It happened the January before last. He still doesn’t fully comprehend how. How could they do this, how could they do this to him? More importantly, why did it have to happen at all? Why did they leave him, just when he had started to feel confident in their future together? Everyone always says that pain lessens over time. That the ache gets less all encompassing. He doesn’t think that’s true, though. If it were, then why does he still feel this way? Like his heart has a chunk of it missing, like he physically cannot continue to live, at least not with them gone.
643 days. That’s how many he had lived without. Without a best friend, without a confidant, without his other half. He wishes he were the one to have gone. And then, he doesn’t. He would never want them to feel what he feels right now. He’d never wish this upon anyone, actually.
It has been one year, ten months, five days and seven hours. He thought the ache would’ve dulled by now. He hides it now. People have stopped feeling sympathy, stopped with the “sorry for your loss” cards, stopped with the typical casseroles and lasagnas that come with the death of a loved one. They’ve moved onto pity, pity for this young boy who had all this potential, this boy who people thought was going places. He wants them to know, if anything, that he’s still himself. He just needs time. Almost two years. He has gone almost two whole years without them by now. They were the light of his life, his true love, his soulmate. He just thought they had more time. They were so young.
He wishes on every star he sees that what took them would take him next. Yet it’s been 22 months and he’s still breathing. People die every day, he reminds himself. He hopes every night, listening to the crickets chirp, that he’ll be one of them and yet every morning, the light shines through his blinds, the birds are still chirping, and the kitchen has a new scent coming from it. He used to be the cook, between the two of them. He had always had a passion for creation, any sort of art, and he mainly expressed it through food. Every morning there was a new spread of food and every morning, without fail, they would say it looks mouth watering, delectable, delicious, scrumptious. He hasn’t so much as touched the stove since. He has to get Sirius to do it now. Well, it’s more like Sirius forces himself into his house and makes sure he eats.
He knows this isn’t normal. A normal person would’ve moved on by now, and even if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be this broken up over it, after all this time. And yet, he never dreams of being one of the so-called ‘normal people’. If he stops grieving, they won’t be with him anymore. It’s a fickle thing, death. He doesn’t know how to handle it. Everyone tells him the same thing, “It’ll pass”, “You’ll be okay”. He’s so sick of it. He can’t handle the looks he gets when he leaves his house, albeit it’s a rare day that he does. Everyone feels so bad for him, he can tell from the sad look they have when they think he’s not looking. He wants to scream, he wants to punch someone, he wants it all to stop. ‘Treat me like a person, not a ball of glass you never let go of for fear of dropping it.’ He’s not as fragile as people think, if he were, he wouldn’t be here right now. He would’ve joined them 643 days ago.
You can’t think like that, what would Sirius say? Sirius, who, out of everyone, he thought would understand. Sirius, who held him on the nights he was shaking too much to sleep. Sirius, who still makes breakfast for him, the most important meal of the day, he says. Sirius, who softly sings to him when he can’t stop thinking about it. Sirius had always been for him. Just because someone’s there for you doesn’t mean they get it, though. Sirius had a different relationship with them than he did. They were just as much a pair as they were their own people. It’s hard to deal with the loss of something as irreplaceable as that, but Sirius did. He put himself into therapy, he started doing yoga and early morning runs. Sirius needed a little quiet sometimes, to mull things over, to give his brain a rest, to give himself an opportunity to not be so himself. He was the opposite, physically, all he had was quiet. It was just him, all alone in this big house that hasn’t felt like a home in quite some time. Together, they were going to make it a place to really live in. A place where all their friends could gather, a place where they would always feel comfortable and loved. Now, all he has are shadows and a brain that won’t stop thinking. He tries to quiet it, he takes naps, but the dreams are even louder when he’s asleep than the thoughts are when he’s awake. He tried writing it all down, for a couple weeks, at least. But then, he found himself constantly rereading, reliving the indescribable pain he was in that first month. Every morning he woke up, it was like his brain was simultaneously moving at a million miles an hour and stuck in traffic. He couldn’t get it to just turn off.
He thought they were the one, the end all be all for him. If that were really true, though, then why weren’t they with him right now, when he so desperately needs it? He clings to the scraps of them he has left. The cologne they used, the ring they always wore on their right index finger. He feeds the fish they won at the fair once a week. Every Thursday he buys their favorite dish from the takeout place they used to frequent. He still buys the shampoo they claimed made their hair ‘luscious’. He has playlists they made for him, every song having a special meaning behind it. He has the letters that they used to send each other, signed with codenames, from their years in school. He has the teddy bear they got him their first Valentine’s day as a couple. He has the ring he was going to use to ask them to marry him. He never even got to tell anyone about it. They died, and it was like the world stopped, and he forgot about the ring for six months, until too much time had passed for anyone but him to care about it. Every spring he plants peonies in his front yard, just because they were their favorite. Sometimes, when he thinks about these rituals he does, just to keep them with him, he can’t tell if it feels like he’s being hugged or suffocated.
Remus tells him that he’s not irrational, that everyone manages in their own way, that they were a very important person and a loss as detrimental as this is something that doesn’t just go away. He quite loves Remus. He wouldn’t have expected Remus to be as understanding as he is, but he always knows just the right thing to say. Pandora is always there for him, as well. She makes him soup and she does his laundry when she notices that he’s been wearing the same jumper for a couple days. As grateful as he is to have these people he knows will never leave him, he can feel it in the bottom of his heart that nobody knew James in the way he did. James was this enigma, a ball of light that everyone assumed would never go out, never dim. And then one day, in the middle of the winter, the sun was ripped from the sky and James was gone. Regulus just doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to move on.