Regulus had always tried.
This was a very important fact about himself, which he wished to reiterate every time someone yelled at him that he’d fucked up again.
I’m trying.
The words were a silver lifeline—so vulnerable, so unbearably frayed, stretched thin to its breaking point—and he clung onto them every time he wavered. Every time he questioned himself, or what he was doing, or what was expected of him, he held onto them tightly. He reiterated them, again and again—a prayer against the storm inside his head trying to drown him.
I’m trying.
And he really was! He tried to be perfect with everyone, to be perfect at everything. There was no room for mistakes in his life. Not like his brother, no, Sirius always wanted to risk everything because he couldn’t keep his tongue in check. He seemed to disregard every sense of propriety—in fact, he sneered at the very notion of what Regulus was trying to accomplish. Every single time.
Regulus had learned very early on that he could never please his parents, no matter how hard he tried. Only a few years later, he had learnt that he would never be able to make his brother proud. But he’d never given up on hoping… Hoping that, if he just explained it correctly… if he could just make his brother see, that maybe one day he would understand.
Well. He’d had that hope until now, anyway. As he was standing in the narrow secret stairwell with Sirius now, letting him yell at him once again, he began to realise that this hope had only ever been an illusion. Hope was like a dying star. It burned brightly for a while—but it had died a long time ago, and now the light was fading and he was starting to see that he had been alone in the darkness all along.
“Are you listening to me?” His brother snapped, his voice bearing the usual trademark of impatience with those who didn’t agree with him. It reminded Regulus of Father, and he wondered for a split second if Sirius knew just how similar they were sometimes.
“I am,” he said quietly, crossing his arms in front of him. “Are you listening to me?”
Sirius blinked, frustration clearly written across his face. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Sometimes his brother was so stupid, it amazed him.
“You don’t want me to associate with the other Slytherins in my year,” Regulus began, ticking the topics off on his fingers. “You don’t want me to associate with other Slytherins, particularly the older ones. You don’t want me to hang around Bar—Crouch cause he’s a ‘bad influence’. You wish I would stick to myself for the rest of school so I don’t get pulled into any ‘dangerous schemes’. And you want me to ask the Potters to pull some strings and get me away from home—you see, I have been listening. I hear you. But have you heard anything I’ve said over the last fifteen minutes? Or have you been too busy depositing that stick up your arse to hear anything?”
Admittedly, that last sentence was rather rude. Orion would have punished him for daring to make use of such foul language. It wasn’t dignified, or something like that. But he was frustrated, and he was tired, and he just wanted to curl up and disappear and stop feeling this horrible pressure on his chest.
“Well?” He asked when his brother didn’t say anything and just stared at him, dumbfounded. “You don’t remember a single thing, do you.”
“N-no, I do.”
Sirius sighed, reaching out to take Regulus’s wrists. He shook him off, frustrated with his brother’s strange mixed signals. At home, physical touch only ever meant discipline. Sirius had never laid a hand on him, but that made it even stranger. He’d pulled Regulus into this secret passage to yell at him, shame him for the friends he’d made, curse him for being loyal to their family—then initiated touch in a way that was supposed to show that he didn’t want to hurt him? It wasn’t making any sense, and it felt patronizing, and Regulus hated it.
“You don’t,” he said, a bit louder this time to put some distance between them. “You don’t remember because you don’t listen bec-cause… Because you don’t care.”
“Reg, that’s not true—”
“Yes, it is! I’ve explained it to you more times than I can count, and if you truly listened, you’d understand!” He began pacing as much as the small space allowed him, raking his fingers through his hair, tugging, tearing. The pain brought sharp tears to his eyes, but he blinked them away. “But you don’t listen because you don’t want to understand. You don’t care about anything but your own stupid, privileged opinions. It’s not that easy for the rest of us.”
Sirius scoffed. “Easy?” He repeated, his voice dripping with disdain. “Are you forgetting that it was I who always took the brunt of Walburga’s punishments? The death threats? The knives, the unforgivable curses…” He closed his eyes, a violent shudder running through his body, and even in his anger Regulus understood the feeling. Sirius didn’t know, but he understood. “I barely made it out alive.”
“Yes, but you did. And now you’re all high and mighty above the rest of us—you always have been!” Regulus spat. “You’re so above it all, you’ve forgotten what it’s like for people like Barty and me. I don’t think you’ve ever known in the first place.”
“Reggie—” Again, he was reaching out, trying to initiate contact, but Regulus stepped back until his back hit the wall. There was despair in Sirius’s eyes. “Please. I just want to help you.”
“Well, you have an interesting way of showing it,” Regulus hissed out. “Because you yelling at me sure as hell isn’t helping.” He took a deep breath and straightened through his back, trying to collect himself and be calm again. This emotional state was going to do him no favors here. “Sirius… I know you don’t want to see it, but I am doing all I can. I’m doing my best. I’m trying. But I can’t do what you want… what you expect from me. If I did, Mother and Father…”
He trailed off, not sure how to finish. He’d never told Sirius what had happened all the many times Orion had come to the school to discipline him for one of his small misdemeanors, paling in comparison to Sirius’s offenses but bad enough nonetheless. He’d never told him that, now that Sirius was gone, all of their parents’ attention had gone to him. He’d never told him of the bruises, the cuts, the wands raised against him. He used to tell himself it was because he was shielding Sirius. That his big brother would do something stupid and put himself between him and their parents to protect him.
But now he was afraid it wouldn’t matter to him at all. Sirius was too caught up in his own self-righteousness to understand. Why should he? The road might have been hard, but he got everything he’d ever wanted. Friends, a new family—the boy he loved. Regulus could have none of that, ever. No matter how much he tried to get that kind of bliss, he failed spectacularly every time.
Regulus sighed unsteadily. “They would exile me,” he finished, putting it very lightly. Their parents wouldn’t allow yet another heir to escape. One was a mistake, but for their spare to take that same route? They would never let this embarassment happen again. “They would disinherit me, they would burn my name off the family tree, expunge me from all records… and they would never look at me again.”
“So what?!” Sirius breathed, his eyes blown wide as he searched Regulus’s face for… something. He still didn’t understand. “They’re trash. You don’t need them! And you’ve still got me.”
Do I though? It didn’t feel like that anymore. It hadn’t for a long time, which Regulus did understand for some part. He was a Slytherin, and Sirius was a Gryffindor. It wouldn’t look good for either of them to associate with the other. But they used to have small talks in secret passages just like this one, asking each other how they were holding up and what else had been happening in their lives. These days, there were only ever the fights and that same look of disappointment on his brother’s face that he could see on Orion every time he was home from school. He couldn’t bear it anymore.
“But I do,” he said quietly. “I need them.” He thought of all the many times his parents had threatened Sirius with this, the many times he’d overheard them discuss it. He knew. He knew that he himself represented everything a son should fear: a spare being raised to the position of heir. And he feared this, too, always. He knew that, should he ever misbehave the way Sirius had, they’d create a new one, and Regulus would be tossed aside or buried—and he didn’t want to disappear. He took a deep breath, feeling his lungs press against his ribcage almost painfully. “Without them, I’m nothing.”
Sirius scoffed, the disdain very clear in the lines on his face, in his eyes as he mustered Regulus, and in his voice when he said: “That’s not true.”
I’d rather be this than nothing. “Yes. It is.”
Sirius’s face changed, his lips pressed thin, his silvery eyes turned a dark grey, shutting him out—again. “I know you’re better than this. You’re better than them. Anything else would be…”
“A disappointment.”
He knew this. He knew he was a disappointment to his parents—not the heir they’d wanted but the one they got. He knew that, even though Sirius had been a nightmare for them both privately and politically speaking, they’d hoped for more from him. Regulus, in all his quiet obedience, was too introverted, too inexperienced, too sickly, too weak and too much of a pushover. His parents just… settled with the idea of him being the new heir.
“Pathetic,” Sirius said coldly.
So there it was. Regulus had always known, too, that Sirius was sad, even angry about their diverging paths. He’d been angry and worried when Regulus had been sorted into Slytherin, then angry and worried and sad when Regulus said he wanted to do his best to please their parents. But for some reason, he’d always thought that on some level, Sirius would still understand and respect his choices. He’d never thought he’d think so little of him.
And yet here he was—a disappointment to him, too. He just couldn’t do anything right.
I’m trying.
“I guess that’s me,” Regulus said slowly. “A pathetic disappointment.”
Sirius’s mask was breaking again, already, insecurity and regret flickering through. He hated it. He hated that Sirius’s life seemed to be ruled by this strange emotional rollercoaster, never deciding on something, never just sticking with the thing he’d said. At least Mother and Father didn’t put him through this.
“I just want to help you, Reg.”
“Mhm,” Regulus said, barely even listening. He was done listening to his brother. He tried so hard to walk the fine line—the tightrope between doing what his parents wanted and doing his best to stay… good. He was tired of failing at both. Maybe it was time to try something different. “Look, I need to get going. I’ll get into trouble for being out after curfew, and unlike you I’m not interested in losing any points for my house.”
“Reggie—”
“May I go now?” He didn’t look at him, and he wasn’t sure he was even really asking, but he still saw Sirius nod out of the corner of his eyes.
“Of course.”
Regulus slipped out of the secret stairwell, leaving Sirius behind. He didn’t say goodbye—but then again neither did Sirius. Despite what he’d said, he didn’t hurry back to the dorms. He took his time walking through the almost empty corridors, greeting a ghost from time to time, and looked out of the window at the sparkling stars in the night sky, interrupted only once and again by puffy white snowflakes gently floating to the ground.
He liked it here. He did. Hogwarts might not feel like the home Sirius had always promised, but most of the time it was safe. The school let him take his time to get his thoughts into a coherent order, to come up with plans, to form a future. It didn’t pressure him, it didn’t expect anything from him. It just watched like a silent guardian, keeping him safe until he was ready to go out into the world and do the right thing.
Regulus wasn’t so sure there was a right thing to do anymore, but he knew that he did not want to be alone. He did not want to disappear into dust—like those stars that had really died a long time ago. He did not want to be an illusion or a trick of the light. He did not want to be forgotten, ever.
And so, when his cousin burned the mark of the Death Eaters into his forearm during the Christmas holidays two weeks later, the stench of blood and burnt flesh searing itself into his memory forever, he held onto those words—his lifeline.
I’m trying.
If he wasn’t going to be loved, at least he was going to try to make them happy and do what they wanted. He was trying to stay alive. He was trying to leave a legacy, something to be remembered by.
Among all of it—the confusion, the anger, the hurt—he was determined to try to be someone.