Truce
Lac Léman was breathtaking, with impossibly blue water and towering mountains that circled around it. They were on the French side, but could see the shores of Switzerland across the water.
There was a stone path that ran along the shore of the lake, and Alphard took them down it, explaining animatedly to James how the archaeological findings had only begun recently here at this specific portion of Lac Léman. The lake was formed after the last ice age, around 15,000 years ago; it had witnessed as many empires rise as it had witnessed them fall. It held stories from each one in its depths if you looked hard enough.
Regulus wore a thin long-sleeved shirt to offer some protection from the beating sun, but in doing so had traded the respite of the breeze. His skin was flushed all down his neck. James watched him roll his sleeves up to his elbows.
“Are you hot?” James hushed back towards Regulus. It might have been an olive branch, if Regulus let it be.
“No.” He said as if it were true, an easy lie with an air of defiance since it was so see-through.
James shook his head and turned back to keep listening to Alphard bang on about glacial periods.
A delegation of archaeologists was waiting for them when they came upon a decrepit structure, eroded by time, where they’d set up a tent or two, tarps laid out with artifacts spaced out evenly, all a bit green and nasty looking from their years lost to the water. Many of the archaeologists came and greeted Alphard like a celebrity.
One of them approached with the stone, maybe marble, arm of a statue. The imprints of algae crawled around its forearm like a green tattoo. Alphard and James cooed over it like a newborn baby.
When they moved on, the arm got added to the tarp. Regulus broke away from them and retrieved it. He looked at the arm with an intensity. Maybe he was trying to find something smart to say to surprise them, but maybe he was also jealous of the thing for being so interesting to James when Regulus only ever seemed to be decoration, a small detail of James’s magical French Riviera summer.
He picked up the arm and marched over to James.
James, wrapped up in the breakdown of one of the historians, felt a prod on the back of his arm. He turned around to find Regulus, standing slightly above him on the hill with the sun backlighting him like an angel. His arm was outstretched. In his hand was the recovered hand of the statue. He stood there, expectant.
“Truce?” The olive branch unfurled.
James awed at the halo of golden sunlight around Regulus Black. He wanted James to shake the statue’s hand. James was trying, but he couldn’t stop staring. It took a beat to tear his mind away.
He shook the hand of the statue, and Regulus smiled. It was all worth it, then; every stomach flutter, every skipped heartbeat, every hurt feeling. An angel was smiling down at James, and what wouldn’t be worth that?
As the day passed they had boarded a boat, eagerly watching the retrieval of the biggest discovery of the day. The men on the boat gathered around to watch a large bronze-looking box growing clearer and clearer as it rose through the water. The sun was going down over them, but nobody paid it any mind.
There were many boats gathered around, but Alphard had been ushered onto the one with the best view, so James and Regulus were amongst the first handful of people in hundreds of years to lay eyes on the missing statue. Its twin was part of a private collection, missing its other half, its sister, who had sunk into Lac Léman along with a ship in 1827 on its way to be reunited. When they’d taken the lid off to reveal her, Regulus wasn’t watching. James had gasped, a sharp little intake of breath that was as lewd to Regulus as it was innocent to anybody else. Regulus observed James watch the unveiling of the statue. When he did finally look down at it, he saw where she was missing one of her arms, and looked straight back up to James. He was already looking back at Regulus.
Alphard, James, and Regulus sat on the rocks beside the lake. The expedition was packed up, and it was just the three of them.
“We came all this way, we should swim. Would you care to join me?” Alphard asked them, but was looking out into the lake. Regulus could see the highs of the day in his uncle’s disposition, his shoulders back and more relaxed, a soft happy smile plastered on his face that hadn’t left since they’d found the missing twin.
So they swam, happy to rid themselves of the layer of sweat built up from a day working in the sun. Regulus was the third wheel, but he didn’t find that he minded all that much. His uncle waved at him from their far-out spot on a sandbar. Alphard, usually so collected and proper, splashed James like a child. It started a war.
Regulus lazed in a cove and watched clouds drift by in their reflection on the water. He wasn’t far from where the tents had been up an hour before. James and Alphard were small out in the lake.
For that moment—just then, and seldom after—Regulus felt like this was his normal life; that it was infinite, that they had a forever of night-swims and cool summer breezes, a long life stretched out before them where Regulus never had to count down to goodbye.
“Regulus!” James yelled into the night air, and he swore it echoed, though there was nothing it could have echoed off of.
Regulus, Regulus, Regulus, Regulus…
He stood up, water sliding off of his body as he rose out of it in the shallow place he stood.
“James!” He yelled.
James, James, James, James…
By the time they were home, Regulus was very, very late. If she was still there, Emmeline had been waiting for an hour. He hoped she’d had the self respect to leave, for her own sake, but the thought of her biking home alone made his heart clench painfully. The car pulled into the driveway, and no later than it had stopped moving was Regulus out of his seat and running to his bike.
“I have to go!” He called, leaving his uncle and James behind.
They sat in the car, an astonished smile on both of their faces. It was the sort of passion one could never predict out of Regulus, but jumped out at you all at once from time to time. He was out of sight before Alphard or James could even ask what it was about.
“Are you going, too?” Alphard turned to James with an amused look.
“No, Prof. I’m afraid I have work to do. Lots of thoughts in need of thinking.”
“How about a drink to celebrate the day?” He offered. James grinned.
“That would be lovely.”
On the other side of the orchard, Regulus called Emmeline’s name. It was just him there, with the trees and the lake as a silent witness. He sat down. He didn’t go home for a good and long while, that night. In his loneliness all he could think about was the probability of Emmeline having sat there doing just the same.
***
The piano sounded softly through the empty chateau halls. Regulus played the same melody again and again, his eyes scanning the same stave until he’d gotten it perfect. To an untrained ear, it had been perfect when he’d started.
His body ached from sitting so still and focused, having practiced through the morning and into the afternoon. Alphard was out on business. James had tagged along as his mentee. Sirius… Well, god knows where Sirius was, but it wasn’t here. Kreacher had brought Regulus’s lunch straight to the piano and swooped it away as soon as he’d set it down to continue his playing. It felt like Regulus lived in an abandoned castle, and he was haunting it with his broken melody.
He got up at once, startling himself as his abrupt movement knocked the piano stool onto its side behind him. Kreacher peaked around the corner.
“I stood up too fast.” Regulus gave a reassuring smile. Kreacher cocked a bushy gray eyebrow and grumbled something to himself. It was endearing in a grumpy-old-man’s way of being. He disappeared back around the corner to busy himself with anything he could find that needed tidying.
Regulus propped the bench back upright and tucked it into its niche under the piano. He gathered the sheet music into a neat pile and slipped it back into the folder that sat on top of the piano for next time. His eyes briefly caught on a Bach piece. It wasn’t the same one he’d played for James before, but he knew he’d enjoy that one, too. He put it at the front of the stack.
Wandering up the stairs, he paused in front of James’ door. The room was silent, unoccupied and frozen in time from when James had left that morning. He pushed the door open with a creaking sound and let himself examine it all.
It was Regulus’s room, but it wasn’t anymore. James had left one sock forgotten on the floor by his nightstand, and his dresser had one drawer ajar,mostly empty. The desk had James’s book flat open on a page near the middle, and the curtains were drawn back as far as they would go, bathing the whole corner of the room in summer. James hadn’t made his bed that morning.
Regulus roamed around the room, peeking under the bed, noting what James had moved and what he’d kept just the same. He only stopped when he circled to the desk. He couldn’t help himself but to sit and flip it to the start.
‘“The Cosmic Fragments” by Heraclitus’ , read the title page.
Regulus read the first page in James’s voice:
‘The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing.’
He slammed the book closed with a start when he heard footsteps on the staircase, creaking at a pace that only Kreacher crept around at. Regulus stood and brushed himself off, slinking through his and James’ shared bathroom and into his own room for the summer.
He threw himself onto his bed where his own book was laid out. He opened to the dog eared page, hearing Kreacher open James’ door and pause, most likely crouching around to pick up the unstately room. Kreacher hated clutter. He had a distaste for Alphard’s decor style, but would never dream of saying anything about it, instead coping by making sure every room throughout the chateau was pristine, so as not to add to the “mismatched and peasant-like aesthetic”.
Kreacher moved on to Regulus’s room, knocking on the door three times.
“Je peux?” He waited for a response.
“Entrez!” Regulus invited him in.
Kreacher opened the door, and as he walked in held it with his foot, setting the laundry basket down. It was muscle-memory for him to avoid doors slamming open and closed after him. He closed the door quietly with his free hand, grabbed the clothing, and set the folded and clean laundry on Regulus’s dresser. He did so wordlessly to disrupt Regulus’s supposed reading as little as he could manage.
If it was anybody else, Regulus knew Kreacher wouldn’t bother to be so considerate. Ever since Regulus had first gotten here as a child he’d been soft on him. Regulus was soft on Kreacher, too. When he inhabited the chateau alone in the cold months, Regulus wrote to him from Berlin and kept him up-to-date on him and Sirius’s life, as well as Alphard’s if he had any news. He figured it must be a lonely handful of time. Kreacher never wrote back, but Regulus knew there was a stack of opened letters sitting together on his bookshelf in his personal quarters, so he wasn’t bothered. Regulus was also the only one who knew Kreacher’s first name. He’d never tell another soul, because that’s how Kreacher liked it.
He swept out of the room moments after he’d entered, efficient as always. Regulus regarded the stacks of clean laundry with a warmth in his chest. He immediately sorted them out into their respective places, methodically organizing his shirts and shorts by color in his drawers. He wondered vaguely how James liked to keep his clothes, and if it was as careless as his attitude, or as careful as his hands on Regulus the day they’d played volleyball.
His curiosity got the better of him.
Light on his feet, he made his way back through the bathroom and stood in James’ room, feeling like a criminal.
There was clean laundry set in two stacks on his bed—now made up by Kreacher—with some swim trunks, pants, and a couple button-ups Regulus could remember him wearing. James had some obsession with parading around with his shirts completely undone and open.
He ran his fingers over the stack. They were soft in their clean state, the smell of James dutifully removed from them, which made them completely uninteresting to Regulus.
He looked around for a moment and spotted a white tee folded over the metal bed frame. It was warm to the touch from the sun shining through the window. He held it up to his face, breathing the dark, bitterly sweet citrus as if it was on his tongue to taste. He carefully unbuttoned his own shirt and let it fall to the floor. He slipped the tee over his head. The sun’s heat coming off of the shirt was like a warm body around him. Regulus drowned in the fabric. It covered his upper-thighs and hung off his shoulder on one side. James filled it out comfortably when he wore it during the night before he went to bed.
He imagined he was in James’s body, wearing his shirt, casually roaming his room, putting away his laundry how he pictured James would. He brought the stacks of clean clothes down to the floor with him, opening the bottom drawer.
Contrary to the treatment of the rest of his room, his drawers were uniformly organized with meticulously folded clothes in stacks dependent on occasion. Dress shirts and fancier-fabric tops were together, and his summer casuals filled the rest of the space. Regulus took it all in, noticing how he folded his shirts differently than Regulus did. He mimicked James’ method as closely as he could. It took him five tries for the first shirt. After that, it was second-nature as he folded them in halves instead of thirds, each one taking up more space that way. Regulus could appreciate how you could more easily recognize what shirt it was.
He repeated the ritual for James’s pants and shorts, too. Before he finished his hands lingered over the last pair: stark white pants, two sizes too big for Regulus.
I am sick.
I am sick, sick, sick, sick.
Regulus peeled off his own shorts, then his pants, and put on James’s.
He closed the dresser drawer and walked over to James’ bed— his bed—freshly made, and it felt like it was pulling him down. It pulled him down until his back was against the too-thin mattress, down until his face was pressed against James’ pillowcase, down until the blankets enveloped him in a warm embrace. Regulus closed his eyes, and wondered who James dreamt of when he slept.
A bicycle bell ripped him back into reality. He shot out of bed, to the window, where below James was riding up and setting his bike against the wall of the chateau. He greeted Kreacher who weeded the garden, then disappeared through the front door.
Regulus scrambled off James’ pants and shirt, pulling on his own clothes. He folded the shirt over the bed frame as it had been and put the pants with the rest of them. Regulus hurried into his own bed and cracked his book open for the fake-second time.
When James found his room in a much more presentable state than he’d left it, he mentally took note to thank Kreacher; it wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and James regretted that it wouldn’t be the last. What was unusual, however, was the unmade bed thrown open how he’d left it that morning. Kreacher always made the bed.
Thinking nothing more of it, James swiped his book from his desk and left to find a sunny spot in the orchard to work.
***
Rain poured down out in the courtyard through the window. It darkened the skies and dimmed the room, who’s lamplight wasn’t usually relied upon when the sun did just fine through the huge windows. The garden’s plants and trees sagged slightly from the weight of the water and wind. Every once-in-a-while, lightning would flash, illuminating them as it struck miles away.
James was most definitely stranded at Pandora’s, having left before the storm had blown in. Regulus was taking deep breaths about it.
Alphard and Regulus relaxed on the couch while Sirius rummaged around the bookshelf.
“Has anyone seen my Heptameron?” Sirius ducked to a lower shelf, his ass sticking out dumbly in a goofy motion that had Regulus forcing down a laugh.
“It’s over there, on the table. I was going to read it.” Regulus pointed to a side table.
“Oi! What are you smiling for?” Sirius nipped as Regulus held a hand over his mouth to hide his patronizing grin. Sirius shook his head. “Would it kill you to put a book back, for once, ever?”
“Sirius, what does your room look like right now?” Alphard said so sickly genuine that Sirius shut his mouth with a frown. When Alpahard had you in a verbal corner, nobody could save you.
“Well, if you were going to read it anyways, do you mind?” Sirius motioned between himself and the couch.
“We’d love that, Sirius.” Alphard smiled and made room for him.
Sirius grinned and flopped down, swinging his legs over Alphard and Regulus so he could lay out horizontally. He leaned back against the arm of the couch and opened the book.
“It’s in German, but I’ll translate for you too, uncle.”
Alphard rested his hands over Sirius’s knees, and Regulus slinked down to a more comfortable position. Sirius’s feet layed out over his legs like a blanket.
“Ein gutaussehender junger Ritter ist wahnsinnig verliebt in eine Prinzessin. Auch sieist in ihn verliebt,” He paused to gather his thoughts. “A handsome young knight is madly in love with a princess. And she, too, is in love with him…”
Regulus closed his eyes, picturing the knight and the princess while his brother read aloud.
“...obwohl es so scheint, als sei sie sich nicht völlig ihrer eigenen Liebe bewusst…” Regulus furrowed his brows. “...though she seems not to be entirely aware of it. Despite the friendship—”
“Freundschaft!” Alphard smiled, excited because he recognized the word for friendship.
“Freundschaft,” Sirius laughed. “Friendship that blossoms between them, or perhaps because of that very friendship, the young knight finds himself so humbled and speechless that he is totally unable to bring up the subject of his love.”
Regulus wondered what James might make of that.
The thunder rolled deep, and seconds later lightning struck.
“One day he asks the princess point-blank: Ich bitte Euch, ratet mir ,was besser ist... 'Reden oder Sterben. Is it better to speak or to die’.” Sirius paused for effect.
At that moment the storm cut off their power, and the lamps went out all at once. The room was doused into darkness. The record player that had been spinning towards the end of its tracklist stopped abruptly.
Regulus opened his eyes, and the other two looked up. It was dark enough where even a few feet away from them was hard to make out. Sirius folded the book shut and dropped it onto the table behind his head, sighing largely.
“I’d never have the courage to ask a question like that.” Regulus murmured into the darkness.
“I doubt that.” Alphard said softly. Regulus was glad they couldn’t see one another clearly, because the response made him frown. Alphard thought too much of him.
“Reggie?” Sirius said.
Regulus didn’t answer verbally, but he looked in Sirius’s direction as a force of habit. His collar moved against the couch and made a quiet sound as he did.
“You know you can tell us anything?” His brother asked.
Regulus looked down at his hands and tried to make out their shape.
Do they know? Was I so obvious?
He felt like he was in a void of his own mind, the darkness disembodying Alphard and Sirius’s voices and making them seem farther away in the rain-pattered silence.
Alphard’s hand patted his knee comfortingly, bringing him back into his body.
Regulus swallowed. He knew himself better than he ever had before, but his words had left him. He put a hand over Alphard’s where it laid on his leg, and hoped it was enough.