one
Dorcas Meadowes picks him up at JFK — “Easier to fill you in on the drive to the hospital without your Mommy Dearest watching over my shoulder like a hawk,” she says on the phone — and Sirius feels eternally grateful. The last twenty or so hours of his life have been a waking nightmare, and he’s not entirely sure he can get through this on his own.
She is impossibly tall and intimidating in her white tailored suit, in stark contrast with the deep umber of her skin, but when they get into her Subaru (she mumbles a thousand apologies for the veritable mountain of empty Celsius cans scattered around the floor) and she takes her blazer off, he’s pleasantly surprised to see her arms are covered in intricately patterned tattoo sleeves.
“Didn’t know Regulus had such cool friends,” he points out as he’s strapping himself in with the seatbelt.
It earns him a pointed side-glance, an eyebrow raised in challenge, almost like an accusation, and Sirius supposes that’s right: he doesn’t really know anything about Regulus, not anymore.
“We met in law school,” Dorcas says, one hand on the steering wheel as she puts on her sunglasses before they exit the underground parking garage.
Guilt is a strange beast uncoiling inside Sirius’s chest. He had no idea Regulus went to law school; didn’t have the slightest inkling what his brother might be doing with his life through all those years. He never once picked up the phone to try and find out. For the longest time he thought he was just respecting Regulus’s choices but now, in hindsight, he realizes he’s just been a coward.
“Yeah,” he lets out softly, “Yeah, he’d be good at that.”
“The best,” she grins, then gives a little one-shouldered shrug, “Well, second-best, but he’d never admit it. We hated each other at first.”
Her voice when she talks about his brother is tinged with so much pain and laced with so much love that Sirius immediately feels a stab of jealousy right beneath his ribs. It feels unfair that somebody else got to experience knowing Reggie this closely, this intimately. Something burns fiercely in his throat and he looks away from Dorcas and at the road outside his window. New York never once felt like home, but driving through Queens feels oddly like a homecoming, reminiscent of summer nights he and Mulciber and Avery spent cruising around the city with the windows down. Not that those are memories he should be thinking of with any degree of fondness.
“Sounds like… you were close,” he prods after a long stretch of silence, and a shadow passes over Dorcas’s face.
“Yeah,” is all she ends up saying, a deep crease furrowing her brow.
“You weren’t…” Sirius tries, suddenly hungry for any crumbs of knowledge he can get, any glimpse into who Regulus became when their lives became parallel lines, bound to never cross again.
Dorcas throws her head back laughing at that and simply tilts her chin at the giant “Lesbobile” sticker on the dashboard, right in front of Sirius’s face.
“Oh,” he blinks, cheeks flushing.
“Not that he’s remotely interested in women either, God, he’d laugh his fucking ass off at that.”
This, too, is another blow to Sirius. Not that the Regulus he knew ever talked to him about his dating life or the people he was interested in, but it feels like a bit of information he should have been privy to, something Regulus should have trusted him with. There was a time when they told each other anything and everything, but he can’t remember now when that stopped. At some point between when he started snorting cocaine off Lucius Malfoy’s AP physics textbook in sophomore year and between when he tried to kill himself in their parents’ bathroom, if he were to wager a guess.
“I didn’t know he was gay,” he says, and immediately hates how pitiful and pathetic he sounds, like he has any right to mourn or be upset by what’s happened when he’s essentially a stranger now.
They’re stopped at a traffic light so Dorcas spends a good few seconds eyeing him up and down, a weird, hostile look on her face. When she glances away at last, she asks, with an edge to her voice, “Why do you keep talking about him in the past tense?”
“I—I don’t—”
Sirius thinks he’s going to throw up. With a heavy sigh, he squeezes his eyes shut and leans back against the headrest. His fingers drum against his thigh, to the beat of the desperate itch crawling under his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he manages, tilting his head to the left to look at Dorcas. Her jaw is hardset line, her ring-adorned fingers tightly gripping the wheel.
“It’s fine,” she says stiffly, “You’re technically correct, I think. He’s not—”
She, too, sighs, the words coming out of her mouth like it brings her physical pain to talk about it.
“I’ve just been watching him slowly die for so long and it still doesn’t feel real.”
“How long,” he finds himself asking, wondering, silently, if he could have changed anything if he’d known earlier, if there is anything he could have done to change this outcome.
Sirius and his selfishness, back at it again. He swallows his anger, the self-hatred bubbling quietly inside him and looks out the window once more, finding Dorcas’s Subaru a little too confining for his liking. The weight of the world is already on his chest; he needs to be out in the open so as not to feel crushed by it. It’s partially why he escaped New York and all its skyscrapers.
“He got sick the summer after we graduated,” there’s a detached manner to the way she’s speaking, clean-cut and clinical, like a pre-rehearsed speech, “while we were studying for the bar.”
She glances at Sirius with the corner of her eye as she turns her blinker on, and there’s the ghost of guilt on her face too.
“I think he kind of resents me for it a little,” she admits, “that I got through it and that I’m doing what he never could while he’s… well, you’ll see.”
It scares him a little. The last time he saw Regulus, he was just a kid, freshly seventeen and awkwardly lanky, fists balled as he screamed at Sirius to never even think about coming back. He doesn’t think he’s ready to see him now, lying lifeless and motionless in a hospital bed, a decade stretching between them. Even back then he wasn’t able to look at him and not see a scared child, cowering behind Sirius as Mother yelled. In his mind, Regulus is forever five and forever needs Sirius, and this is who he keeps letting down.
“Why me?” he asks at last, the question that has been rattling inside his chest since yesterday, since he took an illegal U-turn and drove back to his house, and called James and sobbed—truly sobbed, for the first time in years—on the phone, and dumped random items into a bag with no rhyme nor reason, and sped down the highway to LAX, and yelled at an airline customer service agent, and through hours of anxious pacing at the gate, and through the entire six-hour flight.
“For starters, he loves you,” Dorcas offers, not unkindly, but all Sirius can do is snort; he has long ago let go of that notion.
“He does,” she insists, “he kept—he kept talking about you before—I mean, he was basically delirious at that point but he kept calling for you.”
Sirius has wished he was dead many, many times throughout his life, but never more so than at right this second. It’s by sheer willpower—which he has barely enough of as is—that he manages not to throw up, or burst out crying, or tear himself into pieces then and there. He doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to say to that.
“I should have been here,” he lets out at last, ashamed by the tears in his voice, “I should’ve known, I should have—”
“ She wouldn’t let me.”
When he looks up to meet Dorcas’s big sad brown eyes, he sees genuine regret in them, like this is something she’s not going to forgive herself for until the end of her days, and even though he barely knows her, he hates her a little for it, too, even though it’s someone else he should blame.
“Mother—”
“She’s so mad I called you. You know, she tried to fight it, the proxy? Kicking and screaming and threatening to throw me out and never let me see him again?”
Sirius’s lips form a thin line. That’s one person he never wants to see again. He’s been dreading having to face her, terrified that merely being in her presence will turn him back into a sniveling mess of a teenager who can’t even meet her eye. It sounds like she’s going to be just as happy to see him.
“What happened?” he finds himself asking.
“Well she can’t fight the law, the whole thing was ironclad, but—Jesus, fucking harpy.”
“Why me?” he repeats, “Why not her?”
Dorcas stares at him, incredulous.
“He can’t stand the bitch,” a bitter little laugh escapes her lips, “He wouldn’t trust her with his life—death, whatever.”
This is news to Sirius. He has spent his entire life burdened by the knowledge that no matter what he did, Regulus would never love him more than he loved their parents, or at least would always fear them more than he loved Sirius, for all the difference it made. To learn that he so openly disobeyed them, spoke out against them—it shatters him to think that he will never truly know the man his brother has become because this Regulus, Dorcas’s Regulus, isn’t someone Sirius recognizes.
“I’m sorry,” Dorcas shakes her head slightly, “I’m a mess over this whole thing, I’m afraid I’m not being very helpful.”
“No, it’s—it’s a lot to take in, is all,” he shrugs.
They pull into the parking garage at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and sit for a while in silence, neither of them reaching to unbuckle their seatbelts.
“Ready?” Dorcas asks.
Sirius shakes his head no. He can’t find his voice, buried somewhere deep down his esophagus.
“Right answer,” she says.
The years have been, unsurprisingly, kind to his mother but grief hasn’t. She’s sitting at the cafeteria table, face buried in her palms, but she looks up when Sirius and Dorcas walk in. Her frame has remained just a sickly slender as he remembers, the tight black braid slithering down her back tastefully lined with silver strands. Her face is gaunt, tired, and her eyes are red and sunken-in. She doesn’t bother to stand up when they approach, and her features are twisted with displeasure.
Instead of looking at her, Sirius’s eyes land on his father, who sits—or rather slumps—in the chair next to his wife, looking far older than his years, like his son’s sickness and Walburga’s anguish have aged him. Something unrecognizable, almost like pain, flashes across his face when he sees his eldest, and his lower lip trembles. He quickly looks away.
“You,” Walburga says coldly, wringing her hands in her lap.
“That’s exactly what you say to your son you haven’t seen in like, what, ten years?”
Sirius forces a cheer in his voice to mask the tremble in it. All he wants is to cry and hide under the covers, or to just be anywhere else but under the scrutiny of her icy, piercing gaze. He can read every thought written on her face, every vile and lowly insult she wants to hurl at him.
She settles on, “You’re no son of mine,” and doesn’t look at him again.
Orion shifts uncomfortably in his seat, mouth hanging open as if he wants to say something, then thinks better of it. It seems fitting. That was his exact behavior for the entirety of Sirius’s childhood as well. He thinks it must be terribly painful to be so afraid of the person you’re married to that you let her destroy your children in such thorough and cruel ways. Perhaps he’d find it in himself to have some pity for his father if Sirius was a better person, but he’s not. All he has is bitterness.
“There is nothing you can do to stop me from being here,” he says at last, fighting the urge to wrap his arms around himself. He won’t show her how small she’s making him feel; she doesn’t deserve that victory.
“Believe me,” Walburga’s voice drips with venom, “it’s not for a lack of trying.”
He forces himself to laugh. His stomach is a deep, dark, endless pit. Later, he’s going to find himself on his knees in a bathroom somewhere, emptying his already empty stomach, trying to make himself feel clean again. He knows, from the troubled days of his youth, it will be to no avail.
“Mrs. Black,” Dorcas says diplomatically, but Sirius picks up on the slight tremble in his voice, and Jesus, is everyone afraid of his mother? “I know you’re not happy your— Sirius is here, but he is legally in charge of Regulus’s care now, and if you could set aside your differences for his benefit—”
“I know why he’s here,” Walburga interrupts her, eyes locked on Sirius once again, seeping hatred, “He’s going to kill my son.”
There is very little they have to say to each other after that. His father, once again, looks like he’s on the cusp of saying something, breath caught in his chest, but he gives up and takes his wife’s bony hand in his as they watch Sirius and Dorcas walk away.
“That went about as splendid as I thought it would,” Dorcas chews her lip anxiously, uncertain if she should try to offer Sirius some comfort or shrug the whole thing off. It’s not the first time witnesses to his mother’s behavior have been rendered speechless and made uncomfortable beyond the humanly possible.
The elevator ride to Regulus’s room is silent. Sirius doesn’t know what he expected from a cancer hospital but there’s a dreadful, oppressive heaviness in the air, a certain sticky quality of grief and despair clinging to every surface. Never before has he been to a hospital that is so reverently quiet. There’s something about the beige-brown floors and the blue walls, and the sterile, clinical feel of everything that makes him want to scream.
They pause at the doorway and before they enter, Sirius takes a sharp breath in. Need crawls under his skin, driving him to the brink of insanity. It itches so bad he wants to peel the skin off his flesh, and he knows it won’t be enough to make it stop. Years of being clean, yet all he can think of is the pills inside a cabinet in a room somewhere in this hospital that would make all of this just…stop.
“I’ll be with you,” Dorcas reaches to take his hand in hers before she opens the door, and he’s oddly comforted by the warmth of her palm against the clammy coldness of his. He swallows the painful lump in his throat and squeezes his eyes shut, readying himself to see his brother once again.
In the rehab center, they make everyone sit around in a circle in squeaky-clean, brand new plastic chairs. They toss a bright red foam stress ball around and whoever gets the ball has to speak. Every time Sirius catches it, he looks up at the session leader with an empty, dead stare and says, “I don't fucking want to be here.”
He’s got nothing else he wants to say. Eventually, they stop pushing. As long as his mother keeps sending them those hefty weekly checks, they don't really seem to care all that much. Neither does Sirius.
The week before he's supposed to start senior year, he gets to go home. Mother and Father are gone when Kreacher, their butler, drops him off at the building entrance, hardly sparing a word for him, and drives away to fulfill another errand. Sirius is sitting cross-legged on his bed, in a room that no longer feels like home, and he’s got his headphones on but the CD in his Walkman isn't spinning anymore. His sheets are new but still smell strongly of detergent, and they're cold and crisp, and unslept in.
It feels as though he’s in a hotel room; the walls are bare and untouched, impersonal. His mother never let him decorate and most of his personal belongings are back in his dorm room at Trinity-Pawling anyways. There was talk of him being separated from Mulciber and Avery; he probably won’t even get to go back to that room when term starts back up. Maybe his mother threw all of his things away anyways. He can imagine her sorting through his books and CDs and posters, silently mortified and disgusted, and it’s almost enough to make him feel something.
There’s a soft rap at the door, even though it’s wide open—they’re not allowed to have their bedroom doors shut—and he looks up to see Regulus. With a sigh, he takes the headphones off and tosses them on the bed next to him. Although it’s only been a few weeks since he last saw him, he seems to have sprung up a few inches. He’s skinnier, too, which is mildly concerning because he didn’t have much weight to lose to begin with. Purple bruises underline his gray-blue eyes, so much like Sirius’s, except they’re full of life.
“I didn’t know you were home,” Sirius says, trying to sound nice. He has no reason to be mean to Reggie. It’s hard to inject any kind of positivity into his words, though; it feels impossible to pretend, even for his baby brother.
“Didn’t feel like going to the Hamptons,” Regulus replies dryly.
His arms are crossed in front of his chest but he uncrosses them, revealing two thick, large white envelopes, which he places gently on the edge of Sirius’s bed.
“These got here a couple weeks ago,” his voice is barely above a whisper, “I picked them up before she could see them. Thought you might not want her to know.”
Silently, Sirius reaches out and pulls the envelopes towards him, already knowing what they contain just by the sight of them. They’d be much smaller if they were rejections. His heart does a weird lurch in his chest at the sight of them. He’s holding freedom at his fingertips, and he’s not sure it means anything to him anymore.
“Thanks,” he breathes out, eyes darting away from Regulus; he can’t bear to meet his gaze. He’s too smart; he must have figured out what the letters mean.
“You got into Columbia and NYU too, she's got those hung up on the fridge.”
Sirius offers a noncommittal grumble. Shyly, Regulus perches on the edge of his bed. There’s a ghostly lightness to his step. With his peripheral vision, Sirius notices that he’s nervously twisting the sleeve of his oversized sweater, an anxious habit he seems to have recently picked up.
“So,” Regulus breaks the heavy silence after a while, nodding in the direction of the envelopes, “Stanford and Berkley, huh?”
“Yeah,” Sirius says, swallowing a painful lump in his throat. He should probably be proud, but he doesn't know how to be that. He doesn’t know how to be anything but filled with debilitating self-hatred.
“As far away from here as you can.”
It’s not a question, but even if it was, he’s not sure he’d be able to answer. Selfishly, he only thought about how great it would be if he could move across the country. It never once crossed his mind what it would do to his brother, and now the betrayal seems so obvious, so apparent, that it's a gaping hole smack down the center of his chest.
“I—”
“Don’t tell me you’re not gonna go,” Regulus interrupts him, almost softly, “We don’t lie to each other.”
That, in itself, is a lie. Maybe once upon a time they didn’t but Sirius wrecked that.
“You could come too.”
His brother only snorts in response.
The silence between them settles again and stretches for eternity. No matter how much he wants to meet his brother’s eyes, no matter how hot he can feel them burning on his skin, he’s a coward and he can’t look up.
“Why do you do it?” Regulus asks after a while.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Sirius says with a snark that he doesn’t mean.
“I don't know. The drugs. The disobedience,” Regulus’s eyes dart at the raised white scars along Sirius’s pale arms, still far from healing, “Any of it.”
“That's just what I do, haven't you heard? I disappoint.”
There’s a bitterness to his voice that he hates. He doesn’t know how to get rid of it, how to stop it burning like bile in the back of his throat.
“She sent me to therapy,” Regulus blurts out, and this time it’s his turn to avoid his brother’s gaze. His jaw is taut, like he’s gritting his teeth, and his throat bobs involuntarily. Sirius can’t breathe.
“Why?”
At last, their eyes lock on each other and Regulus raises an eyebrow in challenge. He looks tired, and younger than his sixteen years, like he’s somehow grown smaller over the summer despite his growth spurt. Some unreadable shadow flashes across his face.
“Finding your brother in the bathtub with his wrists slit kind of fucks you up, I think,” he says, forcing a cheerfulness in his voice that Sirius knows is unnatural. It’s like a punch to the gut and Sirius has to run a hand across his face to regain his composure.
“Reggie—”
“It’s fine,” he lies, pushing himself off the bed, “Glad you’re not dead or whatever.”
“Stay,” the word is out of Sirius’s mouth before he's had a chance to think about it, and he finds himself reaching for Regulus the way he used to reach for Sirius when he was younger.
The shake of Regulus’s head is barely perceptible but it's there.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Sirius tries, “or we can if that’s what you want to do. Or we can just play Mario Kart, or something.”
There’s a distance between them that's never been there before. Regulus walks around with walls built up to shield him from the world but those always, invariably fall down when he’s around Sirius. He’s never iced him out before. Hesitation flashes behind his eyes, then it’s gone in a split second.
“I don’t think I want to be around you,” he says.
It sounds like he’s in pain. He doesn’t turn around to glance at Sirius on his way out.
Regulus looks terribly young and small in the hospital bed. The afternoon light slants just so as it pours in through the half-closed blinds, bringing some color to the ghastly pallor of his face. His eyes are closed, the purple web of veins on his eyelids trembling ever so slightly. He’s covered in tubes and needles, and the beeping of all the machines covers up the steady, silent rhythm of his breathing.
Sirius holds his hand between his own, trying not to think about how he can feel each bone in his fingers. He can’t tell how much time has passed, how long he’s been sitting in this chair, holding his brother in his grasp, afraid he’s going to slip away. He thought he would cry, but there are no tears, just the ceaseless feeling that he’s being repeatedly punched in the stomach with such force and such frequency that he can’t ever catch a breath.
Softly, he reaches out and brushes the lifeless curls off Regulus’s forehead.
“What am I supposed to do,” he whispers shakily, and he feels rattled by anger. Why is it on him, why did Regulus choose him to inflict this on, how is it up to him when he hasn’t stopped being a mess a single day in his life? And why on earth did Regulus think Sirius would know what he wanted when in the years that stretch between them he has gone ahead and become a person Sirius knows nothing about?
“What do you want me to do, Reggie?”
Unsurprisingly, Regulus doesn’t reply. All that machinery he assumes is keeping his brother alive keeps beeping unsympathetically. Sirius brings his head closer to Regulus’s hand and presses his forehead against it, as if in prayer. If he were a religious man, he would beg God for some kind of sign.
Just then, the door opens wide and in strolls a stranger, strutting into Regulus’s room without a care in the world. He’s tall and stupidly handsome, with his tousled sandy curls and big green eyes and large hands, dressed in the same paper-thin checkered hospital gown Regulus is wearing and dragging a portable IV fluid bag behind him. He walks into the room like he’s used to being here, crossing it in a few wide strides and crouching by the nightstand by Regulus’s bed.
Astounded, Sirius looks the man up and down, still clinging onto Regulus’s hand.
“What are you doing here?” he hears himself saying, once he’s shaken the initial shock off.
“Well,” the man says, nonplussed, helping himself to the chocolate in Regulus’s bedside drawer, unwrapping it deliberately slowly, seemingly absolutely unmoved by Sirius’s presence, “if this paper-thin and exceedingly stylish hospital gown and the IV I'm wheeling around didn't clue you in, I just really enjoy hanging out in hospitals and stealing people’s fancy chocolate stashes,” he flashes Sirius a heart-stopping grin, “It’s a very niche hobby of mine.”
Sirius blinks, dumbfounded. The stranger offers him another ridiculously pretty smile, pushing a curl behind his ear.
“So,” a slight pause, as if to catch his breath, “the prodigal brother returns,” he says, popping a square of chocolate in his mouth and chewing it contemplatively as he shamelessly checks Sirius out.
“This feels a little disrespectful,” Sirius finds it in himself to whisper, eyes returning to Regulus’s still, pale body under the off-white sheets and he tightens his grip on his brother’s hand, oddly unnerved by the stranger.
“I'm not really stealing his chocolate,” the man says, letting out an exhausted sigh as he plops down in the chair across from Sirius, “I have his consent. He pitied me because this god awful place only serves lime jello for dessert and I don't have a rich mother-cunt to bring me fancy candy in a desperate effort to exculpate her guilt.”
Sirius has never in his entire life been more at a loss for words. A startled laugh escapes his lips. He doesn’t think he’s heard anyone else talk about his mother in such a manner.
“Oh, don't look so shocked,” the stranger pops another piece of chocolate in his mouth, never once tearing his eyes away from Sirius’s, “I know you Blacks are so prickly about being the only ones allowed to insult your family members but Reg here,” he nods at the motionless body in the bed between them, “is basically family. And your mother is a cunt, I don't think you can deny that.”
“I'm sorry,” Sirius has finally recovered his voice, “but who the fuck are you?”
He receives another charming smile in response, and he feels electrified right down to the marrow of his bones. The stranger extends a hand—the one that has the IV hooked to it—across the bed and it hangs in the empty space between them almost long enough for it to become awkward before Sirius finally takes it and gives it a soft shake.
“Remus Lupin,” the man introduces himself, once more sliding his gaze up and down as if evaluating Sirius, “and I know who you are, no need for introductions.”
This, on its own, raises about a million questions.
“Still no clue who you are,” Sirius says, voice unnaturally shaky. He realizes he’s still holding Remus Lupin’s hand and he drops it, shifting his gaze away from those piercing green eyes.
“I am your brother’s dying buddy,” he shrugs.
“His what ?”
Remus Lupin’s laughter has a lovely, breathy quality to it. He leans back into the chair, crossing his arms in front of his chest, and tilts his head slightly.
“Sorry,” he says, “we’re a little lax about death on this floor, just getting comfortable with it, you know.”
Sirius opens and closes his mouth.
“I don’t,” he says at last.
“Don’t worry,” Remus Lupin winks at him, “I’ll tell you all about it.”