interlude
When Mulciber clears his throat for the third time in the span of five minutes, Sirius finally puts his book down, as he contemplates offering him a cough drop. He doesn’t talk to either of his roommates —Bruce Mulicber and Carter Avery—and in the several months that they have shared a dorm, he's barely exchanged more than a handful of words with them. The Mulcibers and Averies of the world remind him too much of his parents, of the kind of people they would want him to befriend, so he's steered clear of the boys. They, too, seem to dislike him, either because he took the one single bed in their room and now the two of them are forced to bunk, or because they consider him too weird to hang around in their circles.
Trinity-Pawling has strict weekend rules, so Sirius isn't really allowed to go back home and spend time with the only real friend he has—his brother—so his time in boarding school has been particularly lonely. The rest of his classmates, much like his roommates, remind him of the Ancient and Noble House of Black: spoiled rich boys raised by their haughty conservative families, rotten right down to the core. He doesn't know why he expected anything different from an all-boys preparatory boarding school with a four-tiered dress code where everyone goes on to matriculate at an Ivy.
“What,” Sirius deadpans, looking up from his bed to where Bruce is leaning against the doorframe.
It's Saturday afternoon, which means the dress code for Saturday lunch is what the Student Handbook calls “Neat & Casual.” Accordingly, Bruce is wearing jeans and a sweater, only a touch more relaxed than the “Informal Class Dress” they have to wear the rest of the week. Sirius didn't bother with lunch today, so he's perfectly comfortable wearing a T-shirt (those are never allowed) and a pair of sweatpants (atrocious), even if his state of dress makes him feel even more like he doesn't belong.
“What are you doing?” Bruce asks, the tip of his perfectly polished shoe grazing against the floor.
Sirius bites his tongue so as not to blurt out anything sarcastic. He's curled up in bed with a tattered, annotated copy of The Count of Monte Cristo so he's not sure his choice of afternoon activities is all that clandestine. Still, he forces himself not to roll his eyes. He should probably try to make some friends and not push everyone away by being “prickly and somewhat standoffish” as per last term's letter the school sent to his parents, especially in light of the conversation he's just had with his mother.
They're not allowed cellphones, which he has found to be somewhat of a blessing. He barely gets to talk to Regulus now—they've resorted to emails—but he barely gets to talk to his mother too, their fraught relationship reduced to a weekly phone call on the weekend, and he's grateful for that. Except this week's call has dealt a heavy blow.
He's been miserable at Trinity-Pawling, and the one thing that's gotten him through this terrible, lonely first year has been the knowledge that at the end of summer break, Regulus would be coming with him. Like Edmond Dantès, he only had to get through his sentence, and then—
“Regulus has been accepted to York Prep,” his mother had said primly, her voice cool and detached through the phone.
York Prep is back home in New York City. Basically down the street from their home. Regulus wouldn’t even have to board there. He'd be able to sleep in his own bed, in his own room. Worst of all, he would still be hours away from Sirius, who was essentially locked up in this prison of a boarding school.
“I thought he was coming to Trinity,” Sirius had whispered back, barbed wire wrapped around his throat.
He hadn't realized how much he'd been relying on his one friend, his childhood companion, joining him here. How much of his mental well-being hinged upon it. Their mother must have realized it would make Sirius happy, so she had snatched the promise of it away, like she did with everything else.
“It's best that your brother be kept away from...bad influences,” his mother had said.
It was unspoken that Sirius was the bad influence, not Trinity-Pawling, or his classmates, or his instructors.
Now Sirius is faced with five more years at this school where nobody likes him, and he likes nobody, and he's forced to play stuff like squash and lacrosse, and tennis, and he's not allowed to wear his combat boots or leather jacket, and he has to cut his hair short, and his best friend in the whole world won't even go here.
So, really, he doesn't want to talk to Bruce. He doesn't want to deal with his condescending attitude. He just wants to keep reading his book and to be left in peace.
But he has to make friends, or else he'll spend the entirety of his prep school career as a weird loner with zero social skills, and he wouldn't mind too much if he didn't think it would interfere with his Getting Away plan. While his mother has a strictly drawn plan for his future—Trinity, then Columbia, then Columbia Law—his own plan consists of a single bullet point. Get as far away from his parents as possible. He’s penciled in a smaller bullet point (get into a college across the country) but if he wants it to come to fruition, he should probably get to work.
“Reading,” he tells Bruce, lifting his book up so his roommate can read the title on the cover, “they canceled all outdoors activities because of the weather.”
With a nod of his chin, he points outside his window (he's guilty, a little bit, that he not only got the single bed but also the only window in their room), where a veritable monster of a storm is raging. The raindrops patter against the window, the steady beat of war drums, and Sirius swallows a painful lump in his throat. That's probably more words than he's said to Bruce this entire spring term.
“Well,” the other boy smiles at him—a shy, tentative smile—and shifts his weight, “if you get bored of being an insufferable nerd, a few of us are hanging out in the Cave.”
“Yeah,” Sirius finds himself saying, “yeah, okay.”
“You should probably change,” Bruce grins at him, “or you'll get hung by your thumbs off a chain link in the basement, or whatever they do to you here when you're caught breaking the rules.”
Sirius lets out a laugh as he's pulling on a sweater and a pair of dark jeans—far more acceptable attire for hanging out in the student lounge, as far as the dress code is concerned.
“Don't tell me you've never broken the rules,” he teases, coaxing a wide grin out of Bruce.
He pretends—to everyone else, naturally, but to himself, as well—that he doesn’t notice certain things. The dimple in Bruce's cheek. The edge of his jaw. The way his collarbone dips beneath the pressed collar of his school uniform shirt. The veins on his arms when he swings the tennis racket on the court. He pretends not to feel certain things, either. Like that feeling in his stomach when the other boy flashes him a bright smile, that unnamed, unnamable pit that caves in, that he can never—will never—address.
“Course I break the rules,” Bruce says, throwing an arm around Sirius’s shoulder, “I just don't ever get caught doing it.”
In the years to come, Sirius will always wonder if that was the moment things went wrong. If that was when he should have shaken his head no and returned to his book, or if he could have struck up this friendship and enjoyed the warmth of it before it all went down in flames. If that was the one domino tile that set the rest of them in motion. He wonders if he would have said yes if Bruce Mulciber had come to him on any other day, if any other path would have led down the same road.
There are no ifs. There is only the crushing weight of what is, of the chain of events he set off that day. Perhaps it would always end like this: with Sirius in rehab. Perhaps it would always start like this: with Bruce's green eyes close to his, his hand cupping Sirius’s as the lighter flickers to life, the flame licks the tip of the joint, the smoke fills his lungs, and for once, his mother’s voice in his head goes quiet. Perhaps it's unfair to pin it all on Bruce. Perhaps Sirius’s Grand Plan for life would always follow the same tracks: jumping over the fence and smoking weed in the sprawling woods around campus after dark; and lying on the floor of their dorm room, Mulciber, and Avery, and Black, shoulder to shoulder, passing a bottle of cheap vodka that burns down their throats while Sirius’s CD mix plays in the background; and Bruce's familiar hand passing the rolled-up Benjamin Franklin to Sirius as he leans over the thin white rows on the desk—and then the rest of it, the parts he can barely allow his memory to graze over.
Perhaps it would always end like this. That's what he has to tell himself so he can live with it, even when he knows it isn't true.
The last time he lands himself in rehab, he lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling the all-too-familiar itch crawling under his skin, its spidery tendrils as intimate as a lover, and he tries to pinpoint the exact point of no return. Maybe it really was that first day he quietly followed Bruce. Maybe it was the first drag of weed burning in the back of his throat, or maybe it was the first time he took the bottle Avery handed him and his lips touched the glass, or maybe it was the first time he was ushered into Lucius Malfoy’s dorm room, that first time he looked at the Ziploc bag filled with fine white powder and every cell in his body screamed “yes, please.”
Maybe it was a different drug entirely: the brush of Bruce’s fingers along his jaw, the first time he pushed him against a wall and devoured him, their mouths lonely and hungry, their bodies colliding, needy, or every other time they sought comfort in each other in the dark, drunk enough to have plausible deniability but not too drunk to know that it would never happen sober. Even in later years, when he’d had Cecilia, pretty little Cece Greengrass, with her doe eyes and pouty pink lips, he’d still only longed for two things: the drugs and Bruce. Maybe if they’d never crossed that line, if he didn’t crave Bruce’s hands gripping his hips mean enough to leave bruises, if he didn’t crave being fucked into a mattress, if he didn’t crave the dreadful feeling in the pit of his stomach when Bruce refused to look at him the morning after, then he would have never chased any of the other highs.
But he knows, in his heart of hearts, that he’s nothing but a pathetic junkie. Because had he not healed, had he not moved on, years later, when he crashed into Avery again? Had he no reason anymore, with his newfound peace, with his newfound friends, to tip right off the edge again and land himself face first into his old life? If nothing else had been a choice, then he’d had a choice that night in Palo Alto, when he climbed into the back of Carter’s Jeep; when he declined James’s call; when he downed that first scotch, neat; when he rolled the first crumpled bill he could fish out of his pocket, and crushed the pile of pills on the table in front of him, and snorted them like no time at all had passed. Time had merged, then, and he’d been in a club in Palo Alto, high off his fucking mind, and he’d been in his dorm room in Pawling, high off his fucking mind, and he’d been cold and naked in the bathtub, alone and afraid, blade clutched in his hand.
He’d had, come to think of it, so many choices. He’d chosen time and again to reach back out to Avery that fall. He’d sought him out, feeling alive again for the first time in years, only when he was on the dope, only when his nostrils burned with it. It had been a choice that night to ride in the front seat, just as it had been a choice to let Avery drive after the copious amount of drugs and alcohol—God, he had no clue what was even in his system, let alone how much—and it had been a choice when he didn’t put a seatbelt on. After, when he lay in the hospital bed, pumped full of newer, better drugs, too ashamed to look James in the eye, he’d made a choice too, and he’d known it to be one he would come to regret.
It had all been a choice—the Oxys he would keep popping, the lies he would keep telling, the promises he would keep breaking, the people he would keep disappointing. Because Sirius knows one thing to be true: he’s the one to blame for all of it. At the end of the day, he’s weak, and he’s a coward. At the end of the day, if he has the opportunity to take the pain away, to forget, to lose himself, he’ll make the same choice over and over.