Memory
James' legs made circle patterns in the water where they dangled into the trough. This, despite both the river and lake being so nearby, was his favorite spot to swim. It was central. With people always passing by, James never felt lonely, even when he sat on his own.
He knew that Regulus could see him from his bedroom window. Whenever he spotted James at the trough, Regulus happened to stumble by only minutes later. James supposed that was his other favorite thing about it.
Feet still dipped in the water, he lowered himself onto his back and spread himself out in the sun. He adjusted his straw hat—the one his mother had bought him specifically for this summer—so it sat over his face, shielding his eyes from the blinding sun.
Regulus paced below him. He was up to his waist in water and making his way up and down the length of the small pool, holding a score book out of the water, scribbling something in it every so often. The notebook made a slapping noise as it was tossed onto the ledge of the trough. The sound made James peek up. He was glad he did; Regulus stretched his arms, and James watched the hypnotizing way Regulus’s skin moved over delicate muscle and tendon.
“My brother has been reading this German romance. He read some of it to my uncle and I the day the storm came in.” Regulus said, catching James looking when he turned to regard him as he spoke.
“About the knight who doesn’t know whether to speak or die? You told me already.” James said.
“Yes.” Regulus faced away from him, resting his head in his arms propped against the ledge of the trough.
“Well, does he or doesn’t he?” James sat all the way up, committed to finishing the conversation this time. Regulus had been circling around the story a few times in the past couple of days. James was convinced it was a ploy Regulus designed to drive him mad.
“Better to speak, she said. But she’s on her guard. She senses a trap somewhere.” Regulus said. It was as far as he’d gotten. He dropped his hands in front of him and wrung his wrist.
James eyed him carefully, as much as he could at least from this angle of the back of his head. His hair was in crazy curls, having been undone by the water and air dried more frizzy and free. James knew the pain of it well. He quite enjoyed Regulus’s less polished look, though.
“So, he speaks, right?” James asked with his eyes still on Regulus.
He turned around, surprise in his eyes from seeing James looking so intently back at him. He leaned back against the wall of the trough, waiting to answer. James was afraid for a moment he wasn’t going to answer at all, and they’d go in more circles for another handful of days.
“No. He can’t manage it.” Regulus said.
“Figures.” James shook his head. He replaced the sunhat over his eyes as he laid back down.
He pulled himself right back up, though, remembering his manuscript at the print shop.
“Listen, I need to pick up something in town.” James said, placing the sunhat atop his head and pulling his feet out of the water. He felt around for his glasses that he’d set to the side.
“I’ll go, if you want me to.” Regulus offered, watching James pack up above him.
Regulus’s eyes felt like they were burning into James’ skin. He watched and waited for James’ answer. James, against his better judgment, wanted to surprise Regulus. He wanted to see that look he would give nobody else but him. James knew this because he watched Regulus just as much as he knew Regulus watched him. It wasn’t a flustered look—he never allowed it to get that far—but it was a look of someone knocked off balance, one leg swept up in the current, hurrying to find their footing. It gave James a high every time.
“Let’s go together.” James concluded.
The look. It was Regulus’s head turning to him sharply, then away, then back—always back—before finding James’ eyes who was always smiling by this point. It was the way his hands tightened around whatever they held, even if it was the air. It was his lips parting in the most subtle of ways.
“Now?” He said. Their eye contact was intense and he wasn’t sure if they’d ever kept it as long as they did then.
“Why, have you got anything better to do?” James grinned teasingly. It was a gift that Regulus took, falling back onto his scowl like it was a bodyguard.
“No.” He grumbled.
James stood up at once, happily making his way to his book bag that sat slumped beside the apricot tree. He packed up his belongings feeling like a winner.
“So let’s go.” James held up his bag like a trophy and motioned towards the shed housing the bikes.
Regulus dried himself off haphazardly with his towel as he trailed behind James. He got his shirt on just as they got to the shed. Kreacher took his towel as he opened the shed door for James and Regulus, tossing it over one shoulder to take to the laundry.
“I straightened… the… la roue. C'était du travail. And it needed, eh… de l'air dans les pneus.” Kreacher held out James’ bike as he spoke in between two languages. His English was poor. He hated to speak anything but French, but especially English, so the fact that he even tried to communicate in James’ native tongue struck Regulus.
On the ride to town, Regulus kept side-eyeing James’ bike. It made a sound every so often as they rode. It hadn’t done that before.
James looked and saw Regulus studying his bike as it made the sound again. He looked down at the front wheel of the bike, then dropped his feet to the path and dragged to a stop. Regulus used his brake beside him.
“It was the day the power went out. The storm,” James said, reaching down at his swim shorts from the bottom and pulling up to reveal the full side of his upper thigh. There was a bruise there, angry blackened purple with a yellow halo. It was sizable, taking up a chunk of his hip and upper thigh. “I tried to ride back. It was thoughtless of me, I fell harder than a sack of bricks in the mud. Had to leave it there, limp back to Pan’s, then walk the broken bike all the way back that next morning. Kreacher gave me some sort of witch’s brew ointment. He also fixed the bike for me.”
Regulus leaned forward to get a better look. He grimaced. It looked worse than it felt, now that it had been on the mend for a few days. Kreacher’s black unguent mixture was smeared over it, making it look darker.
In town, one of the locals sold James a pack of fags. Regulus would always remember the brand. They were Gauloises.
James siphoned one out of the box and lit it between his lips. He closed his eyes to savor the feeling as he breathed in.
“Want one?” James asked, nudging the box against Regulus’s arm.
Regulus took one, placing it in his mouth. Before he could ask for a light James was there with his hands cupped close to his face, lighting the fag that dangled between Regulus’s lips. He could feel James’ breath. It stole his own, and when he breathed in to replace it, smoke filled him up and the nicotine ran all the way to the tips of his fingers and down to his toes.
Ever since then, he felt like to taste a Gauloise was to taste James.
“Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad.” Regulus agreed, blowing out.
They smoked for a beat in comfortable silence. James closed his eyes again, and Regulus watched a flock of birds overhead. He wished for the days where he could pick out every thought that drifted across James’ face. Before they became what they were: a complication. Not yet anything, just a complication. Regulus wondered if he had more to lose, now that they were something but not nothing, or if there was some other reasoning that kept James ever mysterious.
“I thought you didn’t smoke.” Regulus commented absentmindedly.
“I don’t.” James replied. His finger came up over his mouth and said ‘shh’. He peeked one eye open to see Regulus, smiled, and then shut it again. He took another drag.
Regulus was in on something top-secret. Something about being an exception filled Regulus with a sort of bittersweet pride.
James only opened his eyes when he heard Regulus move his bike, and followed him in pushing their bikes over to a monument with a small fenced garden encircling it. It stood tall, looming above them with the names of fallen frenchmen etched onto the stone.
“I or II?” James wondered out loud.
“World War II. The central powers occupied this land for a while. But in the end, ANVIL was a success.” Regulus put up his bike’s kickstand, taking a closer look at the memorial.
“I’ve never heard of the operation.” James propped up his own bike and followed.
“It almost didn’t happen. Your man, Churchill, disagreed with it. Seventeen thousand people died.” Regulus shrugged when James looked back at him.
There was a pause as he waited for James to say something. James regarded Regulus with a smile splitting across his face.
“Is there anything you don’t know?”
Regulus turned away and shook his head, rounding the garden fence in the opposite direction James did. He shot a glance across the garden to where he walked, a smile still glued to his lips.
“I know nothing, James.” Regulus said. It was dramatic. It was leading. It was all Regulus could say, because every other one of his words had been shot down before they ever got the chance to leave his mouth.
James wanted to laugh, but something in him steadied.
“You know more than anyone around here.” James said, and it wasn’t true, it can’t have been, but he seemed so certain. Regulus turned over his words in his head until they stopped making sense.
“If you only knew how little I know about the things that really matter.” Regulus said.
The smile had officially left James’ face. He was there, with two feet on the ground, in view of Regulus with an unwavering gaze.
“What things that matter?” He asked. In his eyes was James Potter, unguarded, unafraid, deep honey, and glazed over with only a film of fondness.
It was disarming, and Regulus was a weak, weak man.
“You know what things. You of all people should know by now.”
Silence.
“Why are you telling me this?” James and Regulus had both undone themselves now, there was no denying; no going back in time to pretend like neither of them had a clue what the other might be insinuating. They might try, but when it came to lines crossed so far this summer, they’d just broken through the big ribbon at the end of the race. Normally, this is when celebration would ensue. But it was no race, and Regulus was no girl, and James was not gay. He wasn’t.
Why are you telling me this?
“Because I thought you should know.” Regulus said.
“Because you thought I should know.” James repeated, trying to decode it all, to find some hidden door to exactly what Regulus was thinking.
“Because I want you to know,” Regulus blurted out. If not then, he never would again. “Because I wanted you to know.” He whispered smaller, for only himself to hear. “Because there is no one else to say this to. No one but you.” He said to James.
There was some sort of traffic distraction behind them on the road. A car honked. James looked over to it, but it was only to buy himself any moment of time he could be afforded. When he turned back, Regulus had disappeared behind the monument. He quickened forward to get eyes on him across the garden again. By this point they were on completely opposite ends, completely out of reach, but there regardless. They could hear each other clear as day despite the small distance.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” James asked.
“Yes.” Not a moment hung between them before Regulus replied.
James couldn’t help but feel blindsided. He had been comfortable, at peace even, when he and Regulus danced around each other without ever looking desire in the face. It’s not that he didn’t want to break the tension. It was just that… well—
He wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted.
“You’re saying what I think you’re saying?” He repeated. Regulus looked him in the eyes with an alien certainty. They were walking again, making strides back towards each other to meet on the other end than they’d started from.
“Yes, James. Ignore it, if you’d like. It just had to be said.” He’d gotten past the hardest part, and now stretched the capabilities of his freedom. Regulus spoke nonchalantly, like it was simple. Natural, even. His self-assuredness was one of a criminal that had already confessed.
“I need to go and grab—” James searched for the end of his sentence.
“Right.” Regulus cut in, saving James from floundering.
“Wait for me here. Don’t go.” James said, as if he didn’t beat Regulus to it every time with his ‘Later’.
Regulus smiled sadly.
“You know I’m not going anywhere.” He said.
James did a half hearted jog to the print shop across the street. Regulus lost him in a crowd of passengers loading off of a bus. They were elderly, old men and women with lives well lived creased into their skin and sunspots where once they’d been caressed by their parents—probably all long gone—or maybe kissed by their strings of lovers who’ve since forgotten their names.
Regulus turned the other direction and spotted a table with late middle-aged men gathered around. One of their wives sat amongst them, her hands folded in her lap while the men talked like old friends. He wondered how many people here, in all of La Colle-sur-Loup even, remembered the names carved into the memorial. How long did grief sustain? How long did memories serve? Did they stay true and accurate, like a portrait, or did they distort more and more as the years passed, the place the dead have in a memory growing smaller and smaller as people forget the details? What mattered more, their route home from work, or the legacy they left behind? Which held more weight in the hearts of those whose job it was to immortalize them?
When James emerged minutes later, he dodged around the elderly crowd with a stack of papers in his hand and an irate furrow of his brow. He didn’t pay them any mind, as if he wasn’t passing by versions of who he could end up becoming. Regulus didn’t understand it.
“They’ve mixed up my pages. They'll have to retype the whole thing. Not their fault, I guess. New employee. Still, I won’t be able to work on it today. Damn.” James spoke, mainly to himself, grumbling in annoyance that was trying hard to be positive.
It all hit Regulus at once how stupid he’d been as he watched James fiddle with his out-of-order manuscript pointlessly. He felt like he’d made it happen.
“I wish I hadn’t spoken.” He said, and it made James stop. He was still looking down at his manuscript, a finger running up and down the first page’s paragraphs. He breathed out a sigh that sounded in between relieved and something else.
“I can pretend like you never did.” James said with averted eyes.
“So we’re on speaking terms, just as long as we don’t really speak?” Regulus tried to catch his gaze, hoping what he’d find was a wall being built up, and not a genuine look of pity, because that would mean he’d been completely off the mark. It would make him a fool.
James didn’t give him either. He was thinking over what Regulus had said.
“Look, we can’t talk about this sort of thing. We really can’t.” James said as he stuffed the papers into his beat up book bag. He walked away, finding their bikes back where they’d first come upon the memorial.
Regulus tried to imagine the version of himself in James’ head. He tried to rationalize if he was the type of memory that would fade in ten years, five, or one. It made him sick. Here was the only man to ever hold Regulus’s heart: James. James, who was right in front of him, unable to look Regulus in the eye and tell him straight that he didn’t want it.
“Du würdest also lieber sterben.” Regulus said to himself. You would rather die.