Chapter 2
Sirius had felt when his brother died. He hadn't felt it inside or anything. He felt it when his quaint apartment shared with his then boyfriend rumbled with the falling of a famished looking house elf.
It was late. Late enough that the fire started at some point near six pm started to dwindle, fire curling into soot as Remus curled around Sirius, warmth of their quilts and covers surrounding them with a hearth of safety. Late enough that the normally busy street below their bathroom window was quiet, the only sound to be heard was Remus's gentle snoring, although in their Hogwarts days he had found it insufferable Sirius now found himself unable to sleep without it. Their fridge in the kitchen let out the most quiet of hums and the only light that could be seen was a dull green coming off their analog bedside clock. Then and now, they truly lived in a chamber of comfort.
Truth be told, Sirius barely slept even when he was engulfed in Remus's warm presence. The memories of childhood screams and his teenage body racked with pain placed by his parents rendered him awake constantly. Even when he was asleep, he found he would drift in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of where he was constantly. That's why Remus's snores drove him up the wall, the background noise had once meant every inhale Sirius rose.
That's why Sirius almost bolted when he heard the crash of Kreacher falling from their ceiling to their floor. As he faced his third least favourite thing in the world, the only predecessors being his parents, shaking like a leaf, crumbling into the soft of the rich red rug Remus had bought, his immediate reaction was to whip out his wand, pointed at the defenseless house elf with the utmost rigor.
"Master Sirius." Kreacher stammered, barely even a whisper.
"Kreacher"
"Master Regulu-." Kreacher was interrupted by a hawking cough, erupting his lungs into wet hacks and wheezing
"Go on"
"I trie- He insist- the ca-" Sirius's tensions grew. He knew Reggie had been a spy but surely he left the damn house elf out of this. Surely? No, the younger Black loved that thing, making it food and conversing with it, a matter the elder brother had never understood.
He's unable to remember much beyond that unfortunately, he remembers the house elf's hacks and coughs and he remembers the carpet under his knees after he fell to them. He remembers a half awake Moony cradling him from behind, rocking him side to side and whispering comforts to his ear, desperately trying to subside the wails Sirius couldn't stop fleeing his mouth. He remembers trying to shit his eyes, relieve himself of the reality and run away to blindness, only he was unable.
When he closed his eyes the first time on that fateful night he saw baby Reggie, Reggie sitting underneath the sorting hat, seven year old Reggie playing marbles with his nine year old self at the dead of night, bruises adorning them like the stars they were named after did the night sky. Every time his heart beat he saw a new memory of his baby brother, every time he heard the sound of his own wails he heard another memory of Reggies voice.
His eyes dulled, Remus told him, after that night. Two flames of blue ignited by mischief and bleeding with life became two pools of memories of a dead man. Not just a dead man though, the dead man Sirius had bathed, changed diapers for, held when the horrors of their childhood stopped him from sleeping, laughed with, cried to, cried due to, been cried at, yelled at.
The dead man that was Sirius's family.
Everything else was a blur. The sound of James's broken screams of pain when Sirius had cut through his own grief for only a moment, but long enough to infect his best friend with it. The funeral was non existent, simply a crowd of people around an empty grave, a gravestone with only his initials and a simple black cat engraved on the top, Reggie would've wanted it for it was almost impossibly simple. He didn't know what his parents knew about it, only that they died months later, their anger eating away at each other until there was no more of either.
He was scared after that. Scared of losing anything. A hair tie, a pencil, a tube of toothpaste, Moony, Prongs, Lily, Peter,
Oh, Peter. James had always liked soft clothing, since they were first years the boy had remarkably well-worn shirts and old red jumpers. It was only when Sirius and Moony held back James from Peter that the fabric was suddenly coarse, rougher that a wolf's nails and or mother's knife. What was far more vicious though were the hoarse cries that escaped James's mouth like a stream of confetti, or one long strand of betrayal.
"You killed him!" The wails of despair haunted Padfoot's dreams to this day "You killed him as well didn't you rat!"
James's voice was ingrained into him. A permanent thread embroidered into his brain, wrapping around and squeezing it whenever Sirius's mind wandered to there so that his head burst with a most awful migraine.
It took a while, a few months and far more nights spent sobbing into Moony's tender arms. He could go for up to a few days without crying, and his face was no longer constantly drooped towards the floor, instead it was simply a horizontal line, neither happy nor sad. As Sirius spent nights lavished in Moony's arms he felt the other man's quiet heartbeat, almost identical to his quiet love. They had never been good at words, the pair of them, but god when they were relaxed like they were then Sirius felt a kind of peace he used to tell his brother fairy stories about.
The idea of marriage was never questioned in Sirius's mind. He knew they couldn't really, but he also knew that a ring is a ring and a man is a man, so surely they could wear rings and they would know, as would anyone who had the pleasure of being around them for a second long enough to feel the magnetic pull they had to each other.
Beyond that, he knew another reason. Much quieter than his love for moony but still strong in his mind, a steel marble in amongst the thousands of wooden ones.
He knew Regulus wanted to. Not marry Remus of course, but instead he wished to marry the sunrise who went by James Potter. If Sirius was bad with words, Regulus was mute. His younger brother had a knack for knowing just what to say to make children and adults alike run away crying, and had made that a point to both his family and classmates many times. Even Sirius, before they had made up when he was in seventh year, had been privy to Regulus's systematic and ruthless dissection of Sirius's looks, personality, social circle, and really anything the younger could think of.
But to say Regulus never loved would be an insult. Sirius saw it every time he was around that insufferable couple. The slight rounded edge to Reggie's sharp eyes, the quiet hand encased in James's, even the soft whispers the two exchanged. The part of him that cared for both Reggie and James became more and more shattered every time he saw the hollowness James was left with now.
When he proposed he did it because he wanted to spend his eternal life with his dashingly handsome werewolf, but a microscopic part of him also did it because Reggie was unable to spend his with his boisterous, charming James. Even James Potter wouldn't spend the rest of his life with the boisterous charming James, because that James died when he had discovered his heart was gone.
The day Remus accepted the proposal was the day Padfoot finally smiled again, after 386 days of misery.
See, the only problem now is that Sirius has a whole new list of reasons to not sleep. While psychotic parents and throwing pillows at a snoring pig had been something to stay in his teens, he now had a dead looking best friend, a potentially mortal fiancé and the slowly fading memories of his brother. James and Reggie terrified him, not because of how it ended or anything around themselves but instead because it showed him how quickly a future can be demolished. How one star crossed lover can become a sunset while the other stares longingly at it. How his moony could easily face the same fate.
Instead now, he stayed perfectly awake, consuming potion after potion to ensure his love never discovered his insomnia. At night he lay motionlessly in Moony's arms, staring at the rise and fall of his darling's chest and feeling the warmth of his breath in Sirius's hair. He obsessed over his lovers sleeping frame. Eyes scanning in the dim-lit dark for any injuries, inconsistencies or anything of concern. He lay his head gently against Remus's chest once in a while to ensure the heart he belonged to was still beating.
Sirius lay like this every night, especially the night roughly two years after Reggie's death. Staring. Rise and Fall. Rise and Fall.
Rise
and
Fall.
Suddenly as he stared he felt a layer of blue that first started roughly two years ago lift slightly, and if for just a moment he fell into a sleep then it remained a secret between him and the most quiet of refridgerator hums and the dull green light coming off their analog clock.