*mob yells* give him the damn danish!
Funny how these past few chapters have Regulus in the shower, huh?
But once again, no wank scene.
That’s more of a behind-the-scenes thing, for his dignity.
But Regulus was having trouble in the shower this time.
From balancing the searing heat of the water on his still sore (still half-open) cuts and wounds, his sore ribs and keeping the wrapping on his wrist intact and out of the water, Regulus was essentially fucked.
Deadpool had really done a number on him.
No innuendo intended.
After a, quite frankly, appallingly long time, Regulus got out of the shower and changed, getting ready to go to the Coffee Bean and then to the *sigh* Bugle.
He absentmindedly looked at his phone, eyes widening at the time.
“Shit!”
He grabbed his keys and everything else he needed, shouldering his bag and grabbing a few textbooks and a few Tolstoy books (light reading) and sprinting out the door.
Yeah, he definitely tore a few stitches.
🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️
Regulus hated running.
Okay, let’s backtrack - he hated running when he was Regulus Black.
When he was Spider-Man? Fine. Necessary, even.
But Regulus Black ? No fucking way. He was always carrying too much stuff in his pockets or his hands, or he was wearing too many layers to comfortably run. The skin-tight spandex made Regulus feel like he was running naked. Minus his junk hanging out, of course. That would’ve been really uncomfortable.
But Regulus Black had a reputation to uphold. And running did not fit into that criteria. The most he would do was a reluctant brisk walk.
No running though.
But then again, Regulus also didn’t like missing the breakfast specials at the Coffee Bean cafe, that got promptly thrown out and/or eaten by Marlene’s hungry ass at the end of the day with no flexibility.
So, alas, he must run.
“God,” he muttered under his breath, realising how far he was from the Coffee Bean Cafe, with his stupid short pained strides.
Regulus reared up, checking the time - two minutes left- fuck, never mind, one minute left - and put his backpack over both arms, shoving his phone in his pockets and patting himself down.
Then he started sprinting.
Now, of course, with the whole enhanced senses, Regulus was fast . Like, fast. Like those little brown spiders on the corner of the ceiling in your bathroom that move freakily fast and you lose behind the mirror in five seconds that make you think, 'fuck! Now I have to move! (Or burn this house down)'.
Regulus weaved through people, looking like a blur.
As he ran, all Regulus could think about was, fuck, he was hungry .
Regulus spotted the sign and infamous painted brick walls a street down, taking an abrupt turn.
He probably had, like, ten seconds left.
In a moment of weakness and desperation, Regulus decided to do what he had to before the fuckers at the Coffee Bean threw out his well-deserved cherry danishes and replaced them with the (frankly, cardboard tasting) apple ones - he knee slid through the door.
Yeah, that’s right. Regulus motherfucking Black knee slid through the door of a coffee shop to get the morning specials in time.
Much like that one scene in Big Daddy (1999).
“Fuck! I’m here! Give me the damn danish,” he panted, still on his knees in the mid-slide position.
“Whoa,” he heard from the person who was holding the door open for Regulus to slide into. “Sexy.”
Regulus glared up at the ever infamous James fucking Potter, holding four coffees and wearing an ‘ASK ME ABOUT MY FEMINIST AGENDA 💋’ shirt and jorts absolutely not suited for the London cold.
“You have a black eye.”
“No I don’t.” Regulus said flatly - this guy was an idiot, Regulus could probably gaslight him into thinking he didn’t have a black eye.
“...Yeah you do. What happened to your-”
“Why are you everywhere?” Regulus asked exasperatedly, pointedly ignoring James’ question and the hand offering to help him up, hauling himself back up.
“Ah- excuse me,” he pulled a mock-offended expression. “My friends work as much at this place as yours.”
“Yeah, but they actually like me.” Regulus snarked.
“Well, actually,” Dorcas approached them, holding Regulus’ danish. “-Sorry Reg, we’re out of your coffee syrup this morning, but you can come back in a few hours - and we don’t like you both. Now, if you had brought Peter or Pandora with you, completely different story. So Regulus, I assume you’ll be going to do more nerd stuff, and James will be off to be a complete menace to society some more. Stop terrorising our actual customers, and goodbye.” She finished her official statement by plucking a ten pound note from Regulus’ hand and turning around to walk back to the counter, shooing them off without turning around.
Regulus huffed, turning around on his heel and shouldering his way past James, walking in the direction of the Daily Bugle offices.
Stupid fucking cow eyes.
🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️
“Oi! Black! Get over ‘ere!”
Regulus grimaced, turning to Angelica, the receptionist, and rolling his eyes. “Jameson, - you get it.” He sighed, trudging over to JJJ’s devil spawn point office.
“Sir? You asked to see me?”
“Yes, right,” JJJ grunted, turning around in his chair as if he hadn’t just yelled for Regulus to go over there. “I had to ask if you had any more photos of the masked menace?”
“Who? Deadpool?” Regulus scoffed. “Okay, right, my bad.” He pulled out his newest folder full of Spider-Man photos (selfies) and slid it onto JJJ’s desk.
He watched as JJJ slowly opened the folder and skimmed the photos, his ugly-ly long and hairy fingers moving them to the side.
“...No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ll take a few of these photos, but this is too much ‘superhero’, not enough ‘menace’.”
Well maybe that’s because Spider-Man is a superhero, you fucking numpty.
“...Sorry?” Regulus asked again.
“Don’t be.” He wasn’t, but… “This menace definitely has too many opportunities for you to take photos of him. Your artsy-fartsy photos might get you somewhere in ‘life’ or whatever. But at the Bugle? Make him look as dangerous as possible. Which he is.”
The fuck he isn’t.
“Uh, okay. Thanks. So you’re taking the photos?”
“No.” JJJ huffed as he slid the folder off the table and into the drawer in his desk.
“But-but you took the photos.”
“Oh. Then I meant yes. Shoo, Black, come back at 9:34am sharp next Tuesday, and I want more menace-worthy photos.”
Regulus left as quickly as possible, barely resisting the urge to squish and mangle the door handle under his fist as he opened and closed the door behind him curtly.
Regulus was seething all the way to his photography station. They didn’t have proper cubicles or desks like the journalists did - they had standing stations for photographers to touch up and print photos and review their work before turning it in.
“Hey, Regulus?” Angelica walked up to him, leaving her post at the front desk.
“Yeah?”
She handed him an envelope, which, surprisingly had no creases - not a usual occurence for Bugle mail.
“This is for you.” She said cryptically while popping her gum, turning around and walking back to her desk (to, no doubt, stalk her ex on Instagram).
Regulus eyed the crisp white envelope in his hand, turning it around with the tips of his fingers. His eyes narrowed upon reading who it was from.
“Fuck no.” He mumbled, tearing the letter in two and chucking it in the bin.
The inside of the envelope was a rich, deep looking black, which didn’t appear from the outside of the envelope. Good quality, then. He wouldn’t expect anything else.
Also symbolic and ironic.
Regulus’ Spidey sense rang in his ears, and he whipped around to come face-to-face with Bellatrix motherfucking Black. How did she even fucking get in? Who let her in?
“Regulus.” She regarded him, voice coolly casual.
How the shit did she end up right behind him? Black family traits, he supposed.
Where he and Narcissa couldn’t shake the habit of appearing behind people like ghosts, Sirius and Andromeda demanded respect with their presences, loud and impenetrable.
Bellatrix? Jack of all trades. She could do both.
Her eyes swept over him sporting the judging gaze they knew they both had. She was wearing fishnet stockings and a long black dress underneath a longer dark grey trench coat. Compared to what he was wearing - wrinkled shirt, the baggiest fucking jeans he could find, beat up Docs, holding his camera with a fraying strap and fraying straps of his backpack over one shoulder - he didn’t blame her that much.
“Bellatrix.” He nodded to her, hopefully as coolly as her, trying to mask how much the Spidey sense spooked him. “You… wrote.” He gestured haphazardly at the torn letter in the bin next to him.
“Not that you bothered reading it, but I was going to ask you if you wanted to come to dinner tonight.” Her gaze didn’t move from his. Freaky.
“Why would I want to go to dinner with you?” He raised an eyebrow, gaze not moving from hers either. “I don’t know if you noticed, but my emancipation meant we didn’t have to do the cousin-incest thing anymore.” Regulus smirked.
He also gauged the exact moment that Bellatrix’s switch flicked.
“Why, Reggiekins,” she grinned. The nickname - something he already despised when it came from his friends and Sirius - sent a shiver down his spine. Something about her tone and the sly grin accompanied with it didn’t help soothe his nerves. But don’t get it wrong, there was a time that the nickname coming from her wasn’t taken badly at all. For fuck’s sake, she invented it. “You need not worry about that. I was just going to ask my baby cousin for some… help with an upcoming business endeavour.”
“Bella-”
“Three course meal. On me.”
“...Fine.”
The grin. “Here’s a copy of the invitation. I would advise against tearing this one up too, without reading the details.”
Regulus gave her a sheepish tight-lipped smile. Fuck, what happened to being cold and calculated Regulus?
He took the invitation identical to the one he had torn up from her perfectly manicured hand.
She reached into her Prada black leather shoulder bag, pulling out a pair of sunglasses and putting them on.
It wasn’t even sunny outside, that pretentious fucker (it made complete sense they were cousins, to be honest).
“See you later,” she Cheshire Cat-grinned at him again. He heard her breathe something else out before she strutted off. He wouldn’t have been able to hear it properly if he didn’t have super-hearing. “... Réglisse .”
‘Réglisse’, in French, means ‘licorice’. You’re probably thinking, what the fuck? Well, when said out loud, the word sounds a lot like ‘Regulus’, something that the Black cousins revelled in when found out in early childhood, when paired with the fact that ‘nobody likes licorice’ and ‘licorice is bitter’.
The nickname hadn’t stuck as much through the people Regulus knew, because nobody really got it. Where everyone knew about ‘Reggie’ or ‘Reg’, nobody other than the cousins knew about ‘ Réglisse’. Sirius never brought it up, bittersweet for the both of them, but apparently Bella hadn’t gotten that memo.
Regulus hardly held in the flinch.
Once she had strutted out the doors, gaining a few looks in her wake, Regulus grumbled under his breath, turning back to his camera.
“Yeah, okay, when the day becomes the night and the sky becomes the sea, when the clock strikes heavy and there’s no time for tea; and in our darkest hour, before my final rhyme, she will come back home to Wonderland and turn back the hands of time.”
🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️
“Yeah, so, then she just kinda… left.” Regulus shrugged. He was walking on his ceiling, on the phone with Dorcas.
“That’s it?”
“Well… yeah.” Regulus squirmed. “Actually, she also called me a name.”
“Like… a slur?”
“ What? Wha- no. She-it’s a nickname. From our childhood. To be honest, I haven’t heard it for a while. Kinda shocked me, I guess.”
“Well, bringing that stuff up? She’s trying to soften you. Classic manipulation tactic. Not love-bombing, per se, but she’s trying to incite softness in you. Probably to tell you something over dinner.”
“Oh, and Cas?”
“Yeah?”
“The restaurant she’s taking me to is really fancy. Like, really fucking expensive. It’s- I need to put on the suit.”
And yes, sure, Regulus is rich. Like, rich. He’s the ex-heir to the Black fortune.
Psych!
He’s not the full heir to the full fortune until he turns 25. W******* and O****’s dying wishes specifically. (Imagine that in a bitter tone, with Regulus splayed sideways across a velvet couch smoking a blunt and drinking expensive wine from the bottle.)
In the Black family, the fortunes and inheritances are ‘delivered’ at specifically 25. Regulus managed to bypass the laws and such to get Sirius his inheritance, but (although nobody really knew) Regulus still had yet to receive his full inheritance and the fortune.
Why 25, though?
Every male is expected to go to a respectable university directly after high school for three to four years, doing every degree possible, and then has one year to either have children or find a respectable wife, and then have children.
The women, however? They wait for a man to finish university.
Yeah, it was fucked.
“Whoa. Like, a whole suit and tie thing?”
“Yes, Dorcas, a whole suit and tie thing.” Regulus rolled his eyes, not sure if he was feeling lightheaded from standing upside down for the past hour or the surrealness of this fucking situation. “As far as I know, it’s just her and I eating dinner.”
“Well you’ve got to get there in a few hours. So I’d advise checking everything’s alright with the suit. And are you going to tell Sirius?”
Oh shit.
That’s what was bugging him.
Other than the whole concept of Bellatrix.
“I think I’ll-I’ll tell him after the dinner.”
“Okay hon, do whatever you want. But I want a photo of the suit.”
“Yeah, fine Cas,” Regulus snorted, scoffing and hanging up.
He walked down the wall and onto the floor, going over to his closet and grimacing at the suit kept in pristine condition in a plastic bag next to the tattered Spider-Man suit he’d left on a hanger. He had a different suit, mind you, but he couldn’t be bothered going all the way to S.H.I.E.L.D to dispose of it properly.
Regulus sighed, tugging his clothes off and wincing at the bruises all over his body.
Yeah, sure, Deadpool really fucked him up. More than he let on. More than Deadpool knew, because he had a feeling that Deadpool was beating himself up over it. Literally.
But the whole cat-tree-Nintendo situation from a few days ago probably helped ease his worry.
So instead of being angsty, sad Deadpool, he could go back to being loud, annoying, sings ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ ’ at the top of his lungs at 3:00am Deadpool.
🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️
Regulus already knew what was going to happen - he was going to arrive at the restaurant, get seated, get given a menu, and Bellatrix would show up ten minutes late.
Obviously, the old fashioned way of asserting dominance would be already waiting at the predetermined place long before the other person actually had to be there - it was a tale as old as time, truly.
But Bellatrix, ever the innovator, made others feel like a burden or like she had better things to do when she was late.
‘Fashionably late’ and all that shit.
Despite knowing what was going to happen, Regulus nevertheless took a begrudging taxi ride (because he couldn’t swing, stupid stitches and stupid clean suit) to the restaurant and walked in, sitting at the table Bellatrix had booked.
It was one of those restaurants where every table had their own mini chandelier above and a semicircle of a leather seat-bench thing.
It wasn’t like Regulus was out of place though. He was extremely well prepped for these types of situations.
When he had somebody to talk to.
But if Bellatrix was going to be like that and show up late, Regulus had nobody to actively try to impress. He already knew he held himself in the way that people were impressed by anyways. Especially the suit.
Speaking of which…
overconfident dork
cas
*photo*
waiting at this stuffy ass restaurant rn
REGULUS BLACK YOU GOD
SEXY ASH
IM FORWARDING THAT TO EVERYONE
and im sure its not that stuffy
order a shit ton of wine for me <3
stop trying to drink vicariously through me
well im stuck with my beautiful gf
while she tries to convince me to watch
ALLLLL
the fucking marvel movies ever made
that dork
um
ew
sappy af
but whatever
Regulus silently let out a puff of breath, gaze sliding around to try and see Bellatrix. Nope.
He tucked his phone back into the pocket of his dress pants, then reached into the inner jacket pocket to pull out (sigh) the Nintendo Switch from Deadpool.
As much as he would like not to be, Regulus was well aware how genuinely ridiculous he looked, waiting for someone in a full suit and slicked back hair without ordering anything, fading black eye and wrist wrap peeking out from the sleeve of his suit jacket, holding a Spider-Man themed Nintendo Switch.
But did Regulus care?
Abso-fucking-lutely not.
🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️
As suspected, 10-15 minutes later, Bellatrix was gliding through the doors elegantly, taking a seat directly across from Regulus.
“Regulus.” She regarded him, once again. Yeah, thanks, Bellatrix, he knew his own name.
“Bella.”
“We do have business to discuss. But before that, should we eat?”
No shit, that’s the only reason why he’s there.
While Bellatrix looked over the menu, Regulus slowly pulled his Switch out, resuming his quiet war against that hoe, Donkey Kong.
🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️🕸️
While they ate their (kinda mid) food, Bellatrix was dead set on making small talk.
Even though they had been cousins for, like, all their lives.
“So remind me again, you dropped out…” she started slowly. She had taken an interest in his studies, even though she probably didn’t know shit about molecular biochemistry.
“I didn’t drop out. ” Regulus said for what felt like the fiftieth time that night. “I changed my major.”
“But weren’t you set on getting a business degree?” Bellatrix asked in a light, airy mocking voice.
Regulus’ fists clenched under the table. He couldn’t even hold anything because he would definitely crumble it.
“My parents were set on me getting a business degree.” Okay, Regulus, no cussing your older cousin out tonight.
“Well I’m told that you’re rather intelligent,” Bellatrix raised an eyebrow like they were only acquaintances. Regulus couldn’t really place why, but it bothered the shit out of him.
And who was telling her that?
“I’d like to think so. But then again, wouldn’t everyone?” Yeah, you unthoughtful YSL Black Opium-smelling fuckwad. Regulus could be curt as well.
“Well,” Bellatrix took a long, slow sip of her wine as Regulus almost spasmed from the low hum of his Spidey sense at the base of his head. “I assume you know why you’re here.”
“Prison ran out of cells?”
“Business proposal.”
“I’m nineteen, Bellatrix, I doubt you’d find any use with my skill set. You know, I’m not huge on illegal business dealings and money laundering at this age.”
Regulus took cold delight in how her jaw flickered.
“My father started a business before he died. Long, long before he died. Before either of us were born. I’d tell you the details, but it’s best if we mind our company.” She gestured with her eyes to the full restaurant. “Anyways, I was wondering if you would be interested in contributing your biochemistry… prowess to the company. With pay, of course.”
Fuck.
Was Bellatrix Black just asking if he wanted to join her company?
To be honest, the answer was fuck no. Why would he go back to the family he was trying to get away from? He knew that Bellatrix was pretty far from both their parents, but she wasn’t trying to distance herself from the last name at all. In fact, she embraced it.
She was the only one of the cousins who was left willingly.
Which was either the stupidest or smartest thing, on her end.
“You’re asking me if I would like to work for you ?” Regulus scoffed. He could feel the moment his voice turned harsh. Obviously it didn’t phase Bellatrix, harsh smirk glued on her face. “Without knowing what your business is about? You’re funny, Bella, truly. Hilarious. You ought to know how well it would tide over with me. You want my answer? Fuck no.” Regulus hissed, standing up abruptly and walking out of the restaurant.
Sure, he was going to be hungry.
Sure, he was going to need to microwave a few bowls of Mac-n-Cheese to tide over his stupidly massive superhuman appetite.
But while he was walking away, trying to make his frame as large as possible (flex those Spider-Man muscles, you know?), he heard her mutter something after him that made his blood run cold.
“Of course, Regulus, no worries at all.”
‘Oh my god! That’s so nice and understanding of her!’ The fuck it’s not.
It was a simple threat. If he wouldn’t willingly side with her, she would make him.
Also, just for a finale, Regulus did, in fact, dent a fork with his fingers. Not his fist- just his fingers.
Okay, fuck.
Regulus let out a cold breath into the night air, looking pretty stupid wearing a suit and waiting for the bus.
Once Regulus slipped onto the bus, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, he reached into his suit jacket pocket, fingers brushing over Deadpool’s Switch, but he reached into his pants pocket instead and pulled out his phone.
It was about time that he should tell Sirius about what he had just done.
infuriating bastard
sirius
i have to tell you something
cronch
you hear that?
yhats the sound of me eating wticks
Okay, Regulus would tell him later. Infuriating bastard.