Chapter 42
As Sirius skates around the ice, taking crossovers in preparation for a double axel, he tries his best to ignore the pain that is pulling at his hamstring.
He first noticed it about an hour ago, after a particularly nasty fall he’d taken in the middle of his free skate run through. He’d been in the middle of his first step sequence cluster, going from a rocker to a counter, when he’d leaned too far on his inside edge and been sent tumbling to the ice right on his ass. It had begun to ache pretty immediately, but in competition, he wouldn’t just be able to stop his program because of a little pain. So he’d gotten up and finished his run like his life had depended on it—something that his mother always says. “Skate like your life depends on it,” she tells him before every competition, “because it does.” When Sirius had asked her what she’d meant by the last part, she had simply shaken her head and told him he’d realize it when he was older. Well, Sirius is nine now, and she’s been saying it to him since he was three. He wonders when he’ll be old enough to get it. Regardless, he’d finished his run with those words as a mantra, and hadn’t missed another beat.
One of the coaches on the ice had asked him if he was okay after his music had ended. He’d just nodded and told her that he was fine, despite the cramp that had begun to form in his right leg. But when he looked up to the bleachers a moment later and was instantly met with the approving stare of his mother, he knew he’d said the right thing.
And so he’s continued his practice, not daring to waste a moment of the ice time that his mother tells him is very expensive. At first, it was easy to brush off the pain—he falls all the time, and it often hurts like this. But he moves on, gets up, and eventually, it stops.
Yet as this session has gone on, the pain has only gotten worse. It’s completely messed him up; he’s been practicing jumps for the last half hour, and he’s botched just about every landing in one way or another. He keeps extending the practice on, telling himself that he’ll just do “one good jump” and then be done. The one good jump hasn’t come yet. He’s hoping this will be it.
As he sets up gliding backwards on his right foot, he forces himself to take a deep breath. You can land this, he tells himself. You’ve done it dozens of times before. Just gotta do it like you always do.
With that in mind, he steps forward onto his left foot, swinging his arms backwards as he presses onto his leg, and then he kicks up with his right foot and vaults into the air.
His takeoff is too aggressive, which he realizes a moment too late. The second he pulls into rotation, he can feel the way his body tilts backwards into the air, completely diagonal and entirely off axis. He kicked his leg up too far, causing him to have to overcompensate, and now he’s here. That was his first mistake.
His second mistake is trying to finish the jump. As he gets around himself once, then twice, he realizes pretty quickly that he didn’t get enough height to land properly. His theory is confirmed just a nanosecond later when his right leg touches the ground an entire half-revolution early, and the impact is so sudden that he’s sent stumbling to the ground.
A searing pain shoots through his hamstring as he smacks into the ice, and it takes everything in him not to scream as he attempts to tolerate the impact.
The fall is loud, and he knows that everyone in the rink hears it. He doesn’t want the attention that comes with a hard fall again—so he scrambles up to his feet the second that he hits the ice, only to find that he can barely stand on his right leg.
Okay, he thinks, his heart beginning to pound as he realizes that he might actually be hurt now. Okay, this is fine. It’ll be fine. He forces himself to take a deep breath, and then he attempts to push forward on his leg.
He almost immediately collapses again, and can only save himself by clinging onto the boards that line the rink.
Almost instantly, he knows it. He can’t continue to skate on his right leg. Maybe it’s a cramp, or a torn muscle, or maybe it’s just simply overworked. But the last thing he wants is to make it worse.
His journey out of the rink is done hobbling and hanging his head low.
When he makes it to the doors, he doesn’t need to look up to see who’s met him there. He already knows it. “Why did you stop?” his mother asks him, and Sirius immediately can judge by the annoyance in her voice that this will not be an understanding conversation.
He glances up to meet her unforgiving gaze, and instantly he wants to shrink back and hide from it. He doesn’t let himself do that. “My leg hurts. I’m getting off.”
“Is it broken?” she asks, her stare falling down towards his leg. When Sirius starts to answer no, she cuts him off. “You can still walk, can’t you?”
More like I can limp, Sirius wants to retort, but he resists from doing so. He doesn’t get the chance to even utter a word before she speaks again, effectively silencing him. “So it isn’t your leg. You’re giving up.”
Sirius doesn’t know how to answer that. He doesn’t know what she expects him to say, how he’s supposed to react now. For a moment, he’s frozen to the ice, just staring at her and trying to figure out what to do next. He’s just been told that giving into his pain means giving up, that he needs to keep going until he collapses. He isn’t sure he agrees with that.
But it’s his mother telling him this. She’s telling him, and he’s supposed to trust her.
He turns around and takes off again, determined to push himself until his legs give out.
”Sirius!” calls out the voice of Regulus, his bedroom door flying open. It’s enough to abruptly end the memory that’s been on repeat in his head for the past several weeks, for which he’s thankful.
”Yeah?” he asks, gritting his teeth together as Regulus steps into his room completely unannounced. Could’ve at least knocked.
“Mom’s got dinner ready, if you wanted to come down.”
Sirius wants to laugh—Regulus should know what his answer will be by now. He doesn’t laugh. Instead, he just shakes his head. “I‘ll be down later.”
Regulus looks at him for a second, completely silent. Then, he nods. “Okay,” he says, like he’s disappointed, like Sirius has let him down. “Just checking.” He opens his mouth again like he wants to say something else, but quickly shuts it and turns away. He’s gone quickly, and he leaves the door wide open behind him.
They’ve fallen into this routine every night. Sirius will spend his days either hanging out with James, at physical therapy, or at the rink, and when he does go to the rink Regulus would rather pretend he’s not there. Then they get home and Regulus quickly disappears into his room, muttering something about homework or about catching a little bit of sleep, and Sirius doesn’t see him for hours. He only goes into Sirius’s room to tell him that dinner’s ready, and every night, he gets the same firm no. Every time, he looks equally as upset, and Sirius can’t quite understand why. He doesn’t understand why Regulus is mad when he’s the one that refuses to talk to Sirius, when Sirius knows that him asking won’t make things any better.
It’s all so incredibly confusing to him. And it’s only made the weeks that have followed his surgery more miserable.
The procedure went surprisingly well. Even the surgeon commented on how easy it was, and how it’s definitely possible that he’ll be recovered in four months time instead of six months time. He came out of the hospital feeling very reassured, and he hadn’t had any trouble falling asleep that night.
As it turned out, the recovery process had been the least of his worries. Now, he has to figure out what to do about his brother, who barely speaks to him yet looks at him like he wishes he could say more. And he wonders if he’s let Regulus down. It sounds stupid; yet somehow, it makes perfect sense. After all, Regulus did grow up hearing the exact same things that he did. And he’s always been the one who’s more keen to listen, who’s more inclined to believe in their mother’s methods. He wonders if that’s what Regulus wants to tell him every time his lips part and the words don’t fall out. He can imagine what he’d say if he could, clear as day. “Why did you give up?”
And as the past memories of his mother telling him to ignore any sort of pain resurface, all of the times she told him to push through it and to never let his weaknesses show, he wants to tell Regulus that there’s no need to give a voice to the question. Sirius has asked himself the same exact thing every day.
It’s not fair, not by any means. He barely had Regulus back, and already he’s lost him again.
❅ ❅ ❅
Lucius has no idea what to do about his star student right now.
With less than a week to go before they’re set to fly out to nationals, Regulus is looking just about as bad as ever. He’s popping jumps left and right, stumbling on the passes that he does attempt, falling out of spins he’s been able to do since he was 10, and skating around the ice with no purpose whatsoever. It’s absolutely horrendous, and if Lucius could look away and pretend that it wasn’t happening, he would. But unfortunately, it is his own student that is crashing and burning during every single run through, and Lucius knows that whatever is happening, he is at least partially to blame. Whether it’s for not helping him get it together, or for not teaching him how to fight through the exhaustion and the pain, or for neglecting the mental side of skating, Regulus’s current failure is undoubtedly an extension of what Lucius has taught him—or failed to teach him. And he can’t ignore that, no matter how much he wants to.
“Come on, stay on the music!” Lucius yells as Regulus skates into his triple loop. He’s already about ten seconds behind where he needs to be; he’s supposed to be beginning his sit spin right now, and he hasn’t even taken off on the next jump. And as Regulus sets up for it, crossing his right foot over his left and bending his knees in preparation, Lucius finds that his heart is pounding in his ears.
It’s no surprise at all when Regulus takes off and immediately pops the jump, going only into a single loop instead and landing on both of his feet as he comes back down. In fact, Lucius would’ve been more shocked if he’d actually committed to the rotation.
“That’s fine, keep going,” Lucius calls out to Regulus, a phrase that he’s become used to saying by now. But instead of pushing right into his next spin, Regulus keeps his eyes on the ice and stops skating completely, coming to a total standstill. “It’s okay, just skip the spin and get on the music!” Lucius exclaims, growing desperate as more and more time crawls by in the program and Regulus refuses to move.
But as the music continues and Regulus looks up towards him, his expression completely blank, Lucius has to accept that he’s not going to be finishing this runthrough.
He sighs as he skates over to the penalty boxes, where the rink’s music system resides, and promptly shuts Regulus’s music off.
Lucius turns around after, only to find that Regulus hasn’t moved. And as he skates back over to join his student, he watches Regulus stare ahead at nothing, still in that same corner of the ice. The quiet that follows is deafening.
Lucius can’t ever remember being so nervous for one of his students before. Maybe it’s because he’s never seen one of his students lose a competition before the warm-up’s even started, or maybe it’s because he knows that Regulus can do so much better than this. Maybe it’s because Regulus is more than just a student; he’s family.
Or maybe it’s because of the fact that Lucius fears he isn’t good enough to be Regulus’s coach anymore.
He’s begun to sense it over the past several weeks. No matter what he does, what he says, nothing gets through to Regulus. A better coach would have shut this down before it even started, would’ve figured out how to handle this situation so that Regulus could show up to competition confident in his capabilities and trusting that everything would be going right. But here they are, a week out from his junior nationals debut, and Regulus has seemingly given up on his skating career when it’s just barely begun.
He should run away with this title. If everything was going right, then Regulus’s scores would be untouchable. He has everything—the technical abilities, the skating skills, the presentation. Skate clean, and he’d be the national champion easily. He’d get picked for the Junior Worlds team, and then he’d get assignments for the Junior Grand Prix next season. This title is Regulus’s to lose.
Except he can’t get it together. And Lucius has done nothing to help him. He knows things aren’t exactly perfect in Regulus’s home life—that his mother often pushes him beyond his limits, that his brother has just gotten a major surgery, that his dad is hardly ever home. But those are circumstances out of Regulus’s control, things that he should be able to leave behind when he steps through the doors of the rink. If Lucius can’t break through to him now, what happens when he moves up to seniors? What happens when he’s at competitions far more important than junior nationals, and US Figure Skating decides that his talent is no longer worth investing in?
Then Regulus will be seen as a failure, and it will be Lucius’s fault.
Lucius has to say something now. He has to at least try.
As Regulus continues to stare at the ground and the silence between them builds, Lucius struggles to find the words. But when he does speak, they are harsher than he intends them to be. “So are you just going to completely give up like this at nationals too?” It’s the wrong thing to say. Lucius knows it the moment that he says it. And Regulus’s lack of a response is more telling than any response he could give.
Lucius sighs, and tries again. “Look, I know practice has been rough recently. I know your brother’s home, and that probably has something to do with it. But you cannot keep training like this.” He takes a deep breath as he attempts to figure out how to articulate his words properly, how to let him know that he’s coming from a place of concern. “You… are one of the most gifted athletes I have ever worked with.” He starts there. It’s not something that he tells just anyone, it’s something that he knows is true. He wouldn’t say it otherwise. “And I know you can skate so much better than you are right now. I know you can land that quad toe and the axel, I know you can get perfect component scores, I know you can blow the roof off of that arena.” He watches Regulus’s face as he says all of this, hoping that any of it might resonate even the slightest bit. He can’t tell if his little pep talk is working or not. “But you have to know it too. You have to pull it together and start acting like you can, in every single run that you do. You can’t just expect that you’ll go out there and do it when the time comes. You have to be doing it now. You understand me?”
At last Regulus glances up at him, though he doesn’t seem interested in what words or advice Lucius has to offer. “I guess so,” he says, sounding completely and totally disinterested.
Could he make it less obvious that he doesn’t care? Lucius wonders. He grows desperate now as he speaks again. “Regulus, I feel like I’ve tried everything by now. I don’t know how else to break through to you,” he says.
Finally, Regulus interrupts him. “Have you tried telling my mother?” he snaps, directly confronting Lucius’s gaze. “Seemed to work out well last time.” And that’s when it sinks in. Shit. That’s what this is about.
“Regulus—“ Lucius starts, in yet another feeble attempt to make him understand. But he doesn’t get the chance. A couple of seconds pass, and Regulus turns his head to look up at the clock.
“Looks like our hour’s up,” he says, and already he’s headed towards the exit. “See you Friday.”
He’s gone without another word, leaving Lucius alone on the ice with this new realization. God, how could he have been so stupid? How could he not have made the connection between Regulus’s training, and when that whole incident had happened?
Lucius hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, really. Regulus hadn’t shown up to skate at all that Saturday morning, when usually he’d always be the first one on the ice and the last one off. He’d grown worried about it the longer that time went on, and the longer that the ice went without Regulus. He’d thought maybe something had happened, or that his family might be out of town.
Sending the text to his mother asking if something was going on with Regulus that morning had taken two seconds. It was a simple display of concern for his baby cousin, or at least, that’s how he saw it. But now that he’s looking back, he’s realizing that all he’s done is make things worse for Regulus than they already are. And that maybe he’s more to blame for this than he initially thought.
As he watches Regulus leave the ice, he realizes his worst fears are coming true: he has let one of his students down for the first time, and he might not be as good of a coach as he thought. And in just a week, his failure will be put on display for the whole country to see.
❅ ❅ ❅
As Regulus exits Rink B and settles down on one of the benches in the lobby, he tries to find it in himself to regret what he’s just said to Lucius. He comes back up with nothing.
He isn’t sure what to do now. He was planning on skating the next session, but he doesn’t think he has it in him. And even if he did, he already knows how it’s going to go. He knows that nothing’s going to change, that there won’t be some switch flipped in his brain that magically fixes everything that is wrong. He keeps hoping, every time his music plays, that it might. But after about a million tries, he’s become bitterly aware of the fact that his efforts are useless. Something in him has caused him to give up, and he can’t place what it is.
That isn’t what scares him. What scares him more is the fact that he can’t bring himself to care about it.
It’s so tiring. Everything is just so goddamn tiring. He should be worried about nationals right now, and only nationals. But instead, he’s worried about everything else in his life. He’s worried that he might’ve ruined his relationship with his brother all over again, that his mother will rain down hellfire on him if he doesn’t do well, that he’s effectively sabotaged himself by pulling himself away from everyone and everything he loves.
He wants to blame his mother for it. He wants to blame the fact that she threatened him, that she manipulated him and made sure that he’d never be able to have anything for himself ever again. But that just wouldn’t be true. She wasn’t the one who made him yell at Sirius to get out, or the one who made him stop talking to Barty and Evan outside of a few quick words during practices. She’s not the one who forced him to completely push James away, or the one who snapped at Lucius. It’s him. It’s Regulus who has done this to himself, just like it’s always been.
The worst part is that he knows he should fight it. He could fight back against her, and walk away victorious. It would be difficult and painful and he’d have to face the consequences, but he could do it. He can, because Sirius did it too. If only it weren’t so hard.
It’s hard to go against her will. And it’s hard to walk away from the woman who’s only ever wanted to support his dreams, even if she goes about doing it in a cruel and sometimes unforgiving way. He knows that a part of it is because it’s not just his dream to wear an Olympic medal around his neck—it’s hers as well, and she refuses to give it up. But he’ll be damned if he doesn’t want it too, more than anything else in the world. If he has to sacrifice to get there, then he’ll sacrifice.
Except his time has come, and he suddenly can’t handle the pressure. Suddenly, everything around him is beginning to seep into his skating, and it’s all crumbling down. Skating has always been the one consistent thing in his life, the one escape he has from himself. Now, not even that is safe anymore. And he has no idea how to stop it.
Regulus buries his face in his hands, not sure if he wants to cry or scream. Maybe both. But he doesn’t let himself.
For the first time, he understands what everyone else means when they say the world of skating is lonely.
Suddenly, his pity party is interrupted by the main door slamming open. The sound rings throughout the entire lobby, and his heart drops as he recognizes the familiar noise of heavy metal smacking against the glass door.
When he looks up, it’s no surprise that James Potter is the culprit of the dramatic entrance, his bag of equipment still brushing against the door.
James spots him instantly. Of course he did. Regulus should have expected as much. James spots him instantly, and Regulus glances away, pretending like he hasn’t seen anything or anyone.
He knows James will come towards him anyways. He knows because they have been here before, in this exact place, in this exact situation, and that is what James did then. It is undoubtedly what he will do now, because he’s still James, and he’s still far too good of a person. Of course he will talk to him. Of course he will show Regulus kindness that he doesn’t deserve. That is exactly who James is. And it is exactly who Regulus isn’t.
Soon enough, Regulus is proven right. “Hey, Reg,” James starts, his voice drawing closer. Reg. He’s heard it so many times from so many other people, but hearing the familiar nickname fall off of James’s tongue still makes his heart skip a beat. He wishes he could ignore it. He can’t.
“Hi,” Regulus gets out, not daring to meet James’s eye. He can’t do it. He knows that if he does, he’ll immediately fold, he’ll immediately give in. And that is the one thing he can’t allow to happen.
”You doing okay?” James asks, undeterred by Regulus’s feigned disinterest. “Feels like it’s been a while.” He says this very pointedly, a sudden sharpness to his tone, and Regulus’s chest tightens. So he’s pissed, then, he thinks. He knows James well enough by now to know when he is attempting to conceal his anger, an emotion that James rarely seems to experience. Yet when he does, he isn’t shy about letting it show.
Regulus knows he isn’t being fair. He knows that he owes James an explanation, that he owes him an apology. But these are things that Regulus can’t give him, not right now. Maybe not ever. He doesn’t know.
He just hopes that maybe James might be able to understand. “Yeah,” he lies through his teeth. “I’m fine.”
”You’re fine,” James repeats, and Regulus can immediately tell by the skepticism in his tone that James did not buy it. “Well. Good to know.”
”Yep,” Regulus agrees, still refusing to look. It’s the only thing restraining him from spilling everything to James, from breaking down crying and telling him that he didn’t want this. It at least makes the next lie easier as he gets up, deciding that he will go and skate the next session after all. “I have to get back on the ice,” is all that he gets out as he brushes right past James, practically sprinting for Rink B.
He can hear him, somewhere behind him. He can hear James begin to call out his name, not getting it, not knowing why Regulus is doing this. “Wait, Regulu—“ is all that Regulus catches before he’s back in the chill of the rink, ready to return to the sport that makes him and ruins him all at once.
Once he’s to the boards, and only once he’s to the boards, he allows himself to turn back around. He allows himself to catch one glimpse of James, just one look at the boy that he never saw coming, the boy who he’s effectively fallen for.And there’s only one thought running through his mind. I’m sorry, Regulus tells him, watching as James’s eyes still linger on the area where Regulus just was. I’m sorry, Regulus tells him, wishing that he could be stronger, wishing that he had the fight in him that his brother did. I’m sorry, Regulus tells him, attempting to convey the message in every way that he can except out loud. I’m sorry.