Chapter ii
“… sacre fucking bleu.”
The phrase hung in the air as Regulus held his brother’s gaze. The tall, dark-haired man at Sirius’s side looked confused at his friend’s sudden change of mood until he looked up and followed Sirius’s gaze. The moment the man’s eyes landed on Regulus, they darkened. The scarred man behind him quite literally held him back, but they both looked pissed.
Regulus didn’t move. He didn’t even breathe. Didn’t dare to blink, lest the phantom in front of him turn out to be just a ghost.
“You were dead.”
Pandora nodded sagely at this. “As we all were. So goes the cycle of life.”
Regulus didn’t acknowledge her, didn’t even register that she was speaking.
“Sirius, you bastard, why aren’t you dead?”
This seemed to bring Sirius back to the present. His eyes hardened and he stalked over to meet Regulus, almost touching him.
“Nice to see you too, asshole.”
“You were dead. What the fuck?”
“Oh, is that what you told yourself? Is that how you excused leaving me alone? Never answering my texts and emails, ignoring EVERY TIME I asked you to come with me?”
Regulus didn’t know how to respond to this. Didn’t know how to respond to his brother suddenly being alive.
So he didn’t.
He stared at his brother silently, still not blinking, still not breathing. Completely frozen. Sirius stared back, just as he would when they were kids. Waiting for Reg to make a move. The waiting game sometimes lasted hours. It sometimes seemed like Reg was the only one Sirius would ever wait for.
He always did.
"...Barty," Reg eventually choked out, "I've gone completely insane. Toss me a smoke."
It was a true sign of Barty's friendship that he did so silently and without hesitation.
Regulus had always known he would go insane. Nobody with any type of grip on reality would last a week in his household.
But he thought he was getting better.
He thought he was becoming less of a mess.
Clearly, he was wrong.
---
Reg hadn't eaten in days. Hadn't moved in 54 hours. Hadn't slept in 98.
And Sirius was there.
"That's a really fun wall, hmm?" His voice was just the same as when he was thirteen, sneaking Regulus a brownie that 'had too many calories for a young lady.'
Regulus nodded. He hadn't know that he'd been staring at a wall. Hadn't known he'd been staring. Hadn't known he'd been.
"You know, I think you could paint it. Put a giant dick on it or something, really piss Mom off."
Regulus gave a disbelieving look.
"Well, okay, sure, she'd kill your. But you've always wanted to spend more time with me."
"Not in hell, idiot," Regulus muttered. His voice was scratchy and stiff from disuse, and it seemed wrong next to his brother's charming, lilting tenor.
"Beggars can't be choosers, little brother."
In the back of his mind, Regulus thought that that was weird. Since when had he told Sirius he was trans? But he had, of course, or Sirius wouldn't be calling him 'little brother.'
A surge of warmth coursed through Reg as he realized what that meant. His brother accepted him.
"One of the Black brothers? A beggar? Get real, Siri."
Sirius found this far too amusing and his violent, booming laugh filled the room.
Regulus tensed, waiting for Walburga to hear them. She didn't.
"I bet we could make a killing as beggars, you know. I'm pretty and you're sad."
"They'd pay you to shut up, not because of your greasy excuse for a hairdo."
"You're so lucky I love you, Reg, or I'd kill you for having a go at my hair."
"Reg? Sirius, what are you on? That's not my name."
"Well not with that attitude, it's not."
"It's stupid. It's a stupid lower-middle-class white man's name."
Sirius's face tightened. "Class systems are dumb. I told you not to be a pretentious little ass and look down on the people who have to work to survive. And besides, Reg is nice. It fits you."
Regulus scowled at this. "It most certainly does not 'fit' me."
"Fine, you can say it's short for some pretentious bull, if that makes you happy. Quantum Regularity or Regional Gentrification or some shit."
Reg huffed, still scowling at Sirius. "No, it has to be a star. It's tradition."
"So is incest. You don't have to be named after a star."
"Yes, I do."
"No, you don't."
"You get to be, so I should, too."
The bickering went on for hours, Reg's eyelids constantly getting heavier.
When they finally opened, Sirius was gone. Regulus was alone, laying in his bed. His window locked, as it always was when Sirius was there, since the catastrophe of 2012.
But Sirius wasn't there. Reg was alone.
He spent the day in his habitual silence, scanning his tomes of astronomy indexes. Searching.
He found it, eventually. "Regulus: brightest star of the Leo constellation, often called the Heart of the Lion
Regulus. Reg. It was a star. So take that, Sirius.
---
Regulus blanked, and he was surrounded by his friends, Sirius gone without a trace.
Like he always was.
Reg looked down and realized he had a cold, long used-up cigarette between his fingers. Go figure.
There was no noise for a bit, and Regulus eventually cleared his throat. "So what do you little leaches want to waste my parents' disgustingly large fortune on today?"
Barty snorted. "Maybe a lap dance from your insanely hot older brother."
Evan smacked his shoulder. "Shut it, Crouch. Reg, what the fuck was that?"
"...Not a hallucination this time, apparently?"
"Sirius was dead, though." Pandora reminded them calmly, her voice as tranquil as ever.
"Well ap-fucking-parently not."
Reg went back to their dorm, scowling.