potion—if I can’t keep it together long enough to get to the boat…”
Sirius has made absolutely no promises. It’s foolish to spite the opportunity that Regulus has brought to him by refusing to help, but a part of him sincerely wants to. Wants to see Regulus’s face fall as he walks to his likely death alone. You’d deserve it, Sirius thinks, watching the long straight nose, scrunched in concentration. You bastard. Sirius has never liked weakness—in anyone—but least of all he liked it in his little brother. As children, they were both expected to understand that their value and worth was a fundamental intrinsic—that when they spoke, they should expect to be listened to, and that whatever they did they should be the best at, purely because their name was Black, and so of course, of course, they were better than everyone else.
For Sirius, that miraculously held true. He remembered his lessons without constant study and learned his pieces with little practice. From a very young age he was more than happy to instruct a full dining room on what he considered the best things to eat and the best music to listen to, and was only surprised and more forceful when he discovered that the adults did not take him seriously. As he grew older and taller and—especially—more aware of his good looks, he made absolutely certain he was taken seriously by anyone and everyone. As much as he frustrated and embarrassed his parents, he understood that they were perversely quite proud of him, which became one of his most spiteful reasons for his decision to leave—to leave them with spineless, pliant Regulus instead.
Regulus was far too happy as a child to be in Sirius’s shadow, and for a long time Sirius was happy to have him there. Regulus learned his lessons painstakingly and created many discordant pieces on the piano before he produced a beautiful one. Sirius didn’t mind when they were younger, but as they grew older, he grew increasingly puzzled by Regulus’s inability, and mocked him for it. Even when they arrived at Hogwarts, whilst never lacking in power, Regulus’s spells had to go wrong many times before they went right.
Perhaps that is why, Sirius muses, he took to blood supremacism so strongly. I’ve always been the best at everything—Bella was, and Andy and Narcissa too. We always had proof—for whatever reason—that we’re better than everyone else. Regulus—he needed something that made him better than everyone—when he wasn’t, really, he was just…average. At best. Rather than just getting better—he just lazily decided his blood could carry him through anything and everything. Well, here’s a problem pure blood can’t get him out of. Time for him to learn the price of being so weak.
The silence is becoming unbearable, and Sirius throws the fag underneath the car that is parked across his drive and watches the orange spark fade glumly into blackness.
“I suppose you’d better go back,” he says, staring dead ahead.
“I suppose,” Regulus says, reluctantly. “Mother will miss me at breakfast otherwise.”
Damn her, Sirius thinks. She’ll miss you more on Saturday morning.
“At least you can prepare,” Regulus says, sighing. “Now you know. And if something happens—if I don’t make it back—I’ll tell Kreacher to bring it to you. You’ll probably be better placed to destroy it than him.”
“I’ll take it to Dumbledore,” he says, swinging his feet.
“Oh,” says Regulus. “I suppose—that’s a good idea.”
Awkwardly his brother stands and stretches. “I’ll go then,” he says. “Um. Goodbye, I suppose?”
Sirius nods, still staring ahead. “Good luck,” he says, surprising himself.
Regulus apparently can’t bear anymore salutations either because the crack of apparition sounds out a beat later. Regulus the star blinks in the sky above.
Sirius wonders if Regulus had just asked, openly, for Sirius to come with him, if he’d have said yes. Wonders if he should have offered anyway. Knows that he should have. Justifies his failure by arguing that Regulus clearly remains a coward to have not asked, and therefore deserves what he has coming. But he did ask for help.
Stands up, and violently kicks the stone wall. Curses.