Boys

Regulus was shaken awake, seeing Barty above him.

“Its a weekend, piss off,” he said, rolling back over.

“Do you need us to kill your brother?” Barty asked, raising his wand.

“What?”

“He’s outside the door, saying he has a present for you. You think it’s a bomb?” Evan questioned.

“It’s obviously not a bomb, dumbass, but I bet it’s cursed” Barty argued, flicking Evan on the forehead.

Regulus held up a finger, silently telling them to give him a second. He yawned, stretching and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Outside the open door was, indeed, his brother, holding a gift for him. Regulus sighed and walked over.

“Hi. I have a gift for you. Sorry for making you talk so much yesterday,” Sirius said, pushing the gift into Regulus’ hands. Regulus looked down skeptically at what he was holding. It just looked like a normal small notebook, about the size of his hand, and a quill next to it. In his other hand was a small hair clip. Regulus raised an eyebrow, questioning what they do. “Anything you want to say, this quill will write it on the notebook and it’ll say out loud. You can tap your wand into the quill to give it your voice, or choose an automated one. Here, try it.”

Regulus felt frozen. Sirius had remembered. When they were young, it was always hard for Regulus to talk. When their parents asked him questions, Sirius distracted them so Regulus wouldn’t get punished for silence. He could talk more with Sirius, but sometimes he still couldn’t. Sirius had showed him to use letter blocks to talk to him. His brother remembered. It shouldn’t have been that surprising, but it was. Sirius didn’t brush it off as a childish quirk he’d grow out of. He forced himself to walk over to his wand, anyways.

Regulus walked back over and tapped the quill with his wand. “It takes your magical history with the wand, the way you sound when you cast, and infuses the quill with it,” Sirius explained. “When you put on the clip, it basically casts a form of legilimens, and it knows what you want to say, and what you don’t,” Regulus tentatively took hold of the hair clip, clipping it into place. The notebook held itself up, floating in the air, easy for the also floating quill to write against.

“Thank you,” the quill sounded out, in Regulus’ voice. Regulus’ eyes widened at the sound of his own voice. “Wow,” the device said, sounding out his own thoughts. Sirius beamed.

“We made it in 6th year for Moony- Remus, I mentioned him before,” Sirius stated. “I thought of you the whole time when we were making it.” Regulus stepped forward and hugged Sirius. He heard Barty and Evan gasp. The two knew he rarely liked psychical contact from people he didn’t know well, let alone initiated it. But Sirius had always been a safe touch, even when Regulus wasn’t sure he knew much anything about him anymore.

Regulus left the hug. “Thank you,” the magical device said, “Now get out and let me sleep until our planned meet time”. Sirius chuckled and obeyed. Regulus sighed in contentment, walking back over to his bed. He had missed his brother. Barty and Evan, or Thing 1 and Thing 2, as Regulus liked to call them, stepped in front of him.

“Spill. What happened yesterday?” Barty asked.

Evan’s eyes lit with realization, “Oh Merlin, is this why Lupin asked for our help at dueling?”

“Oh, and didn’t Panda and Dorcas say Potter and Pettigrew were being nuisances?” Barty added, turning his head toward Thing 2.

“To be fair, that’s pretty par for the course”

“Good point”

Regulus shoved his way between the 2 of them, towards his own bed. That seemed to screw their heads back on, because they got back to the origin of their questions and continued bombarding their friend.

“What happened?”

“What magic did he have to use to actually communicate with you?”

“veritaserum,” the magical object murmured, mimicking what would’ve been Regulus’s voice perfectly.

“He drugged you!?” Barty bellowed, cackling. Twiddle-dee and Twiddle-dum leaned on each other for support, their loud laughter echoing against the walls.

“I swear I’m gonna get you to give me a pensieve of that, one day!” Evan said between his giggles.

-

Regulus hovered near the Gryffindor common room, waiting for his brother to come out.

All the Gryffindors coming in and out of the room had given him dirty looks and whispered the password under their breaths. He didn’t care. Regulus wasn’t planning to go into it anyway, but the respect he commanded had been the type he’d always been taught to strive for. Well, this didn’t seem too much like respect. If he got lucky, they were scared. If not, they’d look at him with pity or disgust.

He didn’t care.

“Regulus?”

But, maybe, someone treating him like a person more than a snake gave him a rush of happiness. Certainly more happiness than he’d been trained to feel.

James rushed over, stumbling over his own feet and catching himself. He stuck out his hand, clearly expecting a handshake.

“Regulus! Hi! I don’t think we’ve formally met? I’m James, James Potter,” James introduced himself, a bright smile on his face. He was stumbling over his feet as much as he was his words.

“I know who you are,” Regulus’s device responded. James dropped his hand, seeing he would get no handshake.

“Slippery newt-scop,” James said, turning towards the painting in front of them. He took a step in and looked back at Regulus. “Are you coming in? I think Padfoot should be almost ready by now, what time is it?” James frantically patted down his body, finding his wand in his left back pocket. “Tempus,” he cast. A display of gold numbers in front of him showed 5:04. “He’s always late, sorry, I’ll go get him for you!”

James’ departure was quick. Sirius’s bounding entrance was even quicker. He tackled Regulus into a hug, and dragged him by the hand down the stairs.

“Reggie!” Sirius said, beaming.

“Sirius,” Regulus deadpanned, his voice monotoned (as usual) on the device.

“What do you want to hear about? Oh, do you want to hear about us making the talking device? Muggles call it an AAC device, standing for…,” Sirius paused, scrunching his nose up before his face lit up again, “meaning augmentative and alternative communication! So we’re calling it an MAAC device, for magical something something communication!”

This was how it had always been. Sirius rarely forced Regulus to talk, but he would regale his little brother with all the tales he could think of. His mind was always moving a mile a minute, all cut-off-too-early or run-on sentences. Some of the stories would be true, but most of the time (especially before Hogwarts) they’d be made up. Regulus would sort the little wooden letter boxes into one-worded questions, and Sirius would always know exactly what he was asking.

“Before we had perfected it, we tested it on moony because he’s who we were making it for, and we learned a lot about him in that time,” Sirius exclaimed, excitedly leading himself and his younger brother through the halls of Hogwarts. Some students stared. Well, most, if not all, students were staring. They hadn’t seen Sirius and Regulus like this since Sirius’ second year, Regulus’ first. Sirius continued on, ignoring the stares with ease.

“It started out with me coming up with the idea, and then Peter sketched the design. Me, James, and Remus were all in the room, brainstorming with him, though. First, instead of it being a quill and notebook, we wanted it to be like those little electronic devices muggles have, but we quickly abandoned that idea.

“Then, we wanted it to be like the sorting hat, and we were really insistent on this one, but Remus was firmly against it, sadly. We were really excited about this one, and I’m pretty sure we have the sketch Peter made still up on our wall, somewhere in the dorm. It might be on Wormtail’s bedpost- but, that’s beside the point- and then, we came up with the quill and notebook idea!

“Brilliant idea, really, and then we started to get into the logic and magic of it, but we mostly left that with Moony, Lils, Peter, and Mary. They’re the smart ones: Wormtail’s got surprisingly bad grades, he’s pretty good at whatever the word for what we were doing was- spell making? Nah, I guess magically infusing objects? Whatever, they came up with the hair clip idea for it to reach your thoughts, and we did take inspiration from the hat for that one

“It was really hard, according to the smart ones, because the hat is sentient while we had to make the clip entirely out of magic! We tried doing a transfiguration thing to make it sentient, but that turned out horribly- like, really bad, don’t try it- and then we figured out the spells to use to make it work. I think we have a full notebook of the logistics of it somewhere, I’ll ask James, he always knows where everything is- exactly like his bloody father, he is!

“But then, we tried to figure out how to make the voice thingy, and we couldn’t give it its own voice- I already told you how turning it sentient turned out- so we went back to the muggle electronic idea and remembered how muggles have voice actors to make robots talk, or something like that, so that gave us the idea to make it a human’s voice. Lily came up with the idea to use the wand’s history- she and Remus working together are a bloody brilliant force- and then, it finally worked!

“But, it didn’t work all the way. It said ALL of moony’s thoughts, which we had a field day with, but a lot of it was utter nonsense, because he’s always thinking a bunch of different things at different times- but his thoughts are still more organized than me, which I’m quite jealous of- and we found out a lot about him. But he, Peter, and the girls- minus Marlene- made us sort them out. Me and James were not allowed in the room at this point, because we were too distracting or something- we can’t help it if our beauty is the most important thing in the room! Anyway, they finally figured it out and now it only says the things you would have said out loud!” Sirius finished.

“Would you give me any Remus blackmail?” Regulus questioned.

“Would I give you any Remus blackmail? Of course! I can’t tell you, like, half of it- my greater apologies, I’ve been sworn to secrecy- but I can definitely tell you some of them!”

And on and on it went, topic changing again and again. Regulus still didn’t talk much, despite being comfortably able to with his MAAC device. He wasn’t all that used to it and he enjoyed the familiarity of listening to Sirius ramble. Sirius clearly did too. They walked around campus for at least two hours before they retreated back to their own dorms, happy and the yearning in their hearts for each other comfortably soothed.