거짓말인데 - Sondia
Chapter 2. 거짓말인데 - Sondia
Regulus
Regulus stared at his phone in horror. He ran a hand through his hair, still messy from sleep, rubbed his eyes, cracked his bones, and looked again. The messages were still there.
He banged his head into his kitchen island. His friends gave him concerned looks.
“Why is he acting like that?”
“He flirted with James yesterday night and agreed to go on a date with him,” Marlene told them, having already threatened to quit her job as his manager if he didn’t show her his phone. She was sitting next to him, doing her eyeliner in a small mirror. Regulus turned his head in her direction so that the left side of his face was pressed to the cold marble.
“I’m going to come out online just to make your job harder.”
“Do that when you have James as your boyfriend to come out with, honey.”
“When’s the date?” Evan smirked, passing him to take their breakfast out of the oven. Regulus flipped him off. “It’s not a date.”
“This Sunday,” Marlene replied for him, checking her reflection with an approving look. She looked gorgeous. Not that he’d ever tell her.
“It was a mistake. We were both drunk,” he mumbled, wanting to die. “He probably doesn’t remember what happened.”
“I doubt that,” Barty grinned at him. “He’s smitten.”
“No, he’s not.”
“Yeah, of course he’s not, I bet he DMs all of his exes for fun when he’s drunk,” Mary deadpanned, passing out coffee.
“It’s been nine years and we were sixteen and seventeen, Mary. You can hardly call that an ex.”
“Whatever you say, babe.”
James
James was perfectly happy, the memory of Regulus’s face momentarily pushed to the back of his mind as he made himself tea, when he remembered.
“Oh fuck,” he muttered, almost dropping the pot. “Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck-”
He remembered more.
“Fuck!”
He’d contacted Regulus with no compatible reason whatsoever, asked him out on a date - if you could call a nonsensical trip to the dry cleaning a date - and then proceeded to tell him that his favorite movie was ‘whatever Regulus liked’. It was idiotic. Drown-yourself-in-a-river level idiotic.
He took his head in his hands, curling up in the corner of his kitchen in utter despair. It was a fucking horrible situation to be in. He wasn’t even in love with Regulus anymore. He was just not old enough to be over his first love. Loving someone and being in love with someone were very different things in his opinion. He still loved Regulus, but he wasn’t in love with him. That was all. And James knew that it sounded ridiculous, but it was true. The nostalgia from seeing his face had muddled his mind yesterday, and that was it. Regulus had probably forgotten about it.
Regulus had forgotten about it.
“James?” Peter said, an eyebrow raised threateningly. James averted his eyes. He’d known this question would come up sometime, but he didn’t think he was ready for it yet.
“Hmm?”
“Which depressing event have you suffered that made you write such a brilliant, gloriously depressed song?”
James pretended not to understand. “What do you mean?”
Sirius snorted, tuning his guitar. “You’re shit at lying, James.”
I’m still not over your estranged younger brother, he thought.
“If I stop loving you, will it stop hurting,” Dorcas read out loud from the lyric paper. “When I stop loving you, please let the hatred stop too,”
James flinched. It was, in fact, very depressing. But it was also quite good. It seemed one look at Regulus was all it took to make him regain the ability to make songs.
Peter gave him an accusing look. “But I can’t,” he continued, glaring at James. “I say I’m fine, but I miss you more every day.”
“Okay, that part is an exaggeration-”
Remus’s eyes bored into him like his insides were transparent. He had a way of doing that. James’ face flushed with shame.
“I wish it were a lie, every day we spent, every smile we shared,” Remus read in a perfect monotone. “Every breath I took, I wish it were a lie-” Sirius huffed - “Everything I saw, I wish it were a dream.”
“God, James, do you have to get this sad over every ex that you ever had?” Sirius groaned, scrubbing a hand over his face. Remus and Peter exchanged grim looks. They knew that wasn’t true. The only breakup songs he wrote, or love songs for that matter, he wrote about Regulus. But Sirius didn’t have to know that. James would tell him when he was actually, completely over Regulus.
He tried to change the subject. “Well, the song is really good-”
Dorcas cut him off angrily. “We know the song is fucking brilliant, James, but sometimes people actually care about you and not just your bloody songs!”
The room went silent save for Peter sighing quietly in the back.
James knew that he had a problem with self acceptance, self love and whatnot. He’d always known that he was privileged, maybe a little too well. When he was a student, he’d been so afraid of seeming arrogant, too proud of his family’s wealth - he still was. Somewhere in that timeline, he’d developed a bad habit of making his own problems seem small in comparison to other people’s, scared that he’d be complaining about silly, inconsequential things to people who had it harder than him. Because how was he supposed to know if a problem he had was a real, acceptable one, or if it was just some petty thing he only had the time to worry about because he wasn’t working late night shifts to pay his student loan? And he knew that they were actual, respectable problems. Logically, he knew that a small problem was still a problem. He would never treat another person’s problems like he treated his own. But in the back of his mind, where his heart overwhelmed his brain, he didn’t really believe that. There was still a part of him that laughed at him and told him that his problems didn’t matter, to just laugh it off, pretend to forget about it. He lied to himself about them most of the time, too.
And James could accept that. He had issues. Everyone had issues. He was lucky his issues were so small. But he’d found that those issues rendered a problem for the people around him. They cared about him, cared about his problems and wanted to solve them together, or just be a support as he solved them himself. Because that’s what normal, healthy people did when faced with a problem - they tried to solve it, unlike James who pushed it down where no one could see and kept it there. And because they cared and wanted his problems solved, they worried about him constantly when he didn’t even try.
And he always forgot about them.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, not meeting his friend’s eyes. “I’ll try not to forget that. I do try, but it gets kind of,” he gestured helplessly, trying to explain words that didn’t exist.
“It’s fine,” Sirius sighed. “We know that.”
“It’s about an old ex I ran into a few days ago,” he told them, feeling so guilty for lying to Sirius’s face like that. It wasn’t an untruth, but it wasn’t the truth, either, was it?
“All right,” Peter said, looking almost comically grim. “Let’s try the song out, shall we?”
Every day I tell myself I’m gonna forget
But when the numbness gives way
I poke at old bruises
Regulus
Regulus flicked the ashes off the tip of his cigarette, watching them fly away, marking the wind's motions. The man stirred in his bed, rolling over. He really shouldn’t have invited him over. He should have just asked Barty. Barty would have felt better than a random man whose name he’d already forgotten. But Barty was too familiar. He reminded Regulus too much of Grimmauld Place. Normally, he didn’t associate those two things. But right now, when all he could think about was Grimmauld Place and his mother and James Potter, it was too much for him. He leaned over the railing on his elbows, looking down to the still-bright streets of London and breathing in the gray smoke expelled from his mouth.
“Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street,” he murmured softly, only half-realizing he was doing it. He’d written the lyrics to Red before he even knew how much a Maserati cost. He’d lost count of the times he’d played the song in James’ basement after he’d left, still having the key, before the new owner bought it.
“Faster than the wind, passionate as sin.” He watched himself in his mind’s eye, breathless and laughing in his bed as James hovered over him, grinning with his lips kiss-bitten and red, his hair drenched from the rain outside. James had climbed in through his window, telling him I missed you, Regulus, at his horrified expression, and it was at that moment Regulus had realized he was stupidly, irreversibly in love with him. It had made him so happy. He’d never thought he was capable.
“I love you,” James said, the words coming so easily to him.
“I-” Regulus broke off in the middle of repeating his words back to him. He couldn’t get them out. They bubbled up in his throat, filled his mouth and almost overflowed. But he couldn’t get them out.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured to James, burying his face into the side of his neck. “You deserve someone who can tell you they love you.”
James smiled, the motion so visual even though Regulus couldn’t see his face. When James smiled, the expression radiated off of him. “It doesn’t matter. I want you. It doesn’t matter if you can’t say a stupid little thing.”
“Mother.” He hesitated, wondering at the vulnerability of what he was saying. But he liked being vulnerable with James. It didn’t feel like vulnerability when he was with him. It felt like being free. James nodded patiently, lying down next to him and toying with a strand of Regulus’ hair.
“She tells me that a lot.”
“That she loves you?” James frowned, confused. “Doesn’t she hate you?”
Regulus shook his head. “She doesn’t hate me. She loves the concept of me, and she gets mad when I venture outside the lines of that concept. She loves the concept of our family. A loving father, a loving mother, two brilliant children to carry on their bloodline.”
The frown didn’t disappear. “But she doesn’t love you.”
Regulus smiled without humor. “She doesn't hate me, either. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard to not love her. It makes me feel bad, not hating her. Because she’s a bad person. She’s ruined so many people’s lives. But I don’t hate her.”
James didn’t understand. He couldn’t. But he’d hugged Regulus nonetheless, pulling him to his chest and tucking the strand of hair behind his ear. “You don’t have to hate her. You don’t have to be a person who hates her. You don’t have to be anything.”
Regulus had thought about what might have happened if he’d run off with James along with his brother more than a few times. He might never have had this job that he hated, might have had a future with James, might have had a relationship with his brother. He might have had the mental capacity to escape his mother, unlike now, when even though he was far out of his mother’s reach, a grown adult she couldn’t lawfully control, he still couldn’t quit modeling.
But thinking about what might have been would do nothing but drive him crazy. Especially because he knew he could never have done that. He could never escape his mother. He could never stop loving her. He could never stop wanting to please her.
Never.