Chapter 3
December 26, 1979
My darling Regulus,
Life continues to pass and each day so does a touch of my sanity. I feel you so strongly, I feel your love of astronomy as deeply as I feel your hate of tea. You remain the only voice in my head, puppeteering me to live in a way you should be, oly without you by my side that life is wrong. The gaps you leave twist and turn around me, slowly strangling me until all I feel is a gap. When I wae up I think about how you would feel if you knew my thoughts and as i go to sleep I think of how to join you. Pads and moony tried, bless them, this Christmas. They put tinsel around their apartment and created notes when they couldn't remember the melody of Silent Night while Wormy poorly harmonised. Sirius's eyes were dead and Moony's flashed between Pads and I quickly enough I thought he would generate electricity. Remember when we played hide and seek in the astronomy tower? You spent ages looking for me but I found you in half a minute, barely a look.
My love I search for you in the stars. I search for you in the clouds. I search for you in the trees, the bakery down the street, the stray cat I see scraping at the bins in the alley. I search for you in Sirius, hoping for just a second he will have your ears when he listens to me speak. I only notice now how much deeper your eyes are were. Darling, where are you off to? Where do I look to find you? If i too went to heaven would I first see your subtle smile or would the sensation of your hair in my hands overwhelm me?
Where has my star hidden now?
Prongs
James's heart was cold. He was cold as James carried him in, rain seeping through Regulus's thin clothes onto James's thick jumper. It would have been less damp to simply stick his arms into a pond than carry the lanky boy's body inside. James gently placed him onto the closest couch in the living room. As his hands left the boys body he felt the slight freeze on Regulus's skin. As he stared in shock at the boy that lay before him he was taken back to the last time he had seen the boy. Ironically, even then Regulus had been cold. Only that was a different type of cold, the cold that stirs an emptiness in James's stomach. The cold that is left in a short sentence or a sticky, uncomfortable silence. The cold that only Regulus Arcturus Black could truly pull off.
A cold that until the last time they spoke, had never been directed to James Potter. James wondered constantly after that last moment with Regulus before his demise, if it had been better than if he Demise? The boy lay before him. He snapped out of his thoughts, throat closing as his mind twisted and grew endlessly. How was he here? Where had he been? Why was James not worth an absence of a week? Why was James worth suffering through a world without Regulus for three years?
James snapped up, standing straight. His head grew dizzy as he raced to the kitchen. Muggle phones had infatuated his parents before him, and although he had only used it once before now he said a silent prayer of thanks that he had left it in his kitchen, only one number that wasn't his parents dead friends' was saved.
"Hello?" Lily's soft voice trickled into his ear through the phone
A low cry escaped James's mouth that was truly bizarre, a pinch of confusion, a touch shock, just a bit too little grief and just a tad too much anger all pooled out of him at once.
"James? James are you alright?" Lily paused for a moment, he heard Mary softly in the background "James? Mary and I will be over now ok? Sit tight."
A whimper left James indicating he understood. He dropped the phone on the counter and stumbled back to his star's limp body on the couch, only able to stare, scared that if he were to touch the boy would disappear.
James had spoken with Dorcas many times, they formed a grief club of sorts after Marls died, about what either would give to see their loved one again, touch them, heart their heartbeat, feel their warmth and see their eyes. It was only now that James realised he had grown comfortable in the knowledge Regulus was gone, a distant gap he saw in every room and yearned for. This boy here was much more terrifying. He represented the one thing James, amid all his grief, had been quietly rotating in his mind. He never saw the body.
At first he had clung to the hope Regulus was alive, but he learnt quick it was a defense against acceptance, and subsequently let go of hope a week after that dreaded phone call from Remus, Sirius still wailing in the background. Only the body was here. Regulus His star His love His life As mary and Lily rushed from a haze of Floo powder smoke to James's still frame, and took in the scene they were quick to run to the body soaking James's couch, tending to him. While James was too scared to touch, the same did not apply for Mary who was quick to check the body's pulse. "He's alive!" The cry broke James, sobs shattering more and more as he sunk to his knees and his vision left him.