Hold me Like a Knife
Sirius has been obsessed with superheroes since childhood, smuggling comics under his bed to read at night, sneaking in with his friends when the newest movies come out, playing with figurines from happy meals before throwing them out on his way home.
Stories have nothing on actually meeting one, and he reels for days after the fact.
It’s a little silly, definitely the result of some sort of repressed trauma from growing up the way he did, but he collects Spider-man memorabilia like an elementary schooler..
This reflects onto his desk, his photo of his first day on the job right next to a first edition poster of Spider-man.
It’s like you could see his entire life play out for him through the items on his desk, the big apple coffee mug James got him for his fifteenth birthday still half-full with two day old coffee with more sugar than caffeine in it sitting right next to his keyboard with the backspace button the most worn in and the numbers a close second. His polaroids have gravitated from the wall of his apartment to his cubicle as well, a few old ones like the third day of boarding school and blowing out the candles on his seventeenth birthday at James’s house next to photos of him and Marlene on stakeouts and blurry photos of a smile of squinting eye (courtesy of Remus’s rule that he isn’t allowed to put up full photos of him in his office) his personal life spilling into his work as he throws himself into the law and helping people with everything he has.
He throws down his car keys, sinking into the subpar chair as he checks out for the night, laying his slightly perspirant forehead down on the cool metal of his desk.
After finishing his end of night report, detailing everything from the patrol (sans one Remus Lupin encounter), he opens his email to make sure he hasn’t missed anything big.
A knock on the joke of a cubicle has his spine instinctively straightening as he turns towards the visitor, relaxing when it’s just his partner.
“Hey Mar,” he says, grinning slightly at the bottle blonde. The shorter woman grins back, her dark red lipstick a practical stain against the snow of her skin and curls of her hair.
She has her personal leather jacket slung over her uniform, a surefire sign that she’s just clocked out for the night as she raps her black nail polish chipped nails against his desk, “Mary and I are going out for drinks, you up for a few?”
While a little break does sound nice, Sirius doesn’t feel like drinking tonight, never feels like drinking on the nights after particularly jarring home calls. The domestic disturbance he just got back from would qualify, especially when the buzzing beneath his skin that grows every day he doesn’t see Remus is at an all time high.
“ I’d rather not be drunk under the table tonight Mar.”
Her nose wrinkles in mock disgust, “Why must you turn everything into a competition?”
Sirius grins, a sharp cut of gleaming white teeth and a glint in his eyes that means nothing good, “It’s the newbie in me.”
Sighing, Marlene practically goes boneless over the top of the cubicle, all of the energy sagging out of her body like a popped balloon, “It’s the newbie in this whole goddamn precinct.”
Barking out a laugh, Sirius powers up his computer to crank out a few more reports before heading home, waving Marlene off with the promise of another time as she slinks away, shoulders sagging with defeat.
She’s the most competitive woman Sirius knows.
Managing to not pull overtime for the first day this week, Sirius finishes off with a relaxing stretch of his arms, releasing the tension from his body as he packs up and heads out, noticing a light still on in one of the interrogation rooms.
By now, all of the night shifters have filled out their evening reports and shuffled away in exhaustion, ready to collapse for twelve hours before their next shift, so Sirius is pretty sure he’s the only one left in the whole building.
A light being on isn’t anything new, he works in a building with a bunch of men in their prime without anyone keeping them in check but their equally reckless partners, a little wasted electricity is not a first.
It’s the noise that shuffles around inside the room that worries him.
Laying a hand on the gun at his belt, he walks forward slowly, worst case scenarios building in his brain.
When he’s steps away, the light flickers off from inside and someone walks out. Tensing, Sirius steps forward silently, trying to identify the person in the dark without alerting them to his presence when-
“Oh, Wormy it’s just you.”
Peter jumps a whole foot in the air, spinning around to face Sirius as all the blood drains from his mouth. A younger, more immature Sirius would have laughed uproariously at the terrified expression on Peter’s white face. Now, Sirius just quirks a smile and holds his hands up until Peter recognizes him, establishing himself as non-threatening.
“Oh,” Peter breathes out in a sigh, his body relaxing slightly even as his grin stays firmly on the knob of the closed door, “Sirius you frightened me.”
Unwillingly, Sirius’s nose wrinkles at the proper Manhattan drawl to the man’s words, a sure sign of class that Sirius has done everything he could think of to beat out of his own voice. Peter flaunts his upbringing like it’s something to be prideful.
Sirius…doesn’t talk about his childhood.
“Who else would it be Wormy?” Sirius says as he forces a grin, trying to distract the man from the brief discomfort that had very obviously flitted across his face. From the way Peter tracks his expression with vague disinterest, it doesn’t quite work.
While they did train together, Sirius feels like becoming a cop has driven Peter and him apart. They grew up at boarding school together and together with James they were an unstoppable trio, and yet, while Sirius and James have stayed unhealthily close, Peter has drifted apart.
It’s times like these, late into the night where Peter is coming off the high of caffeine and working himself to death in an empty interrogation room where Sirius regrets letting him drift so far away that he doesn’t have the right to be concerned anymore.
It’s like staring at a stranger who’s laugh you could recognize anywhere.
Peter clears his throat, shuffling off hastily as he claps Sirius on the shoulder, wishing him a good night.
Eyeing the room his friend just came out of warily, Sirius steps closer to it, reaching out toward the doorknob before yanking backwards.
It doesn’t matter what Wormy had been doing there.
It’s not Sirius’s place to ask.
Regulus stares at his calendar, the initiation ball marked in the green of his mother’s notation on his personal schedule, set for a week from now and flicks his attention between the notes she has written for him and the security camera footage of the robbery gone wrong.
The gang, Death Eaters, his mind supplies, (after all, he’ll be one of them soon) consists of both middle-class and upper-class people. The middle-class people do all the dirty work, going on missions and carting around intelligence and overall catching the police force’s attention.
Behind the scenes, rich young men are manipulating officials, infiltrating governmental positions, raiding businesses, taking control of the stocks, paying off law enforcement, rioting in smaller neighborhoods, and running a very lucrative drug cartel from behind the scenes. Regulus can see the writing on the wall behind their increasingly aggressive riots and vandal careers, it’s very quickly going to become some sort of cultist hate group if nobody puts a stop to it.
They’re settling in place to take over the country, gripping their claws in so slowly nobody even notices the sting as the skin breaks, too preoccupied with the crime of lower-class gang members scraping and scratching at their feet.
It’s calculated and perfect.
If Regulus weren’t actively fighting against evil powers and forces that push themselves into New York, he might have considered getting in with them just to understand their innerworkings.
It’s the mechanic in him, his engineer brain’s need to understand the inner workings of not just machines but social groups as well. His first encounter with Grindelwald’s murders (the serial killer of the century) had been over outdated documents in a library and he had become so invested in the case and understanding how Grindelwald worked that he accidentally figured out the murderer in his endeavor to puzzle it out.
The anonymous tip had never been traced back to twelve year old Regulus, but plenty more have been made since, enough to garner attention from that certain precinct, enough to make a name for himself.
Of course, he has no choice but to join the group if an offer is made, his parents will make sure of that. And it’s calculated and perfect.
He’s going to take them down from within.
To do that, he has to do his research, which is tedious and boring, consisting of hundreds of different searches that take up stupid time that gives him space to work on other things but not enough focus to work on them with.
His mind drifts back to the test, to the computer running facial recognition, to identifying every single person he can, to planning exactly what he’s going to do once he’s initiated. It can’t focus on the summarization paperwork of his finished prototype, or the overview of this quarter’s spendings, or preparation for the next shareholder’s meeting.
Never before has his focus and control spun so arrogantly away from him.
Kreacher interrupts a song, “If I may Sir, James Potter arrived home thirty minutes ago alone, and Spider-man could do with a swing around the block.”
Glancing at the search engine currently tracing the entire family tree of one Tom Marvalo Riddle, Regulus grimaces, looking at the clock, “You know what Kreacher? I think you may be onto something.”
The clang of the fire escape as Regulus drops onto it makes James jump up from the couch he sits on, the book that had previously been left in his lap flying across the room as his chest heaves, head swinging around anxiously before clocking Regulus staring at him through the window.
Before clocking the knife currently visible by the hilt buried in Regulus’s left shoulder.
The blood drains out of James’s face so alarmingly fast that Regulus is afraid he might faint for a moment before the window is open and James is gently half-guiding half-yanking Regulus into the apartment.
The taller nurse is muttering under his breath about stupid vigilantes and cleaning wounds as he shoves Regulus stomach-down on his ratty couch, the springs under the hero groaning with the sudden weight as Regulus tries not to huff in pain.
“I’m Siriusly thinking you’re starting to do this on purpose just to see me,” James jokes.
Regulus turns his head towards the nurse in lieu of answering, watching him silently through the mask as he gets out the first aid kit and pulls out all the supplies he needs.
“Really,” James babbles on, “You can stop by whenever you want, hurt or not. Though that won’t guarantee that I’ll be home, I keep weird hours. I guess you’d know all about weird hours though, being a guy that works free night shifts every day on top of whatever it is your civilian job is.”
Regulus hadn’t been planning on stopping by at all, having already passed this street and spent an alarmingly large amount of time sitting on the roof of the building across the street and watching James dance around his kitchen as he kept an ear out for any obvious crime.
Under the mask, Regulus’s lip quirks up in a half smile, “I plot murders, obviously.”
James rolls his eyes fondly at him, hands fluttering around the wound for a moment before both of them rest gently on the hilt of the knife, “Oh yes, the vigilante with a strict moral code that refuses to kill anyone plots murders and is secretly a serial killer. That tracks.”
James is trying to distract him. Regulus knows James is trying to distract him. James knows Regulus knows James is trying to distract him.
He lets him do it anyway.
“Well it’s the best cover. Who’s gonna suspect me when I have such a strict rule about killing.”
“Ah yes,” James says with all the air of an experienced war veteran who has been a secret superhero for decades, “Because Spider-man refusing to kill people will be a totally valid alibi for Spider-man’s secret identit-”
It’s an accident really, cutting him off with a shout of pain. Regulus rather likes James’s voice, likes how an unidentifiable accent curves the man’s r’s into a vowel sound and blends together his consonants. It’s very soothing, a wonderful voice for a bedside manner, just smooth enough to relax someone without making them feel like they’re being tricked for relaxing.
It reminds Regulus of the faint traces of French in his mother’s voice after a particularly long day, of the swooping French that lingered in his grandemere’s English even after the dementia took away the knowledge of her native tongue.
It’s a comfort that James has twisted, turning the icy accent that had claws but still reminded him of home into something more warm and inviting. Melting ice into chocolate chip cookies, the good ones with gooey middles.
It’s probably the pain making him a little loopy, but as James babbles and stitches up the no doubt gaping wound in Regulus’s shoulder, Regulus reaches out a clumsy arm, swinging wildly for purchase until he finds one of James’s arms so he can haphazardly smack lightly at it.
“Yer a chocolate chip cookie,” he mumbles, face half squished against the couch cushions as he sighs and lets sleep take him.