James feels the blood fill his mouth. It is a small stream, but the taste is here, still, gross, metallic, incomplete. James feels like the taste of blood. His tongue flicks the flesh now only half-covering his growing wisdom teeth. Well, tooth. He can only feel the bottom one, on his left. He flicks it again and the metallic taste comes back, as does the memory, or lack thereof.
Half punching himself to dry the treacherous tears that have been drowning the corner of his eyes, the edge of his face, he can’t help but think it.
He didn’t even know if Regulus got his wisdom teeth removed.
He doesn’t know if he felt the pain at night, maybe once or twice in Charms, or during one of their secret night swims in the lake, muffled giggles interrupted by the jab of a growing tooth. James doesn’t know if he suffered through it, he doesn’t know if he got them removed, he doesn’t know if he had yet to feel them. And James will never know.
James will never know because he never thought to ask, because he never thought at all, because he never would have believed this information, this absence of knowledge, he would have never felt it would leave him hollow like an old building, wind running through.
James will never know because caskets don’t talk and the dead never answers and he may have the cape of legend, he would give it all, all for this single stupid fucking answer. James misses Regulus like he would air and yet at nineteen there is nothing else for him to do but to stand in front of a grave, and finally rageously drop to his knees, heaving with pain not of a growing tooth but of a surgically removed boy.
It seems so easy for everyone else, it can’t have been anything but a surgery, they must all still dream, perks of a slumber a bit too deep from which they too, upon waking, will realise the missing limb.
But James knows, he knows as he kneels in the dirt, Regulus laying below, probably half-eaten by bugs and bloated by decomposition — and James would love him still, blue, rigid cold and blown open, pests and all — James knows they are not asleep. He went to the funeral, from a distance, and saw all of Regulus’ friends. He saw the resolve, and the moving on in the same instant, and the never-looking back. James comes daily; he has never seen one of them.
James has also seen Sirius, he has seen Sirius scream in an empty cemetery, pointing an accusing finger at a tombstone, at a grave, at anything beneath.
James would have wanted to jump between grave and man, between beloved and accusation but he knew he couldn’t, he would never have. Sirius grieved as he could, and James loved as he had too, with all the bits of memories he never got to have, with the tear in the middle of his throat and the screams that forever escaped him, the words never pronounced never to be said.
oh beloved, you fucking asshole, i love you so much it’ll ruin all else that is good.