Oh Brother Mine
James first feels it on a Wednesday.
A Wednesday that hadn’t been particularly important and the sensation was faint at the beginning, which is probably why he didn’t notice it till the early afternoon.
He’d been so busy, spending the morning with Sirius meticulously dressing up every inch of the house in festivities for the upcoming Yuletide, cowed under the weight of his mum’s disappointed stare from the kitchen archway. She’d caught the pair flying around in the fields behind the house, the pair of Chasers doing sudden sharp turns and death dives for Quidditch practice.
His mum had stood on that porch for nearly twenty-five minutes, looking up at them in the cloud line in somehow equal parts exasperated yet fond. Euphemia had her long dark hair braided up and away from her face, her prized lavender apron splattered with a mixture of kheer, a yule log and… was that a piece of plum in her hair?
It ended up coming down to a Sonorus spell, both meeting her gaze with guilty eyes as they drifted back down to earth.
“Sorry mum!” They chorus in scary unison, very much brothers despite lack of blood, scurrying into the house without another word.
It was a Wednesday when James first noticed the unnatural cold blur.
They’d managed to finish decorating the house just in time, the doorbell chiming as James finished lining the hearth with mango leaves and ruby poinsettias. Sirius already stood at the open front door, embracing Remus as if it had been months not a matter of days since they’d last seen each other.
“Hey Moony”
“Hey Prongs, see I would give you a hug too mate, if I wasn’t currently occupied by a barnacle” Remus replies, although making no choice to move at the same time, the sap. Sirius doesn’t even bother lifting his head from Remus’s chest, flipping them both the bird.
“Shuddup,” He says muffled, “It’s called missing the person who doesn’t snore as if they were the damn Hogwarts Express themselves”
“Oi, I do not snore! That’s bloody Finnigan and you know it”
“Really now, I didn’t realize Kneazles could snore, did you know that Remus? Also, good one naming him after a shite player from the Holyhead Harpies, Jamie boy”
“Just because you’re a Montrose Magpies fan doesn’t stop you from realizing that Ciarán Finnegan is a god on the broom. He certainly ain’t shite, not like your team anyway”
“Oh no you didn’t!”
Sirius launches himself at James within the next moment, Remus left laughing as they scrimmage on the floor like a bunch of— well… frankly over-grown children. Peter joins him not long after, not even bothering to ask, more than used to the Potter-Black antics after nearly six years being both their friend and dormmate.
“Boys!” Effie calls from the kitchen, stilling Sirius and James in an instant, much to the combined delight of Remus and Peter.
They slowly untangle themselves from the pretzel they’d become, squinting eyes at each other in mock anger before breaking out into peals of laughter.
Peter and Remus share another look, collectively just sighing.
The four of them pile into the living room, all cramming into the one sofa despite the love chairs and an entirely different sofa barely two feet away. Peter sits on one arm, back resting against the sofa whilst his feet dangle. Remus sits on one end, James the other and Sirius— in typical Sirius fashion is splayed across them like a damsel. His head is on James's lap, his feet tucked between Remus’s side and the sofa arm.
James cards his fingers through Sirius’s hair softly, deftly detangling the mess that had become Sirius’s hair, scritching every so often much to Sirius’s delight who managed to become even more boneless underneath the loving ministrations.
It feels like a chill, so it takes James a few times to realize that there’s just a certain patch at the nape of Sirius’s neck that’s freezing cold, seeming to chill James fingers whilst Sirius doesn't even flinch.
It was a Wednesday when James heard the blur speak.
The boys were piled up on the couches, hours later after supper had been and gone. Both Effie and Monty had already retired upstairs, leaving the usually boisterous house rather quiet instead.
Remus was curled up on one of the love chairs this time, spectacles perched on the nose stuck buried in a book. Peter took up the second love chair, a thick blanket pulled up to his shoulders while he dozed by the heat of the fire.
James and Sirius took up the same positions on the couch as they had before supper, James sitting up whilst Sirius splayed across, taking up as much space as possible with his head in the other boy’s lap.
The four of them each took comfort in the calm tranquility of the Potter household oozed, the same house they’d been visiting for Yuletide every year since they’d met and become the ‘Marauders’. James and Sirius had become fast friends on the first ride of the Hogwarts Express, chattering away about anything and everything they could think of, finding more and more similarities as they talked. Remus and Peter had joined their group soon after, both initially just dormmates, but neither could stand up to the twin-sun smiles of the Potter-Black boys.
So they’d become the ‘Marauders’, thick as thieves, willing to pull any prank for a little bit of fun.
Then Sirius had run away from the Black estate at fourteen, showing up on James’s door in the pouring rain; battered, bruised, and positively trembling. It had taken two weeks for Sirius to explain, clunky and stuttered, about the horrors hidden behind the closed doors of one of the most famous pure-blooded families in all of Great Britain.
The wounds, the scarring that riddled Sirius’s back, the quivering in his voice as he explained how his mother Walburga would punish them with the Cruciatus curse.
About Regulus, his poor younger brother, and how he’d constantly pushed Sirius out the harm’s way. How his sweet younger brother’s face had become an impenetrable mask, cold and unforgiving, as he banished Sirius’s name off the Black family tapestry with seemingly no remorse.
(“He looked right through me, James, looked right through me like I wasn’t even there. I’d never seen him act so cold”)
It had been two years since that day.
“Pads, can I ask you something? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to” James asks softly, never once stopping the pattern his fingers massage into Sirius’s skull, mentally preparing for the outburst.
“What is it, James?”
He sounds nonchalant, almost uncaring as if James hadn’t asked this question every year since then.
“Do you think you’ll reach out to Regulus this year?”
And unlike the last two years that ended in an explosion, this year Sirius just sags, head lolling to the side as if the weight of it was too much to bear any longer.
“No,” he says slowly, “Regulus made his choice. He chose to believe mother and father’s ideals, despite them being a load of horse shite. He chose to banish me, when all I was trying to do was show them reason”. Sirius rolls over, facing James's stomach as if to curl away from the world.
“My little brother died the day I was banished and I will never forgive him for it.”
Oh mon frère, le mien (Oh brother mine)
Mon frère étoile, (brother star,)
Je t'aime, je suis désolé (I love you. I’m sorry)
S'il te plaît, ne le fais pas (Please don’t)
S'il vous plaît, ne me détestez pas. (Please don’t hate me)
Je l'ai fait pour toi. (I did it for you.)
Tout (Everything)
Tout pour toi. (Everything for you)
Toujours (Always)
It was a Wednesday when James Potter realized that the milky blur that he’d been seeing was a person.