Chapter 1
James eyes open to silence. his head is engulfed in fog as his eyes blink and blear at the bright light shining into his bed, dodging him and instead softly lamenting the empty space beside him. As he fumbled his glasses onto his face his vision clears so he can truly appreciate just how empty his home is.
He trudges down the stairs, creaking and croaking of the old wood his only comfort. The arrogant sun glares through the windows, blinding him. It shouldn't be this bright. He doesn't care it's summer or that this is the first good weather this soggy country has had for months. He doesn't care that his house almost looks ethereal, soft curtains enamored by the beams of light, rich wood floor looking marble and the old cream walls naïve with beauty.
He doesn't care for his ability to label every waking surface with happy memories of his childhood, where he first walked, where he unwrapped his first broom on Christmas, where Moony and Pads sat the first Christmas all four of them were together, the other three eyeing him and giggling as his mother brought out the reindeer cookies, nibbling while making direct eye contact with the young Potter. His heart was dead. As he turned the corner into the kitchen, more memories drowned him. He saw where Fleamont had rushedly put the burning Christmas ham the first time James tried to cook. His fingers grazed the counter as he mindlessly visualised the strands of his six year old self's hair when he had decided enough was enough and if mummy wasn't going to cut his hair then he must, Euphemia's screams when she saw her baby's curls changed to a choppy makeshift mowhawk still clear in his mind.
He smirked at the thought, but when he glanced up his soul fell from him as his legs froze. His breathing deepened as he remembered his heart sitting on the corner counter, sipping a tea blacker than his hair in a mug not even nearly as blue as the eyes he fell in love with when he was 15. At the time, James had been enticed. His beauty had sat quietly drinking tea, staring just above the corner of the room, mind in a world of it's own as James had stood as he did now, drinking the view of his beautiful boy. Now he stared at the absence and tried not to go insane, peeling paint and plaster off the wall, if Regulus was dead then the surrounding area should be too, destroyed like James's future and everything he intended for them.
His friends tried, to their credit, to help him. Sitting with him as he stared at nothing and trying to give him pep talks, talking about old times this and "Live for him" that. All he felt was the absence of heart and warmth he had known his whole life, forbearing Regulus but quietly dying with him.
James Potter was absence.
It had been three years and the absence never ceased, only sometimes when he saw Sirius smile like his love once had or Remus read a book his darling raved on and on about did the absence cloud, an empty sky clouding for a storm. The storm only happened once he was alone again, overcome with a craving to hold Regulus in his arms, smell his hair and feel his warmth. He often wondered what it had been like in that cave, dark and cold in Regulus's final moments. Sirius refused to tell him, much to James's annoyance. James knew why of course, somewhere in the absence he knew that a miss of information kept the absence, a thin sheet of ice, from cracking, plunging him into a freezing ocean of grief.
His absence only filled with the letters. He started writing them after his fifth sleepless night. He wrote to his star, he told Regulus of all that had happened since his death. He told Regulus what he truly felt, as oppose to the smoothed over sugary version any of his friends received when they tentatively asked. When The Dark Lord attacked the Longbottoms, Frank and Alice dying but somehow Neville, their infant survived and The Dark Lord perished, he told Regulus of how he wished they could celebrate the end of the war together. When Sirius finally screwed his head on properly for what appeared to be the first time since Regulus's death and proposed to Remus, he told Regulus how Sirius's eyes sparkled and for a second James had seen Regulus. When Mary and Lily begged James to help them move into their little cottage down the road from him, he told his star of the beautiful chocolate brown velvet curtains in Mary and Lily's bedroom. No one would ever see the letters, for their recipient had gone lifeless and cold a grueling two years ago.
The only letter he had ever shown was the one about Marlene. He had seen Dorcas after her death, the same look of insanity he had. The off gaze, disheveled hair and shell shock he knew all to well had taken hostage of the once quick-witted, sarcastic witch who now could only be described as a zombie. He pulled her aside one day, and in the quietest of whispers as to not awake James's tears told her about the letters, showing her with trembling hands the tear stained parchment paper.
"My darling star,
I miss you more than I even know. I see your face nowhere, would you be as kind as to haunt me? I long to see your eyes, I crave your smile, it kept me alive more than any potion or drug. Peter was a mole, we found him at the McKinnon's one dreadful night. Would you be as kind as to welcome Marlene when you see her? Peter is being tortured as we speak in Azkaban, if he has anything to do with your death I may join him there.
I hope, if I can, I dream of your laugh tonight.
Prongs
They had held each other and cried, no words were said.
As he snapped out of his memories, twisted by guilt, James flicked on the kettle and muttered a spell his mum taught before she too died to make him toast. He began his usual pace to the front door as the kettle grew louder and louder. Pictures lined the walls of his friends and loved ones, gaps where the ones of Regulus were, the sight too painful to bear.
James creaked the door open to go to the mailbox when a pressure leaning on the door stopped him. he assumed it was Pads giving him another oversized gnome of whichever politician had most recently objected to werewolf rights or something stupidly funny like that.
Instead he stared motionlessly at the lanky frame curled in fetal position which he had memorised so well. The mop of black hair he could feel in between his fingers if he closed his eyes and thought hard enough. The lips he would burn the world to kiss lay slightly apart, rose-turned blue colour. The eyes that burned in his mind were shut, long wispy eyelashes flickering in the cold.
The body lay almost motionlessly on his porch, shivering occasionally in the cold. He was clothed in simple wear, burn marks and blood stains adorned his worn blue shirt and dark black jeans, rips showcasing his pale bruised skin, the initials James had known so well embroidered in a sharp silver on the collar of his shirt.
Regulus Arcturus Black was positively blue with cold.