A Compromise
Regulus became lighter after their conversation at the memorial. He made the decisive motion to waive all matters of embarrassment about baring himself to James and being hung out to dry. James had made himself clear. Regulus did not care.
He smiled at the grass drifting to-and-fro in the breeze, because he didn’t have to pretend anymore. He watched a stray cat jump onto a fence so tall it seemed impossible, and laughed to himself because he’d been braver than he ever thought he could be. He did not look at James, in order to not give him the satisfaction of it, but also because it hurt more than any hit or bruise ever could.
Regulus and James rode back to town together, with the countryside passing by around them, wrapping them up in a blanket of sunny warmth. Neither of them could stay in bad spirits. It was all more romantic as the southern French skies shone down on them; it made even damaged people grateful to be alive to experience it all. Even heartbreak. Even turning down the one thing it feels like you’ve ever wanted.
Tree after tree passed until a quaint factory came up beside them. James stopped to ask for a glass of water. Regulus shuffled his own bike to a stop and watched as James talked to an old woman who was sitting in a rickety rocking chair. She agreed to fetch a glass for him after a moment of confusion trying to decipher his slightly broken, British-American twanged French.
Water in hand, James tipped his head back, his neck bared open with a bead of glittering sweat running down it. In his hurry to hydrate himself some water spilled down his chin. Regulus watched because it didn’t count if James couldn’t see him do it. The mix of sweat and water glided down his exposed neck. it wasn’t indulgent of Regulus to watch, it was torture. It was his punishment for being this way. He could look, but it would never be enough, and he’d always know how wrong he was about it all. It was deep-seated, his wrongness, having wound around his very being, impossible to extract in order to live the way people should.
Regulus put on a smile so big that for a moment he himself was convinced. James cast him a tilted look.
“Merci. Bonne journée!” James said thankfully to the old woman, who took his glass and sat back in her crooked chair. James turned his gaze back to Regulus, who dutifully avoided looking back. Not fully, anyways. Half-glances were allowed. “What?” James said to a still smiling Regulus.
It had faded a bit, now, more serene and knowing. James desperately wanted to pull him apart to study it.
Regulus’s eyes caught on a flag on the wall just inside a doorway behind the old woman. James followed his line of vision until he spotted it, too: the flag of the Vichy Regime, or the Nazi rule in France. It was so casually violent, hanging there like it was.
Regulus and James turned to one another. They made surprise eye contact for a moment before James folded over and put his head down over his handlebars to hide the laugh that bubbled out of him. Regulus clamped a hand over his mouth and turned away from the woman and the factory, suppressing the laugh that threatened to spill out. The charged air around them dissipated.
“Take me somewhere,” James said as they mounted their bikes. “Anywhere.”
“Anywhere at all?” Regulus asked, and James nodded.
Regulus thought up all the places he’d most want to experience with James. He came up blank, not for lack of inspiration, but because he realized he would want to revisit every place, even the boring ones. He wanted to know what sort of groceries James bought, what James said when it snowed for the first time, James’ reaction to traffic when he drove, and on and on the list it went.
Regulus thought of the last place he should bring James, the place he could hardly bear to stand the thought of anybody stepping foot in. The words fell out of his mouth before he could think it through.
“Follow me.” Regulus rode off, making James hurry after him.
Regulus set a quick pace, in his head with nerves. His fingertips felt electric. Maybe it was adrenaline that pushed him to bring James to the place he never dared to bring anyone else. They veered off-path until they came upon a collection of willow trees that hid a pond only knee-high at its deepest.
“This is my spot. I come here to read.” Regulus rested his bike down on the soft grass and toed his shoes off. “I can’t begin to tell you the number of books I’ve read here.”
James leaned his bike against a willow, scanning the spring. He imagined how much of Regulus this small nook of the world had seen. James wondered if Regulus ever spoke aloud, to nobody but the swish of leaves. He pictured the glittering water siphoning his thoughts out through the creek, releasing his secrets to get lost in the ocean miles away from here.
He hopped and threw off his shoes, dipping his foot into the water from the bank.
“It’s freezing cold!” James explained, snatching his foot back onto dry land.
“The water comes straight down from the mountain. L’Audibergue.” Regulus told him. James bent down to splash his face, and when he looked back, Regulus was ankle-deep and acting like it was nothing.
“I come here to escape the known world.” Regulus said, staring straight up to the soft-top bed of trees that shaded them.
“Do you like being alone?”
Regulus thought about that as he watched the branches sway overhead.
“No. Nobody likes being alone, but I suppose I've learned to live with it.” Regulus said plainly. There was no more secrecy, not anymore.
“Are you always so wise?” James smiled. It bordered on condescending, but his blinding smile pushed it into the territory of friendly banter.
“I'm not wise at all. I know nothing.” As Regulus said that, James felt his heart jump back. “I know books, and I know how to string words together. It doesn't mean I know how to speak about the things that matter most to me.” Nothing could stop Regulus, now that the floodgates were open. He would haunt James with the sincerity of what he said, and the cowardice that it brought out in James.
Regulus stared. He was breaking his own rules. It was all impossible. He stared, and James stared back, a crack in the wall behind his eyes.
“But you’re doing it. In a way.” James swallowed. His stomach was in his chest and his heart was in his throat.
“In a way. That’s a good way of putting it. That’s how I say a lot of things: In a way.” Regulus scoffed and looked down to his feet in the water.
James felt like Regulus’s sanctuary was judging him, watching him flub, waiting to see if he was worthy of being brought there in the first place. The trees were imposing and the water was too-cold, but he stepped into it anyway. A rush ran up James’ legs to his head.
“I like how you say things.” James said, as if it didn’t ruin everything. Regulus’s stomach turned, but he refused to let his unease show on his face. “Why are you always putting yourself down?"
“I don’t know. So you won’t.”
“You care that much about what people think?” James said. It didn’t hit the same as it might’ve now that Regulus knew what a great big coward he was.
Regulus shook his head. I care what you think, he thought loud enough for James to hear, staring at him while loaded, ambivalent silence stretched out in the space between them.
In the air, feeling stilled by time itself, was a passing of notes from Regulus’s eyes to James’. Regulus was looking into James’ soul. He stared, not in defiance, but because there was a truth that had waited in the dark long enough. Regulus wasn’t coy anymore, he wasn’t letting James off the hook for what he’d done to him, and he wasn’t going to fade into a vague memory of something that almost was. Regulus was surrendering, waiting for what James would do as his white flag flew.
This is who I am. This is who you are. This is what I want, there is nothing but truth between us now.
Let it never be mistaken that either of them were unaware how their souls had touched one another. Even if it was only for a moment.
Regulus had no shame in admitting now that the root of his boldness, then at least, was the fact that he had nothing left to lose.
James let him stare. He couldn’t tear his own eyes away, either. The pull of Regulus’s white water gaze, turbulent and fear-instilling, was unavoidable as it drew him closer. The spring’s water made way as James stepped closer. His eyes flicked from Regulus’s to his lips, and then back up to his eyes before he did something irreversible.
“You’re making things very difficult for me.” James said in a low tone.
“Am I?” Regulus thought he was making it quite easy. Stay or go. Speak or die.
“It would be very wrong.” He stepped back.
“Would.” Regulus repeated.
“Yes, would. I’m not going to pretend the thought hasn’t crossed my mind.” James said, and Regulus had to bite his tongue to not protest. Pretending was exactly what James had wanted to do. Intended to do.
“I’d be the last to know.” Regulus retorted indignantly.
“Well, there! It has crossed my mind.” James was knocked down. He felt backed into a corner between what was right and what felt right. Out of his options, he couldn’t imagine him walking away a winner in any of them. “I have to hold back. You should learn, too.”
“The best I can do is act like I don’t care.”
“So you’ve shown.” James finished, and they fell quiet again.
Regulus felt himself wither. His charade, what he faked best at, his one defense against all things James Potter, had never been the shield he thought it was. It had always been see-through. James had known his game all along. Regulus stepped back himself, at that. His head tilted like he didn’t understand, but the reality was that Regulus was starting to understand too well and all at once. He steeled his mind.
“This is where Monet used to paint.” Regulus said. James cocked an eyebrow. “Take a look.”
James glanced around the cove again. It was the same. Soft, dreamy, hidden.
“It is, is it?” James’ voice was back to a normal, casual pitch, with none of the gravel left over from before.
“I'll show you at home. We have a book with wonderful reproductions of the area around here.” Regulus supplied, picking up an interesting rock from the bed of the spring.
“Yes, you’ll have to show me.” He played casual so well.
A few minutes later, they laid out in the sunshine outside the perimeter of willow trees. Their legs had dried from the heat. Each of them propped themselves up with one elbow, staring out at the view of country hills and blue sky.
“You're the luckiest person in the world.” James breathed out, an understated smile on his face. It wasn’t like him; he was always smiling grand or not smiling at all, and it felt more raw, vulnerable even, to see him in a place between the two.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Regulus thought of all he owned. Not just material objects, but the love he housed for his brother and uncle, the security he’d been granted with no terms and conditions, all of the long lazy days where all he had to do was be. Material objects, too: The house he loved, the piano he worshiped, the art and books Alphard bought just for him.
When James didn’t answer, and the silence drew longer than Regulus could bear, he spoke again. “So much of it is wrong, though."
“What? Your family?”
“Sometimes.”
“Living here all summer long, reading by yourself, meeting all types of people and seeing all types of sights?” James teased.
Regulus smirked. Nope.
After hesitating, James softened his voice. “Us?” He said.
Regulus kept watching the view. James couldn’t take it.
He reached out, and upon James’ hand grazing his cheek, Regulus looked back at him. His eyes were searching. James ran a light finger across Regulus’s bottom lip like he’d been thinking about doing so for hours—maybe he had—and let it hover. It was Regulus’s last chance of bailing. If he didn’t, he might hate himself forever.
There wasn’t enough time to waste in debate with himself, because before he could do anything James touched his lips to Regulus’s and nothing else mattered. Not the moments that came before, and not the moments that came after. It didn’t make sense, but Regulus thought he might have lived another lifetime just within that one kiss.
James had met Regulus where he stood, a kiss like a consolation. It was a compromise. What he hadn’t accounted for was when they pressed together, Regulus was so deprived of it all that James couldn’t help but give everything away. Regulus was a star whose gravity was so much that he was afraid they’d go supernova, and nobody would ever be able to recover their bodies. Here lies James and Regulus, never to be separate again. Their bed was made.
“Better now?” James whispered, his face so close it reminded Regulus of that day at the river. So close, but still miles away.
Regulus pulled him back, kissing him again. That kiss started more passionately than the last one, and James threw himself into it just as hard as Regulus did. So much poured into it, and it was no work at all. Regulus was sure that everything would stay alright as long as they kept like this, together, two people acting as one.
They touched back on earth.
“I think we should go.” James said.
“Not yet.” Regulus shook his head.
“I know myself, Regulus.”
“Do you? What does that mean?”
“It means that so far we've behaved. We've been good. Neither of us has done anything to feel ashamed of. Let's keep it that way. I want—” He gave a dry laugh and wry smile. “I want to be good.” James nodded as he convinced himself.
“Don’t be.” Regulus said like an indignant child.
He didn’t care for this side of James. He didn’t give a fuck about James’ deluded sense of good, because now he’d kissed him, and it was too late for Regulus; he would never be able to be good no matter where they went from there. Good and bad, right and wrong… It wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t something he had the option to choose between. He was bad and broken before James had arrived and was going to be bad and broken after James left.
His anger bubbled up until he became brash and placed an audacious hand on James’ crotch, over his shorts. He knew that James was just as bad as him.
Tenderly, enough for Regulus’s anger to melt away, James placed his hand over Regulus’s. It sat there for a long moment before he intertwined their fingers together, lifting them, and gave Regulus’s hand back to him. He did it all without a word.
“Did I offend you?” Regulus asked over the chirps of birds above them, the small sound of a creek funneling out of the spring behind them, wind rustling leaves around them.
“Don’t” James shook his head. It was in the same way he said ‘Later!’, blunt and needing more.
The world sitting beyond Monet and Regulus’s spot funneled in when James winced as he stood up. Regulus remembered the bruise on James’ hip, then the bikes and the chateau. They all still existed even when James and Regulus’s relationship from before they’d left didn’t. He pictured his music notebook he left at the swimming trough, abandoned with a modification of a Bach piece. He vowed to never finish it.
“I think I'll stop at the pharmacy on the way back. Wouldn’t want it to get infected.” James thought out loud as he checked on his scrape.
“Fermé aujourd’hui.” Regulus lied. It was almost definitely open.
“Closed? Okay. More witch’s brew for me.” James patted his injured hip gently.
On the bike ride back to the chateau, Regulus couldn’t leave it be. He was kidding himself if he said he wasn’t completely livid.
“We’ll never speak again.” His eyes stayed on the path in front of them.
“That’s not true. I’ll be here for another couple weeks.” James argued.
“Yeah, you’re right. But it’ll be chit-chat. ‘Blah, blah… chit-chat, chit chat.” He mocked. “We’ll never really speak. And the funny part is I can live with that.” Regulus shot at him.
Smiling despite everything, James let out a light-hearted laugh. “That rhymed.”
***
At lunch, James and Regulus were beside each other at the table as they always were. Their chairs held the same bodies. Regulus didn’t feel much the same.
Joining them at the table were Alphard and two Italian art historians. They were a couple, Regulus remembered, because they were so meant for each other in the way they both drove him equally up the wall. They were colleagues from a job the year before that Alphard took great pride in. While they banged on in Italian, obnoxious and large with their words and hand-motions, Regulus felt a brush of skin on his bare foot beneath the table.
“È il compromesso storico…” Alphard tried to get a word in between the two as they spouted on and on.
“E lo dici così? E’ una tragedia! Alphard, da quando hai ereditato questo posto sei cambiata.” The woman, Elena, replied. ‘Compromises are tragic. Alphard, you've changed since you inherited this place.’
“Ma che c’entra? Sei matta? Sei una stronza!” ‘You’re mad’, Alphard shook his head and smiled. How Alphard put up with it like he did, Regulus had no idea.
Under all of the commotion, though, was James’ foot touching Regulus’s. He could barely focus as it brushed him, then left again. He decided to play it cool, pacing himself, waiting a reasonable amount of time that would lead to the conclusion of nonchalant and not anxious. When he reached back out, shuffling his foot sideways, Regulus was surprised that James’ foot had barely left him, sitting only a small movement beside where Regulus’s rested.
Regulus tried to tune back into the conversation in order to feel in control. His Italian was middle-of-the-road and he struggled to catch everything in the race of words that spilled out between old friends.
“Il cinema non può essere la risposta per tutto…” Elena shook her head disapprovingly.
“Il cinema è lo specchio della realtà.” Her husband, Marco replied. ‘Cinema mirrors reality.’
“Sentiamo che ha da dire lui.” Elena turned to James, who unlike himself hadn’t spoken almost at all the whole meal. ‘Say something’, she encouraged.
“Amore, ma è inglese.” Alphard laughed, shooting James an humored but apologetic look. ‘Darling, he’s British.’
“Inglese non vuol dire stupido!” ‘British doesn’t mean stupid!’
Regulus noticed Kreacher setting up dessert on another table a few meters away, smiling amusedly to himself.
Out of everybody's line of sight, James and Regulus’s ankles were crossed over one another, a small gesture that tied them together even as they sat silently watching the scene unfolding in front of them. They stayed there, neither of them hurrying for a break of contact.
“Voici le dessert.” Kreacher sets plates in front of each of them. The Italians awed over Alphard’s stunning display of hostmanship. Dessert looked perfect: vanilla ice cream with fresh berries bordering the sides of the antique glass dishes.
James dug in at once, the creamy soft ice cream giving way to his spoon easily and with satisfaction.
Regulus looked down to try his own. He watched a marring spot of crimson fall onto the white of the ice cream, next to a group of other spots. His nose had spontaneously started to bleed. He quickly gathered a napkin and pressed it to his nostrils, untangling himself from James and pushing his chair back as he stood.
“Ma che succede?” ‘What’s the matter?’ Elena glanced between Alphard and Regulus who retreated into the house.
“Non ti preoccupare, succede sempre.” Alphard took a sip of his sparkling wine. ‘It’s nothing. Happens often.’
“Vi state abituando proprio a tutto!” ‘You get used to absolutely everything!’ Elena shook her head dramatically and looked at her husband, who shrugged.
It left Alphard with a bad taste in his mouth. He looked at James, then pointedly to the doorway Regulus had left through. He hoped it was the right thing. James nodded and followed Regulus through the door, leaving Alphard to entertain his guests. He plastered a smile onto his face, and raised his glass for a toast.
Regulus laid out on his bed and pressed cold ice to his nose. He kept his head tipped back.
‘We’ll never really speak. And the funny part is I can live with that.’
He supposed he couldn’t live with it after all.