Jump.2
Do you ever dream
of the horrors you’ve witnessed,
hear the screams that linger still?
Have you ever jolted awake,
suddenly, violently,
only to realize the agonized cry
was your own?
Sirius was awake again.
Kreacher had come earlier, bringing him tea—a quiet act of service that felt almost unnatural coming from him. The elf had never been kind, not truly. Not until recently. Not until he had begun helping Sirius in his desperate, impossible attempt to bring Regulus back from the dead. The peppermint heat slid down his throat, easing the tension in his body, but doing nothing to calm the labyrinth of thoughts coiling around his mind. There were things he could not name, shadows of memories that did not belong to him yet refused to let go. The house, ancient and aching, whispered in the quiet, its wooden bones creaking under the weight of unspoken truths.
And then, there was the chair across from, on the other side of the table.
It had been empty only moments ago.
But now, Regulus sat across from him, still as a statue, as though he had been there all along.
Sirius studied him, his sharp gaze tracing the contours of his brother’s face, looking for familiarity in the unfamiliar. Regulus had changed. The once proud, unyielding lines of his features had softened—not in kindness, but in the way stone does after years of relentless erosion. Was it time that had done this to him? Or had Sirius simply been blind to it before, lost in his own need to survive?
A great weight settled in Sirius’s chest, pressing down with the force of years lost. He had missed too much. He had missed nearly all of it.
Once, they had been inseparable. Two halves of the same whole, whispering secrets under the heavy velvet of their childhood home, making silent promises in the dark. Sirius had been Regulus’s shield, and Regulus had been Sirius’s shadow. But then Sirius left, breaking free to save himself, tearing away from the chains of their family, and in doing so, he had left Regulus behind. He had chosen freedom. Regulus had remained. And in the years that followed, their bond had twisted into something unrecognizable—estranged, bitter, distant.
Regulus sat with his arms crossed over his chest, his leg folded over the other—a pose of control, but Sirius saw it for what it was. A coiled snake, holding itself in check.
“I get them too,” Regulus said at last.
Sirius did not need to ask what ‘them’ meant.
“I wouldn’t call them nightmares,” Regulus continued, his voice slipping into something distant, something hollow. “A nightmare is just fear spun into illusion. But these kinds… they’re not fabricated. It’s memory.” He paused, his expression unreadable, gaze unfocused as if looking past Sirius—past the room, past himself.
“I’d wake up, disoriented most if the time.” His voice was quieter now, almost as if he were reciting something that didn’t belong to him. “Numb, but knowing something had happened.” He blinked, tilting his head slightly, as if testing the weight of the words before continuing. “There were… gaps. Pieces missing, but not gone. Just out of reach. Glimpses into something my body refused to remember.”
His hands flexed where they rested against his arms, but his expression did not change.
“I recall pain,” he said, but there was no emotion behind it. Just fact. “Fragments of it. Moments of fog. I knew something was happening to me, but…” Another pause. His jaw tensed slightly before it smoothed over again. “But I wasn’t there enough to feel it. I watched from a distance, knowing it hurt, knowing it should hurt, but it never quite reached me. Or maybe it did, and I was just to traumatized to realize it.”
The silence that followed stretched, heavy and unbroken. Then, finally, he blinked, focusing back on Sirius, as if remembering he was there at all.
And then, something shifted.
Sirius blinked, his breath catching. Regulus’s face flickered—just for a moment—as if something beneath his skin had surfaced before retreating into the depths again. He told himself he was imagining it….
but then it happened again.
Thin, jagged lines began to creep along Regulus’s face—marks like clawed fingers raking through his skin, appearing and disappearing in rapid succession. Sirius’s heartbeat stuttered, the cup in his hand tilting, tea spilling onto the table in chaotic rivulets.
Regulus’s hands twitched, he had stood up immediately, his hands hovering uncertainly in the air between them, his storm-grey eyes wide with something close to confusion.
Sirius couldn’t look away.
The marks had deepened and red trickled from the wounds that Regulus hadn’t even realized were there.
Regulus opened his mouth to speak, but the sound that came out was not his own. Not to Sirius. It was distorted, distant, as though carried across some great void. Jumbled, as if Regulus was speaking with food in his mouth. His voice was a thing that had been drowned before it ever had the chance to be heard.
Panic gripped Sirius, cold and suffocating. The room contracted around him, the air too thick, too thin all at once. He was falling, drowning—
And then, arms wrapped around him.
Regulus held him with a strength that did not belong to the dead.
Sirius barely registered his own frantic hands, pulling and pushing at his brother in equal measure, desperate and disoriented. His fingers found Regulus’s face, grasping as if to confirm its solidity, its reality.
“Tell me you’re here,” Sirius rasped, his voice raw with something too deep for words. “Tell me you’re real. Tell me.”
Regulus did not flinch. He only took Sirius’s hands in his own, his grip firm, his voice unwavering.
“Breathe, Sirius.”
Sirius tried. The air scraped against his throat like broken glass.
“Breathe.”
Regulus was here. He was real.
But he wasn’t. Not really.
“I should’ve been there,” Sirius whispered, the words brittle and damning.
Regulus said nothing, he simply held Sirius is fingers to his face where they continued to sink in.
“What happened to you?” Sirius asked, his voice small now, so small. He searched Regulus’s face, looking for the answer in the lines, in the sharp edges and softened shadows.
Regulus faltered.
And then, as Sirius pressed closer, needing to feel the warmth of something that should no longer exist, Regulus exhaled. But the breath never touched Sirius’s skin.
“I don’t know,” Regulus admitted, his voice quieter than the silence that followed.
It was the weight of something infinite, something neither of them knew how to hold.