Chapter 1: November
Notes:
This began as a weird little offshoot from my previous "Regulus survives the cave" fic, so please forgive me if the timeline is a little off. For the purposes of this story, Regulus went to the cave to retrieve the locket horcrux in 1980, not 1979.
I've never had a baby, gone into hiding, or lived in the UK in the 80s. If you have done any of these things, kindly grant me your best suspension of disbelief.
Chapter Text
12th November, 1980
James shuts the door. He doesn’t slam it, exactly, but it’s a very resolute sort of sound. The younger, smaller brother of a slam, perhaps.
“James,” says Lily, “I don’t want him here.”
Harry, bless him, hasn’t a clue. He’s sucking on his dummy with relish, entirely unaware they’ve got his godfather, Dumbledore, and a wanted murderer having a terse meeting in the next room over.
“I don’t know what else we can do,” says James. “He’s got no wand. He’s in pieces, just look at him.”
“Chuck him in Azkaban and be done with it,” Lily says.
“You don’t mean that.”
She glares at him. Of course she doesn’t bloody mean it.
Harry, meanwhile, looks between his mummy and his daddy with great self-satisfaction, as though he did well in choosing them, if he can say so himself. Lily thinks that’s rather rich, considering that, at least according to her various baby development books, her son currently still can’t see anything more substantial than vague shapes and blurry colours.
“They wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t a last resort. I don’t think they’ve got anywhere else that’s safe to put him,” James adds, gently.
“Don’t know why you bother with your glasses,” she remarks, smoothing down Harry’s unruly black tuft of hair (it flicks straight back up again), “when you wake up every morning and just throw on your Sirius goggles instead.”
James takes Harry from her. Jiggles him a little, until the baby laughs. “I think Sirius is probably on your side,” he says. “Well—maybe not the Azkaban bit. But he gave up on his brother a long time ago. Reckoned he had made his choices, so he ought to live with them.”
Lily takes a seat at the small, square kitchen table. She rubs circles into her temples. Thinks of Petunia. Not Petunia as she’d last seen her, sneering at James, arm-in-arm with that pugnacious husband of hers. No. She thinks of Petunia with her perfect blonde curls undone and straggly and wet, her face white as milk, her clothes sodden and clinging to her skin, pupils blown and eyes maddened, swaying like she half-expects the living room floor to capsize beneath her.
And Lily thinks of Sirius, still fuming in the other room. Face thunderous, words barbed. One hand, nevertheless, wrapped firmly around Regulus’s bony elbow. Basin at the ready in the other.
“No,” says Lily at last. “No, I don’t think that’s true.”
James perks up at once. He’s always known what she’s thinking before she’s even thought it. It’s the worst thing about him. “I’ll tell them, then?”
“Harry’s staying in the room with us,” she warns. “I won’t go so far as to lock the bastard into the spare room, but I will be putting a Caterwauling Charm on the door every evening. He tries anything, we know about it immediately.”
Harry chooses that moment to coo and pull at James's hair with his tiny fist.
“Oi, you,” says James, and tickles Harry.
At once, Lily bursts into tears.
“Oh, sweetheart,” says James, and then Harry is squashed between them as he wraps his spare arm around her shoulders.
“When,” she sobs, “is this—going—to end?”
And for once, her pig-headed, big-hearted, smart-arsed husband has no answer. Instead, he hands her back her son and he says, gently, “I’ll make up the spare room.”
*
Sirius puts his brother to bed at the exact same time that Lily puts down Harry. There is something of a stand-off between the four of them on the landing. This all feels slightly ludicrous, owing to the fact that Harry is a three-month-old infant and Regulus Black is dead on his feet—but perhaps Lily is just hysterical.
Regulus’s eyes—lightless black holes in his skull of a face—stare blankly at the two of them like he’s never seen either of them before; Lily supposes that he hadn’t exactly been compos mentis when he’d been carried into their living room three hours earlier. At least he’s no longer dripping gore onto the carpet.
“That’s my godson,” Sirius tells him, “and if you so much as look at him the wrong way, I’ll hang you by the ankle from a broomstick and send you packing straight back to your beloved Dark Lord, d’you hear me?”
As Sirius remains the only thing that’s holding Regulus upright, the threat deflates like a popped balloon.
Regulus blinks. “Godson?”
Lily glares. Sirius says, “Yes. Godson.”
“Well,” says Regulus, “I always knew Potter had terrible judgement.”
Sirius smacks him (rather weakly) on the shoulder; Regulus seems hardly to notice.
“I’m putting a Caterwauling Charm on the door,” says Lily. “And the window. Any funny business, and I’ll kill you myself. Chop you up and feed you to the cat.”
Harry giggles, and grabs a fistful of her hair.
Regulus’s dead stare is unamused. “Cats. Broomsticks. Whatever shall I do.”
“Oh, if you want to be smart, I’ll tell you where you can shove that broomstick, you smarmy little prat,“ Sirius growls. “Up your skinny little—“
“Charming, Sirius,” interrupts Regulus, too tired for further protest as he lets his brother, still muttering darkly, march him into the spare bedroom.
14th November, 1980
One day passes. Then another. Yet Sirius remains resolute. He will continue skulking around the house until urgent Order business drags him away, and even then, James suspects he’ll leave his brother’s general vicinity only in case of emergency. Meanwhile, Regulus Black does not improve, but neither does he die. James has cheerfully taken this as a victory. Lily, currently prostrate on the couch, is less sure.
She lifts her face from where she’d buried it in the cushions. “What do you think, Harry, hm?”
In response, Harry attempts to shove his entire fist into his mouth. Then he farts.
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” says James, tickling his son’s belly; Harry’s little giggles are fresh as a xylophone scale, his tiny legs flailing. “Marvellous!”
“Don’t look so smug. You’re changing that nappy,” Lily tells him wearily.
James gives Harry’s bum a cursory sniff. Considers his options. Then he says: “Maybe it’s time to rope Sirius into his godfather duties. Have you seen him?”
“That’s evil, Jim,” his lovely wife declares. She’s sinking further and further into the couch, as though the gap between the cushions is eating her. “Heinous. Despicable.”
“I’m getting him,” says James.
“I can’t believe it. I’ve married a monster.”
He cranes his head over and pecks her on the cheek before getting to his feet.
Sirius is not in the kitchen, nor the living room, nor the now-defunct nursery (Harry has slept in the bedroom with them ever since the murderer moved in). James even pokes his head out the window; there’s a little robin redbreast cheering up the garden wall, but no large black dog or disgruntled best friend. Which leaves:
Knock on the door. No answer. He pushes it open with a creak, and warily peers in.
Sirius is snoring. He’s dragged a kitchen chair up the stairs, and in a remarkable feat of exhaustion, has managed to fall asleep on it. His feet are propped up on the foot of the bed, and his head is tilted back, limp as an unstrung puppet. His mouth is wide open and practically begging for James to shove a dirty sock or a spoonful of Marmite into it. He is going to wake with a frightful crick in his neck.
“How long has he been there?” James whispers.
Regulus shrugs. He’s holding a basin, still looking very green. Someone—Sirius—has draped a blanket over his shoulders. “Since this morning,” he croaks.
“Not asleep, surely?”
Regulus’s bloodshot gaze darts upward to settle on James. He does not move an inch from his position on the corner of the bed, hunched over as though he’s afraid that the nausea will come rushing straight back the minute he allows himself to relax.
“He was up rather late.” The with me goes unsaid. James had glimpsed it as he passed the bathroom, door open just a crack: Regulus slumped on the tiles, head pillowed on the toilet seat, acquainting himself with the plumbing, while Sirius had lounged in the empty bathtub and pretended not to care. Sometime after eleven, Lily had put a Muffling Charm on the hall door; they must have been in there all night.
James strides over and opens the window in an attempt to waft away the stale, clammy smell of sickness that lingers in the room. Sirius snuffles a bit, but doesn’t wake. Now that he is within shoving distance, James reconsiders: Sirius’s dark circles are almost as bad as his brother’s.
“That’s it. I’m calling Remus,” he decides.
Regulus somehow goes greener. “You can’t tell anyone I’m here—“
“Calm down, I know. Dumbledore gave us all the rundown. As far as anyone else is concerned, you’re still missing-slash-dead. S’long as you keep your bony arse safely parked on that bed, Remus won’t be any the wiser as to your continued survival.”
Regulus scowls; James winks at him. Then he closes the door, walks down the stairs, waves his wand, and watches as a silver stag soars out through the living-room window and gallops across the garden.
Lily—who has finally extracted herself from the couch to sit next to a giggling Harry—raises a single eyebrow. “What happened to Sirius’s godfatherly duties?”
James sighs, and opens his arms. “Give me my stinky son.”
*
Once the biohazard in Harry’s nappy is dealt with, Lily and James stage an intervention for Sirius in the spare room. It is not their first intervention, and will likely not be the last. This time, however, Harry and Regulus have both been cast as spectators—one distinctly less willing than the other.
“Come on, Pads,” says James. “Go with Remus. Do something mildly reckless. Full moon’s coming up, anyway. He’ll need you then.”
“But—“
“You’re going to go mad hovering over him. You’ve barely left his side in two whole days, mate,” says James. “It’s making you miserable.”
“It’s making me miserable,” says Regulus.
“Reg,” says Sirius, “do you know what duct-tape is? Because it’s going on your mouth in a minute.” To James, he says, “What if something happens? What if he tries something?”
“I’ll stop him,” says James.
“I’ll stop him,” says Lily from the door, baby on her hip.
“I’m not going to try anything,” says Regulus.
“Oh yeah?” Sirius rounds on his brother. “How do we know? He could be faking it, James. This could all be one big elaborate trick.”
Regulus—still locked in a loving embrace with the vomit-basin—raises a single brow at his brother. “Oh yes,” he says, acidly, “you caught me. That’s why I drank straight poison. That’s why I took a little dip in a lake full of Inferi. Just to trick you.”
Sirius’s returning scowl is brief and perfunctory. He turns back to James and Lily. “What if he gets sick again?”
“I’ll get sick on your face in a minute,” Regulus mutters from the bed.
“He’s a big boy,” says Lily, “I’m sure he’ll manage.”
“Stay, go, I couldn’t care less.” Regulus is a vision of abject misery as he presses his forehead against the rim of the basin, a thin sheen of sweat on the nape of his neck. Poetic justice, Lily thinks. “Just stop arguing or get the fuck out.”
Sirius whirls around. “Don’t fucking swear in front of my fucking godson!”
*
A blissfully ignorant Remus, unsuccessfully concealing his bemusement, leads a glowering Sirius Black from the cottage forty five minutes later.
14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th November, 1980
Regulus Black continues to not die. In fact, five days after his sudden and dramatic arrival, he keeps his breakfast and half his dinner down. The day after that, he comes downstairs and fumes at them from the couch; Sirius, who has been persuaded into limiting his mother-henning to a very reasonable hour a day, does not even have to help him. The day after that, he even showers—something that they’re all rather relieved about—though he had point-blank refused to go near the bath, and hadn’t actually braved the shower until he had consumed enough vials of Calming Draught to knock out a hippogriff. Although, from the various bits and pieces she’s gleaned from Sirius regarding a lake and what sounds like zombies, Lily is inclined to forgive him for that.
It is odd, having a stranger in their home. It’s only been the three of them since Harry was born. Since a grim-faced Dumbledore had knocked at the door. Since the Fidelius was cast. But it’s not quite as odd as it might have been. Regulus is not particularly threatening, not even when he tries to be. And despite herself, despite her knowledge of who he is, and what he’s done, Lily finds herself glad that their ‘guest’ is on the mend.
For Sirius’s sake.
28th November, 1980
Let it be known that, while Lily Potter is emphatically not a morning person, she is a fair one: it’s her turn. So here she is, at five o’clock in the morning in the freezing depths of November, standing on a hot water bottle in the darkened kitchen and rocking her terrible infant son back to sleep. Colic must have been invented by God to punish mothers, she thinks, and then she feels awful, because Harry’s probably suffering much worse than she is, the poor thing, and her heart aches for him, it really does—but she still wishes he had had the good manners to limit his fussing to regular business hours.
Then the second poor thing of the month appears at the doorway, looking nearly as wretched as the first. Regulus no longer appears at risk of sudden death, but his delicate pureblood constitution remains wobbly; he’d thrown up so violently earlier that evening that Lily was shocked that the noise hadn’t broken the sound barrier. (Or the Fidelius). She was only glad Sirius wasn’t around to witness it this time, or he would have certainly have set up permanent camp in the bathtub, or thrown up himself with worry; Lily, who does not like or trust their resident ex-Death Eater, had felt a bit nauseous herself at the sound of it. But, since Regulus Black had staggered out of the bathroom with his guts still in their correct places, and evidently did not collapse and expire on his way down the stairs, and used to be a member of a terrorist organisation out to kill her and people like her, Lily is trying not to let it get to her.
“I hope Harry didn’t keep you up,” she lies.
Regulus doesn’t deign to honour her with an answer; the purpling bags under his eyes have bypassed concerning and veered headfirst into comical. Though, to be fair, they cannot be attributed solely to sharing the same roof as a colicky baby. He’s so exhausted he has even conceded to wearing Muggle clothing without complaint, and his skin has taken on a pallor heretofore never seen on anyone still possessing a pulse. His jumper (Sirius’s originally, she presumes) hangs frightfully loose on him; the pyjama bottoms are definitely Sirius’s, considering they’re a bright vermillion and patterned with golden stars.
She resettles the sniffly Harry in her arms. Her wand is within reach on the kitchen table, and his has been confiscated by the Order, but he’s still a Death Eater, defection or not. She doesn’t know where to begin trusting him. She doesn’t know if she has it in her.
Then, in his posh rasp, Regulus says: “Would you like help?”
Lily stares at him. “What.”
“You heard me.”
“Yeah,” she says, “refill the hot water bottle.”
“Pardon?”
“You heard me,” she says.
He follows her gaze down to the hot water bottle that she is currently still standing upon. She steps off. The lukewarm water inside sloshes about; the icy kitchen tiles hurt her freezing feet even through three pairs of socks. She dreams, briefly and achingly, of a bubble-bath. Harry lets out another miserable hiccough, lower lip jutting into a wet pout, tears clumping his black eyelashes into spider’s legs.
Regulus looks at the hot water bottle. Then he looks at Lily. He opens his mouth to speak, but she waggles one of her few spare fingers at him. “If this is going to be some nonsense about Warming Charms, I don’t want to hear it. It just isn’t the same.”
He closes his mouth, expression mutinous.
“Boil the bloody kettle, Black,” Lily says.
Regulus picks the water bottle up off the kitchen tiles. Then he looks with real trepidation at the electric kettle. Lily offers no further instructions, and he clearly senses none will be forthcoming, because he sets the hot water bottle gingerly on the counter before leaning forward to examine the cheap plastic kettle with all the intensity of a man faced with a blackboard of complex equations. To add insult to injury, he bends at the waist, shoulders straight and posture perfect. She would laugh at him, but she’s so tired she can’t remember how. Where do laughs usually begin, anyway? In the throat or in the belly?
“There’s a second one in the cupboard under the sink.” It comes out before she can stop it. “James’s. He never uses it since he already runs hotter than a bloody furnace. It’s there if you want it.”
Regulus Black frowns at her, one hand on the handle of the kettle. The question is unspoken; she hears it loud and clear.
“You look like a man who has bad circulation,” she informs him primly, and carries the (finally! finally!) dozy Harry into the sitting room, seating herself gently on the couch and turning the telly on mute. Slowly, and with several little sniffles, Harry nods off on her chest. She briefly thinks about attempting to carry him to his cot upstairs, but finds herself too tired to move.
Ten minutes later, Regulus appears at the door. He’s wrapped the hot water bottle in a tea towel so it won’t burn her. Lily is—resentfully—touched.
Then, without having to be asked, and moving very slowly, he slides the wrapped hot water bottle under her feet. When he straightens up, one side of his mouth has hooked up into a sort-of-smile. The shape of it Lily recognises—it’s Sirius’s smile—but it looks like something new on Regulus’s sharper, skinnier face.
Harry sighs, a puff of warmth against her throat.
Lily realises she left her wand in the kitchen. And she’d never heard the Caterwauling Charm go off.
Regulus Black is quick on the uptake. He takes a step back. Long-fingered hands where she can see them, palms open and empty. “You forgot,” he tells her, more gently than expected, “and I suspected it wasn’t the best time to remind you.”
“I forgot,” she repeats, faintly. The TV keeps flickering. She’s not half as frightened as she thinks she should be. “Christ. Well. Do remind me next time, won’t you?”
“Gladly,” says Regulus dryly. He sinks down on the armchair, heavy eyelids already at half-mast, so that only a half-moon of grey iris is visible. “Do you mind? Because, frankly, I don’t think I’ll manage the stairs again without at least an hour-long nap.”
“Remind me, who is the baby here?” she asks.
“James, of course,” he says at once.
She throws a cushion at him. He smiles again. Tiredly. Crookedly.
*
James comes down the stairs as the sun rises. He opens the door to the sitting room to find the three of them asleep and snoring in chorus.
The seemingly interminable November of 1980
The most horrible thing about Lily and James Potter, Regulus discovers very soon into his involuntary sojourn in Godric’s Hollow, is that they’re just not very good at hating him. Oh, they can be prickly, certainly, and he’s prickly right back—but, despite being wandless, weak, and entirely at their mercy, they never actually threaten him. In fact, he finds himself settling into an oddly comfortable sort of rhythm:
He wakes up, attempts the stairs, and once he’s managed that, is functionally trapped on the ground floor until he works up the energy to ascend them again. He tries not to nap, but he’s rarely successful. The toilet bowl is his sworn enemy. He generally feels like throwing up for about twenty-to-thirty minutes after eating anything, but, through sheer spite, keeps most meals down.
He might pick up a book, Muggle or Magical. He tries to read it, but just ends up falling asleep again. He wakes up. He wonders if this will be his life forever. Weak as a kitten and threatened by the stairs. Meanwhile, Lily and James fawn over their progeny’s latest incomprehensible babble or toothless smile in the other room.
They’re so in love it’s hideous, verging on emotionally obscene, and they’re spoiling baby Harry rotten. They don’t even shout at him.
Around midday, James will usually deliver Regulus some lunch. Though he and Lily assure Regulus that he has free rein of the kitchen during the day, he is too proud to admit he has never made himself his own food in nineteen years of life, and would, frankly, have no idea where to start. Anyway, the Potters’ kitchen uses elec-tricks. He’d rather starve than attempt any of that Muggle nonsense.
(This does not include the kettle. He uses the kettle. He will not admit that he thinks the elec-trick kettle is a fantastic invention. Not even on his deathbed.)
This is around the time of the day he designates to wallowing. He longs for Kreacher, for his mates, for the comforts of Grimmauld Place, where there are more rooms than anyone knows what to do with, and nobody gazes at him with thinly-disguised pity or open distrust when they think he’s not looking. But he gets over it. Mostly.
(He hadn’t really had very many mates, at least not ones he actually trusted. And Kreacher was safer believing Regulus to be dead. And Grimmauld Place—)
(Well. He’d rather not dwell on Grimmauld Place.)
Then: dinner. Some days, Sirius comes. His moods vary. That’s nothing new; so do Regulus’s. It might be a Black thing, but he’s still feeling a little too wobbly to devote himself to any serious introspection over it. That can come after he’s conquered the stairs. After dinner, he helps clean up, because it’s polite, even though James or Lily or Sirius, being in possession of their wands, usually end up doing most of it.
Then, Lily or James puts the baby to bed. They might watch the television. Regulus wants to show nothing but disdain for the television, but it’s too hard a front to maintain, especially when the whole thing ends up being both interesting and absurd.
It’s like the wireless, but with pictures. They even have little plays in there!
Lily is a fan of The Doctor Who; she explains the plot to him on the first Saturday evening he spends in Godric’s Hollow. His confusion must be evident on his face, because James laughs at him. Two Saturdays and two episodes later, he remains none the wiser.
“So… it’s magic, but it’s not actual magic,” he says.
“It’s science-fiction.”
She may as well be speaking Greek to him, so he quickly moves on. “And the blue telling-phone box… is a time-turner?”
“Er—sort of. A time-turner, and a Portkey. So it travels through both time and space.”
Regulus is alarmed. “But, it’s not real? Muggles can’t travel like that?” He had only just gotten to grips with air-o-planes and hell-to-coppers.
“Of course not,” says Lily cheerfully.
“So, why…?”
“Because,” she tells him patiently, “it makes for a good story.”
“Right,” he says, narrowing his eyes at the television, “but they’ve still got everything wrong about vampires. Though I do quite like the rheumatic dog.”
“Robotic dog. Not rheumatic.” Lily’s mouth twitches. He has no idea why.
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“I wish Sirius could shoot lasers out of his nose,” says James.
“I don’t,” says Regulus.
He tries not to fall asleep on the armchair. He usually fails. Lily and James usually rouse him by being needlessly loud, which is thoughtful of them. Steeling himself, he tackles the stairs. Lily and James are smart enough not to offer help. Should he be present, Sirius is not. Regulus soothes himself by remembering, in vivid detail, that time he dared Sirius to lick a toad they’d found in the gardens in Kent only for Sirius to break out in a violently purple, full-body rash as a result. It doesn’t help. But Regulus makes it to his bed, and, if he’s lucky, doesn’t dream.
He’s rarely lucky.
He doesn’t know if James and Lily hear him. Surely not, if he doesn’t wake Harry; he assumes they’ve soundproofed the baby’s cot, at the very least. Regulus usually paces around the darkened bedroom until his legs give out or the shakes cease, whichever comes first. Perhaps he scratches the Potters’ ugly ginger cat between the ears and underneath the chin. It has, inexplicably, taken a liking to him, and curls up at his feet at night. Regulus resents this less than expected. Eventually, morning comes. He resents that less than expected, too.
In fact, there are a lot of things he resents less than expected.
Lily does not put any more Caterwauling Charms on the door.
Chapter 2: December
Chapter Text
2nd December, 1980
“They grow up so fast, don’t they?” says James fondly.
They’re in the kitchen, watching through the window as Black the Younger—wearing two jumpers and an obnoxiously orange Chudley Cannons bobble-hat James had excavated from the lawless depths of the airing cupboard—painstakingly stacks all of the empty flowerpots in the garden according to colour and size. Meanwhile, Black the Elder smokes on the deckchair and levitates dead leaves for the amusement of the apple-cheeked bundle of blankets on the grass that is their son.
Things have come on leaps and bounds in the Potter household. Harry can roll over all by himself. Regulus isn't on the brink of collapse at any given moment anymore and, unlike the baby, no longer takes involuntary midday naps. All things in their time, though, Lily thinks. Harry’s day will come.
“He’s running out of things to sort,” Lily remarks. “I don’t think the house has ever been so well-ordered. I reckon he’ll ask if he can reorganise my wardrobe next.”
“Going on a cursory glance into that wardrobe, that might be a good thing,” says James. “Tidiness isn’t exactly your strong suit, love.”
She glares at him.
“As long as he doesn’t go near your knicker drawer,” James adds.
She glares harder.
“Sirius actually suggested that we suggest scrapbooking,” he tells her.
Lily’s glower breaks. “Sirius suggested suggesting scrapbooking? Why are we the middle men in this chain of suggestion?”
James says, “I think there is no greater way of guaranteeing Regulus won’t try something than having Sirius be the one to put it to him.”
“Fair point.” She tips out the dregs of her coffee into the sink. “Ha—what do you reckon would’ve happened if Sirius had told him to join the Death Eaters?”
“Oh, he’d be front and centre in Muggle Rights marches, I expect.”
“Chaining himself to the gates of the Ministry?”
“Of course. Even going on Spell Strike until enough static builds up in his ears to make his head pop like a balloon.”
“My hero,” says Lily, pretending to swoon.
Blissfully ignorant to the fact that he is the focus of their discussion, Regulus stalks over to Sirius and appears to be telling him off for smoking Muggle cigarettes around a baby. In response, Sirius tugs the Chudley Cannons hat down over Regulus’s eyes. Harry, who has thus far been quite content chewing on the corner of his favoured blankie, finds this enormously funny. Regulus attempts to look mutinous, but it’s hard not to smile around a laughing baby.
“I wonder when his birthday is,” says James. “We could get him a toilet brush.”
“A really fancy one. Slytherin-themed.”
“Embossed with his initials. Just think of how noble and proud he can be while cleaning up vomit.”
“Give him Harry to burp after a feed. We can find out.”
James makes a sound like a wounded animal. “This is bullying. I shouldn’t laugh.”
“I don’t care,” says Lily. “I’ll laugh for the two of us.”
She pauses by the sink, feeling the hard edge of the counter jut into her belly—so much softer, ever since Harry, and she likes it better this way—and watches the two brothers play-fight in the garden. Regulus isn’t supposed to be doing magic—never mind the fact he has no wand to perform it with—but he has nonetheless whipped up a little whirlwind of dead leaves on the other end of the garden with a careful wave of his finger. Sirius, bouncing Harry on his knee, is twirling his wand with his free hand in order to create his own, presumably with the intention of having his little leaf tornado battle Regulus’s little leaf tornado. The clouds hang heavy and low and white overhead, promising snow; the boys’ laughter floats through the door, left open only a crack to stop the cold from getting in.
Then, at the same time:
Lily says, “—I want to see Petunia.”
James says, “—Have you thought about another baby?”
Neither of them say anything more for a very long moment.
“You want another baby?” Lily manages at last.
Red-cheeked, James shrugs. “I was an only child. Well, if you don’t count Sirius…”
“It’s generally very difficult to discount Sirius,” Lily remarks, feeling almost light-headed.
“I know that—well, that,” he gestures at the warring hurricane at the far end of the garden—birds are scattering in alarm, and the mossy garden wall is only still standing because of the battle fortress’s worth of fortification spells Moody had placed on it—“isn’t perfect. Really fucking far from it, actually.”
“They’re not what I would take as an ideal model of sibling relationships, no.”
“But… I don’t know.” James runs a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end. She’d like to smooth it down, but experience tells her it’s a lost cause. “I’d like Harry to have something like that, you know? Especially if… Well. This whole prophecy business sounds lonely. To say the least. And I think, you and I, we have more than enough love between us for two. But it’s up to you. And you don’t have to choose now, or decide anything for certain, or do anything, really. I just…” He gestures again, almost helplessly, at the scuffle in the garden—Regulus has Sirius in a headlock that is certain to be short-lived, Harry is squealing in delight like the born menace he is.
“But anyway,” he says briskly, “what were you saying about Petunia?”
“We might invite them for Boxing Day lunch.”
James needs a moment to process this. Then, a little squeakily, “Might we?”
“Yeah, what’d’you reckon?”
“You sure she won’t say no?”
“Don’t sound so hopeful,” Lily warns him wryly. “We can test Harry out on a cousin before giving him a sibling. Do you know, when I was born, Tuney threw a book at me?”
The door swings wide open. Goosebumps prickle all down Lily’s arms as an icy wind blasts in. “Who threw a book at you?” asks Regulus.
He looks just about as alive as Lily has ever seen him, and that’s including their six shared years at Hogwarts. There’s colour in his cheeks, and his eyes are shining. The orange bobble-hat is askew, curls escaping around his ears. Harry is braced easily against his hip, and looks at home there.
“My sister, Petunia,” says Lily. “She was two years old at the time, and very jealous that the new baby was getting all the attention.”
“Did it hit you?”
“Turned into rubber in mid-air and bounced off my head,” says Lily.
“Oh, that’s not too bad, then. Sirius levitated me over the fountain in Dartmoor when I was four.”
“I regret that now. I should have dropped you into it,” says Sirius, kicking off his boots at the door. “Builds character.”
“I have plenty of character,” says Regulus, affronted.
Lily takes Harry from Regulus, waggling her finger at the two Black’s. “Before this escalates, I’m laying down the law. There will be no tornadoes inside the house!”
“You’re good at this,” says James in her ear.
“Shut up, or I’ll throw a book at your head.”
“I love you too, darling.”
*
That night, in bed, Harry sleeping soundly in the cot next to them, Lily looks at the ceiling and says, “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“When all this is over. Or when it calms down, at least. I think we could have another one. I think I’d like another one.”
She’s gotten sniffly. She doesn’t know why. The darkened ceiling overhead blurs. She hears the sheets shift as James moves to lie on his side, facing her, his breath warm where it ghosts over her bare shoulder.
“It won’t be like you and Petunia,” he says.
“You don’t know that. We could have a Squib who resents Harry. Or maybe Harry’s a Squib who’ll resent the other baby. Anything could go wrong. We might be bad parents.”
“You could never be a bad parent. Anyway, if we have a Squib,” says James, “I’ll lead the Squib Rights marches. Front and centre, I swear.”
“And chain yourself to the gates of the Ministry?” she asks thickly.
“Mhm. And go on Spell Strike ’til my ears pop.”
She giggles. It sounds rather wet. “What if the baby hates Quidditch?”
“Oh, in that case, instant disownment.”
She buries both her tears and her laughter in the duvet. James traces her freckles until her breathing has evened out and her eyes have dried.
“I don’t understand how you can be so calm,” she says. “Doesn’t it ever hit you? That we might never get out of this house. That Harry is…”
“All the time,” he murmurs. “I nearly had a panic attack into my Weetabix on Friday. But you’re stronger than me. If I started crying, I wouldn’t know how to stop. And at any rate, your tears are much prettier than mine. Or even Harry’s. Best crier in the family, hands down.”
“I certainly bloody cry enough for the three of us,” she says ruefully.
“Things will look better in the morning,” he reminds her. “They always do.”
“Unless you’re having a panic attack into your Weetabix.” Her eyes are heavy, the lids drifting shut. She feels better for having cried, like a cloth that has been cleaned and wrung-out.
“We’ll let Regulus handle that part. He’s a dab hand at panic attacks. Best in the family. Hands down, easy.”
“Alright, then. He can panic for the three of us.”
“Precisely. Equal division of labour. Everyone with their own unique role. It’s what keeps the household in ship-shape. We should write a manual. Your Baby and Your Pet Death Eater: From Birth to Age Five to Dramatic Defection. Or maybe How to Train Your Terrorist. Or maybe—”
“Jim, dear?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I love you. Shut up and go to sleep.”
9th December, 1980
John Lennon has been shot dead in New York. Lily tells Regulus this over breakfast. He nods, looking suitably solemn. Then: “Who is John Lennon?”
That evening, Sirius brings over all of his Beatles records (and a bottle of Jameson). James suspects Regulus regrets ever asking.
11th December, 1980
If the cleaning frenzy wasn’t enough, James knows that Regulus is bored because he’s started to help them with dinner and is getting incredibly invested in which musicians are or aren't miming on Top of the Pops.
“Imagine if Slytherin could see you now,” says Lily.
“Don’t bring Salazar into this. At any rate, he’d agree with me,” he says, leaning forward to study the television more closely. “Look, Lily, look!” he cries, pointing insistently. “The bugger is clearly out of sync with the music; the gall of it is frankly egregious.”
“No such thing as true artistry these days,” James agrees, trying desperately not to smile.
“You should write to the BBC,” says Lily.
“Oh, I will. The slide in standards is unacceptable. Do you think they take owl post?”
12th December, 1980
Regulus has not taken up Sirius’s suggestion to start scrapbooking. But he’s doing something shifty in the garden shed. Lily isn’t sure if they should supervise that—they watch the Muggle news in the evenings sometimes, and she wouldn’t put it past him to try and build a pipe bomb or something—but James insists that they need to give him his space.
“It’s about trust,” he says. “We show that we trust him, he proves himself trustworthy. We’ll undermine all our progress if we start snooping around.”
“Are we sure he’s not building a pipe bomb, though?”
“Lily, darling love of my life, the cleverest witch I know. What would he be building a pipe bomb for? To blow up the cat?”
“To avenge John Lennon, of course,” she says.
13th December, 1980
Regulus is obliged to hide in his room for the entire day, as they've invited Remus, Peter, and Marlene over for mulled wine in a fairly feeble attempt to recreate a bit of normalcy. It's odd having Peter occupy the armchair in the corner. James finds himself turning to look for Regulus’s reaction when he makes an idle joke or remark, and doing a double-take when he gets Peter’s twitchy snicker in place of Regulus's grudging smirk. Regulus has a laugh that sounds like he isn’t sure what to make of it; it’s so different to Sirius’s brazen, brash bark, but no less charming, no less capable of worming in under James’s skin. Slytherin or not, James might well have made firm friends with Regulus Black just as easily as he had with Sirius had Regulus been the one stuffed in a train compartment with him from London to Scotland all those years ago. And that shouldn’t be such a frightening thought. But it is.
Because Regulus was a Death Eater, and while he might have been the one pushing for Lily to let him stay, Lily had been right: that was for Sirius more than it was for anyone else. But now, James thinks, he’s fond of Regulus. Not just a token fondness founded on his connection to Sirius, either, but fondness for its own sake. Now, James likes Regulus Black enough to be angry with him.
Harry is doted over to the extreme the entire day, of course, but James sees him look around on occasion, little lip jutting out, for a face he won’t find. James is not sure how that’s meant to make him feel. And though he isn’t quite crawling yet, as soon as the others have left and Regulus is released from the confines of his bedroom, James's baby son wriggles his way across the floor, opens his chubby little arms, and clings like a limpet to Regulus’s chest.
“I think he likes you,” Lily says sagely.
The terror on Regulus’s face is as funny as it is sad; James suspects that Regulus has been thinking the same thing. He gets up, a sudden restlessness taking hold of him, and clears all the left-over plates and mugs and wine-glasses. Lily follows him into the kitchen, and lays her head on his shoulder while he scrubs the dishes by hand as though they’ve each done him a great personal wrong. His fingers are red and raw by the time he’s finished. Through the glass of the window pane, they see Marlene’s festive fairy-lights still dancing in the garden.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she says.
“I’m thinking that it was so much easier before,” he says. “More black-and-white. More comfortable. Now, I’m content to leave our baby son unsupervised in his company. And I should be happy about that. I should be delighted. I no longer actively distrust the man we let into our home. But it was easier when I did. Easier to bear.”
“I still think it’s fairly black-and-white,” she says. “I mean, it’s not as though it was a minor difference of opinion. He was a Death Eater. There’s still a lot he has to prove.”
“Yes,” says James, “I know, but now I care that he proves it.”
“And you never care about things half-way,” she says. “It’s all or nothing.”
“I don’t want to give him all,” he says. “He doesn’t deserve that.”
“But you can’t give him nothing.”
He sighs. Bows his head, hands braced against the hard edge of the counter. She doesn’t move her head from where it rests on his shoulder.
18th December, 1980
Regulus is not building a pipe bomb in the garden shed.
But it occurs to him, just as his project begins to come together, that it’s a fairly meagre offering as far as these things go. So, he crunches his way back across the frozen grass of the lawn, dodging those ridiculous floating fairy-lights, ducks into the kitchen, and says, “Would you like me to babysit?”
Lily looks up from her potion-making periodical. “What?”
Regulus reddens at once. But he’s committed to this thing now, so he’ll see it through. “If you and James, er, wanted an evening to yourselves. I could take Harry. I know you can’t exactly leave, but I could entertain him in the other room. He’s an easy baby when he’s not colicky. It’s not any trouble.”
She stares at him with those disconcerting green eyes.
“Just thought I’d offer,” he adds lamely.
A small wrinkle appears between her ginger eyebrows. She says, “Do me and James… seem like we need an evening to ourselves?”
Oh God, he thinks, oh Merlin, oh God, what the fuck have I accidentally implied—
“No!” It comes out far too forcefully. “That’s not what I—“
“Oh, hello, you’re out of the shed,” says James, strutting cheerfully into the kitchen, “I’ve just put Harry down for his nap.”
“Regulus thinks we need an evening to ourselves,” says Lily at once.
Regulus actually thinks he’d quite like the Dark Lord to appear right here, right now, and put him out of his misery. “That is not—“
“Excuse me?” says James. “I think you’ll find that my wife is perfectly satisfied—“
“I’m going back into the shed,” says Regulus, “and I will not be coming back out. For at least an hour. Perhaps not ever. I was just trying to be nice!”
They’re laughing at him.
He hunches his shoulders and glares until they stop. Then, with as much dignity as he can muster: “My Christmas present. For both of you. Babysitting. Offer stands, take it or leave it, and please, for the love of Merlin, use a Muffling Charm should you decide to make use of it.”
The sight of James’s grin sickens him. “It’s only natural when a man and a woman love each other very much—“
“Shed!” Regulus shrieks. “Forever!”
But because Harry has just been put down for a nap, he does not slam the kitchen door behind him.
23rd of December, 1980
They take him up on his offer. In fact, they’re even gracious about it. And they’re grateful enough not to mention the birds and the bees—Regulus is barely a year younger than them, honestly, the man-and-wife jokes are both unfunny and unseemly—for a whole day leading up to it.
Instead, they start talking about shit.
“We’ve got a system,” Lily says, and points to her chest. “I generally take care of one end, James takes care of the other.”
She looks radiant. She’s wearing a dress. Her eyelids glitter, and her arms are bare; he can see the freckles tossed over them. And James is clean-shaven and smiling, almost hyper-active in his excitement, his shoulders broadened by the clean lines of his shirt. He’s even combed his hair, for all the good it’ll do. It’s a huge amount of effort considering they’re just having a candlelit dinner in the front room, but Regulus finds himself glad he can do this for them. He’s diligently refusing to reflect on this compulsion—the newfound desire to help, to make himself useful, to ensure they don’t hate him—because therein madness lies.
Anyway, even if he does have Stockholm syndrome, at least the baby is charming.
“I am aware of how children work, Lily, thank you,” he says. “Though I’m afraid I may have to stick with James on this one. Quite tragically, I remain incapable of lactating.”
“Never say never,” says Lily. “Anyway, I’ve already made up a bottle for him, so you shouldn’t have to worry about growing boobs in the next three hours. Have you ever changed a nappy before?”
He sends her a flat look.
“I see your point,” she says. “Right. Well. It’s dead easy. Watch and learn.”
He watches her change Harry’s nappy idly; thinking on how Kreacher had done the same for three generations of Blacks. He’s often wondered why the Potters don’t have a house-elf—James is certainly wealthy enough—but in his experience, Muggleborns do tend to get a bit weird about these things. He can’t imagine why.
“Mind you, do be ready to dodge in case he decides right now is the time for a wee,” she says. “He’s peed on James before.”
“To be fair,” says James, “so has Sirius.”
Regulus needs a moment to take that one in.
“I had quite the stag night,” says James, “in every sense of the word.”
“And voilà,” says Lily, fastening the new nappy and levitating the dirty one over to the bin. “Easy-peasy.”
“Piss-easy, one might even say,” says James.
Regulus and Lily need a moment to take that one in.
“James, I don’t mean to be rude,” says Regulus, fully intending to be rude, “but you are so lucky she married you.”
*
Regulus and Harry have a fantastic evening. Harry has his bottle. Regulus burns pasta but eats it anyway. They watch three episodes of the Clangers that Lily has “taped”; Harry is much more entertained by the strings on Regulus’s borrowed hoodie than by the soup dragon, which is not a species of dragon Regulus is familiar with. Regulus reads the first half of A Christmas Carol even though he is not feeling very festive. Harry has a poo. Regulus’s first attempt at a nappy change is a resounding success: nobody gets pissed on.
He puts Harry to bed (in the nursery, now back in use) and sits on the sofa with the television on mute.
It becomes harder not to reflect with the television on mute.
He isn’t unhappy. And that sends shockwaves all the way down to his core, because he ought to be unhappy. He’s stuck in a house with two of Dumbledore’s prime lackeys, with two people who ought to be his sworn enemies—with a blood traitor and a M—
He takes the television off mute, and watches the end of a Muggle Christmas film about an angel and a Muggle who wants to kill himself, and falls asleep once he knows the Muggle man doesn’t go through with it, and doesn’t wake until a slightly less put-together Lily Potter tries to sneak past him to the kitchen for a glass of water.
“You two had a good evening, then?” he asks, dryly, propping himself up on his elbows as she passes. The glitter that had been on her eyelids is now everywhere but her eyelids, and she’s wearing a blanket like a shawl around her shoulders.
“Oh, shut up, you,” she says, and throws a cushion at him.
“You’re welcome,” he says, catching it with well-practised ease.
Chapter 3: Christmas Eve
Notes:
Some joking references to sex and liberal Sigmund Freud mockery.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
24th December, 1980
The twenty-fourth of December dawns blissfully languid, Regulus having failed to move from the sofa for the whole night (plus the bulk of the morning), while the ugly cat—his near-constant companion—is a fluffy lump purring on the hearth. He has run out of books to read, and his little project in the garden shed is wrapped and ready to go. Boredom is soothing and safe, the garish coloured lights on the ugly Christmas tree winking at him from the corner. Lily is up to something nefarious in the kitchen, while James is on Harry duty upstairs. Regulus thinks this might be what contentment is, though he has very little to use as a frame of reference, contentment having looked rather different in Grimmauld Place after all. Somehow, not even the crick in his neck from sleeping on the sofa can dampen his mood.
Then, mid-afternoon, Lily hurries into the sitting room and tugs him up to his feet, a wild look in her eyes. “I need you to distract James for a while. Don’t let him near the kitchen!”
“What?”
“I’m in the middle of making chomchom. As a surprise. For Christmas. It’s his favourite. They’re on the boil now, shouldn’t take me much longer, but–”
“But you’re a bad cook,” says Regulus. He has no idea what chomchom is, but he does know (courtesy of the fact he is equally deficient in the culinary arts) there is a reason he and Lily are the ones usually relegated to chopping vegetables at dinnertime. That, and the fact that James’s relatively few neuroses all tend to rear their ugly heads in the kitchen.
She scowls. “Shut up and do it. At least another two hours. Preferably three.”
He understands the urgency. Harry will be going down for his afternoon nap, which means James’s hands will be empty, and James Potter with no readily available source of stimulation is a liability to everyone in the vicinity. He will roam from room to room until he finds someone suitable to pester.
Lily shoves him through the door and straight onto a collision course with her husband.
“Oh, hello,” says James cheerfully, catching Regulus by the shoulders to steady him before he falls (Lily possesses a mean shove). “What’re you up to?”
“Er—I—would you like to help me clean?”
“No,” says James.
“Tough luck.” Grabbing James by the wrist, Regulus drags him back through the hall and into the front room.
The ‘front room’ of the Potter’s cottage, so named because it is situated at the front of the house, has been known to switch between study, workshop, potions laboratory, date night dining room, and Sirius’s bedroom, depending on necessity. Regulus has several opinions about this, few of them positive—aside from smug satisfaction that he gets his own bedroom while Sirius is relegated to a fold-out-sofa tucked between a desk and the bubbling cauldron of whatever Lily currently happens to be brewing—but most of his ire is directed at the fact that, no matter how many times he organises the room, his painstaking work is invariably undone by the day’s end.
“You cleaned it yesterday morning,” James whines, “how many times—”
He trails off. Regulus had cleaned yesterday. And today, the surface of the desk is entirely obscured by various vials, glass jars and bottles, as well as what appears to be a bushel of hemlock and an entire chopping board’s worth of dead horned slugs. On one of the chairs is a tablecloth and two half-spent candles, remaining evidence of James and Lily’s date the previous evening. Regulus spots a dropped fork gleaming half-way under the bookcase.
Sometimes, he really does miss Kreacher.
“I think I want to burn this room down,” he says.
“You’re obsessed,” says James. “I like the mess. It’s charming. It’s got loads of character.”
“It’s a health hazard.”
“Oh, what’s life without a bit of risk?”
“Hemlock, James. There is hemlock on the desk.”
“We’re not irresponsible. The door is charmed to alarm if Harry or the cat crosses the threshold.”
“I’m not worried about Harry or the cat when you ate off that desk yesterday.”
“And I’m still here to tell the tale.”
“You won’t be when I’m through with you,” Regulus mutters. “Start with the bottles, I’ll deal with the slugs.”
“You’re a tyrant. A despot. A control freak,” says James—but Regulus, bent over the slugs, hears the clinking of the glass bottles behind him as James begins to move them back to the correct shelves.
“I’m not a control freak,” he says, wrinkling his nose as he tips the chopped slugs into a plastic container (a “lunchbox”, Lily had called it, though he shudders at the idea of having horned slugs for lunch) and prays that she’d washed her hands before starting on whatever the chomchom is. “I just have healthy respect for a well-organised, ergonomic living space.”
James snorts out a laugh, and claps Regulus on the shoulder. “Oh yeah, absolutely.”
Regulus’s mental faculties seem to flicker out for a second at the sheer fondness he hears in James’s voice. His stomach contracts to the size of a peanut. He might vomit. Worse, he might cry.
“Sod off,” he mutters, and shoves James’s hand off.
After a couple of minutes spent tidying in comfortable silence, James says: “Anyway, why does Lily want me out of her hair?”
For the second time, Regulus’s brain short-circuits. “What do you mean?” he asks, voice perhaps half-an-octave higher in pitch than it ought to be.
“Obviously she’s got you to distract me.”
“You’re mental. That’s not it at all. I just wanted your help.”
James raises an eyebrow, and nods towards Regulus’s current activity: re-arranging the row of potion vials that James had just ‘organised’ so that they’re placed properly with labels outward, James, it’s not that bloody hard—
“She’s making chomchom, isn’t she?” says James.
“No! She—I—er—”
James smirks at him.
“...I will neither confirm nor deny that she is making… chomchom.”
“Excellent!” James rubs his hands together eagerly. “Have you ever had one before?”
Regulus shakes his head.
“Oh, you’re in for a treat! My mum showed Lily how to do it, just like how my gran had taught her,” James tells him, his excitement almost infectious. “You know how useless Lily is at cooking? Well, she practised and practised and practised making chomchom until even my mum couldn’t tell the difference between Lily’s and her own. It was around the time we were doing our NEWTs, too. She called it ‘procrasti-cooking’. Mum was so proud of her when she mastered it.”
“Did you marry your mother, is that it?”
“Oi! Lily was the one who asked my mum to teach her because she knew I loved it. It was thoughtful of her!”
Regulus doesn’t know why that makes him sad—an inexplicably happy-sad that hits him like a physical ache. He pretends he doesn’t feel it.
“She used to always make it for my birthday growing up. My mum did, I mean.” James’s smile grows distant for a moment, before he refocuses on Regulus. “In hindsight, I’m actually really glad that they got to spend some time together before she died.”
“And that Lily knows how to make chomchom, I presume,” Regulus says, because this conversation appears to be veering into dangerously emotional territory.
“And that Lily knows how to make chomchom,” James agrees. He nudges Regulus playfully. “Anyway, you’re one to talk about marrying your mother. The way Sirius tells it, you and Walburga are Freud’s wet dream.”
“My mother and I are whose what?”
Immediately, James’s smile is replaced by a grimace. “Never mind. Actually, pretend I didn’t say that.”
“No, I think I will mind, James. Who is Freud? And by wet dream, surely you don’t mean—”
“Please,” says James, burying his head in his hands, “please, forget I said anything.”
“I had never taken you for a pervert.” Regulus pretends to be scandalised.
Hazel eyes peer at Regulus from between the gaps in James’s fingers. He finally lowers his hands, expression rueful. “I hate to break it to you, mate, but in this context, I’m afraid you’re the pervert.”
“I’m still not clear on what context that might be.”
“And I won’t be enlightening you.”
Regulus narrows his eyes. “Sirius will.”
“I really don’t think you want that,” says James, snorting out another laugh.
Regulus crosses his arms over his chest and scowls at him.
“Sirius told us you were easy to rile up, you know,” says James then. “I didn’t believe him. Lily did. More fool me, eh?”
“James, you know how I just love hearing about all the times you, Lily and Sirius have talked about me,” Regulus says, thickly sarcastic, as he sinks down on one of the chairs and gazes out the window at the frostbitten apple tree. Ice glitters on the stone wall. The paint on the gate is peeling; maybe he could fix it in the New Year.
“Oh, but you’re our favourite topic,” James shoots back, and leans against the bookshelf. His brow furrows as he looks searchingly at Regulus; he doesn't even attempt to be discrete. He's always been an open bloody book, James bloody Potter.
Regulus raises an eyebrow. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” says James.
“You’re a bad liar.”
“You couldn’t keep the fact that Lily is making chomchom in the kitchen a secret for more than half an hour, mate.”
“It is not my fault that you know your wife well.”
James snorts again. It’s not very dignified. Regulus thinks he likes that about him.
Then James says, lightly, “So, how did you last so long in the Death Eaters?”
And that question, voiced so innocuously, seems to wallop all the thoughts out of Regulus’s brain; his head goes blank, James’s voice echoing from ear to ear like a shout in an empty cave. He grips the sides of the chair. “...What do you mean?”
“Well, I take it you aren’t all that keen on the whole blood purity thing anymore,” says James, bending to pick up the dropped fork from underneath the bookcase, “since you seem to tolerate Lily well enough. You’re a snob, yeah, but I dunno if bigotry comes naturally to you. You’ve got at least half a brain in your head. Doesn’t really make sense to me how you got sucked into all that. Surely, you ought to have been clever enough to see through it?”
There’s a lot to unpack in those few sentences, but Regulus’s pride, as usual, takes precedence. “At least half a brain?”
“And that’s being generous.” But James’s grin doesn’t reach his eyes. And Regulus realises this has been troubling him. Of course it has. He’s got a wife and son to think about. And yet it only seems obvious when pointed out; Regulus had been so wrapped up in his own unhappiness at being trapped here that he hadn’t spared so much as a thought for his roommates-slash-jailers.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he tells James shortly, his mood curdling like sour milk. “I was stupid. Obviously. And I regret it. But—”
“There isn’t much room for buts in this situation, Reg.”
Regulus stares at him. “Isn’t there?”
“In joining the Death Eaters? No,” says James, harshly, “I don’t reckon so.”
“Not all of us had the privilege of being born on the moral high ground, Potter.” James visibly rankles at being referred to by his last name, and Regulus feels a twinge of regret. Just a twinge. “I had to claw my way up that hill.”
James shrugs. “Sirius seemed to manage fine, though, didn’t he?”
“And there we bloody have it. I’m not Sirius.”
“I never said you were.” James sighs, and throws up his hands. “Let’s not fight. Please.”
A small, childish part of Regulus wants to point out that if this is a fight, James started it. He doesn’t. He just glares, sullen, at the now-clean desk. “Why now?”
“Huh?”
“I’ve been here for the guts of two months. Why are you only asking me this now?”
James considers that. “Dunno, really. Maybe because you’ve been here for the guts of two months.” He ambles over to the window and looks into the front garden, with its rusted, peeling gate and bare apple tree, the wrinkle between his eyebrows deepening and deepening and deepening. It’s cold outside. James’s breath fogs up the glass. “I think the more I get to know you,” he says quietly, “the more incomprehensible you are.”
Regulus doesn’t know why that sounds like a confession. He wants to say something in response, but he can’t quite find the words. He doesn’t know if James means this as a compliment, or as something else. It’s no grand declaration, and yet suddenly it feels as though the keenly-maintained, unconscious rules of the Potter cottage have all been bowled over by a tidal wave. All their unspoken codes have been undone. Regulus is left drifting in the wake. He doesn’t know how to make sense of this. All he has is a feeling like an ache, and James leaning forward, elbows braced on the windowsill, his breath obscuring the view.
“I’ll go check on Harry,” says Regulus.
He flees the room.
Upstairs, he creeps into the nursery. The walls are eggshell blue, and the carpet is cream. He makes no noise where he creeps over to Harry’s cot. Green eyes greet him.
“Awake already, are you?” he grumbles.
Harry coos and grins, reaching out his arms for Regulus. His first tooth has made an appearance, a little white chip jutting up from his bottom gum. Regulus lifts him up from the cot, and Harry’s hands immediately start tugging on his hair.
“Need a haircut, do I?”
Harry gurgles.
“Thank you.”
Together, they pace in circles around the room, Regulus patting Harry on the back, Harry making various baby noises in response to Regulus’s idle chatter. Harry’s room has a pleasant view of the back garden, and, past the low garden wall, the gentle steeple of the church rising beyond the slanted roofs of the village, and the green hills past that. It would be a drastically different life from drab, grey London even if he weren’t trapped here under the Fidelius.
“You don’t think I’m incomprehensible, do you, Harry?” he asks.
Harry babbles out an answer.
“Now what you just said might be classed as incomprehensible,” says Regulus. “But not me. I had elocution lessons until I was ten.”
Harry makes a noise that might—generously—be understood as sympathetic.
“I know,” Regulus agrees. He sighs and Harry giggles, because there is nothing funnier to the Potter family than Regulus’s torment, apparently. Might as well slap a coxcomb on his head and call him a jester. He paces in circles around the room wearing a pout to rival the infant in his arms.
There comes a knock on the door. “Are we awake?”
“We’re awake,” says Regulus.
James pops his head in the door. His hair is slightly more ruffled than usual, as though he’s been running his hands through it, but other than that he gives no indication of how abruptly their previous conversation had ended. “There’s my best boy! Did you have a good sleep, Harry? Shall we go and see what Mummy is up to?”
“We are not going near Mummy,” Regulus tells Harry, “for at least another twenty-five minutes, lest I suffer a fate worse than death and come back to haunt your father forevermore.”
“He’s a big old party pooper, isn’t he, Harry?” James says, tickling Harry’s belly.
“Only one of us is poopy in this room, James, and I’m afraid it isn’t me,” says Regulus, and hands James the baby with an air of great smugness.
After one nappy change and at least thirty more minutes of time-wasting—conversation topics back on safe ground (Quidditch) and Harry chattering happily to himself in his floating Moses basket—Regulus deems it safe to search out Lily, who acts just a little bit too casual when she takes Harry from James for a feed. There is no obvious sign of any chomchom-making in the kitchen. But the windows are open, and the freezing breeze from outside can’t quite dispel the lingering smell of melted sugar and coconut.
James—all bad blood seemingly forgotten—winks at Regulus.
So Regulus turns to Lily and says, “Lily, who or what is Freud, and what does it have to do with mothers?”
James makes a sound like he’s just had all the wind knocked out of him, while Lily grimaces and, in a very measured voice, says, “Regulus, dear, please don’t ask me a question like that when I’ve got a baby attached to my tit. Thanks.”
Notes:
This fic idea was cooked up last November but I am (obviously) an incredibly slow writer. I love writing about Christmas in *glances at calendar* ...May!
EDIT: also forgot to mention, but if I have gotten anything wrong about chomchom/cham cham/chum chum, let me know and I will fix ASAP! There is only so much one can learn from googling dessert recipes...!
Chapter Text
25th December, 1980
“Cheese!” says Sirius.
There is a flash of light and some suspect-smelling purple smoke. Sirius emerges from this cloud with a small rectangle of paper in his hand. “Perfect!”
Because the flying motorcycle was apparently not enough for him, Sirius’s latest project is a Muggle polaroid camera. The charms that he has put on it are not clear to Lily; the photographs it produces do move, but in a rather haphazard, jittery manner, like a television with poor signal. He had nevertheless gifted the camera to Lily that morning. It is the sort of gift, she suspects, that Sirius is so excited about giving that he has given little thought to how it might be received.
(She’s touched, bewildered, and amused. But mostly, she’s tired. The latter is not Sirius’s fault.)
“It’s a marvellous idea, these customised cards,” says Sirius. “Look, it says Harry’s First Christmas! on the front!”
Every letter spelling out Harry’s First Christmas! has a bell attached. They jingle insistently every time Sirius waves the card. The photograph he had just taken of Harry has been rapidly attached front and centre with Sirius’s famed Permanent Sticking Charms. Her son’s little head looks like a red bauble of distress, face screwed up and mouth open in a wail. Only Lily’s chin and hands make an appearance, but it’s a very weary-looking chin and very weary-looking hands.
Smug, Sirius says, “You know, I may even get it framed. Gorgeous!”
As far as silent nights go… it hadn’t been one. The infant involved was, and continues to be, the very furthest thing from tender and mild. The cat had fled sometime around midnight. Father Christmas, all three of him, had sluggishly arranged gifts under the tree sometime after seven. The preparation of dinner now looms, monstrous, on the horizon. Lily is only glad James has been designated as the primary cook. She is self-aware enough to know her cooking is a fire hazard at the best of times, never mind while running on forty minutes total sleep (cumulative, not consecutive).
Instead of dwelling on it, she carries on rocking her evil, terrible, no-good baby son around the Christmas tree — to utterly no avail. James and Regulus are wearing identical expressions of shell-shocked exhaustion in the corner. But Sirius, who had spent the night in his dingy London flat, possibly with Remus, but certainly blessedly free from crying baby, will enforce Christmas cheer upon the proceedings if it kills him. He is hopping around like he’s already drunk. It’s possible he might be.
“Shall we do other presents, then?” he says.
“Huh?” says James. His eyes have glazed over.
“Where is your festive spirit?” Sirius whines.
“Stepped out for a smoke and froze to death,” says James.
“James, you better not have started smoking,” Lily admonishes.
“It may have crossed my mind,” James admits. “It’s been a stressful time!”
Regulus nods vigorously, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“Presents!” says Sirius again. “Here, give me the baby. I’ll cheer him up!”
“If you cheer him up when none of the rest of us have managed, I will find the nearest cliff, and I will throw myself off it,” says Regulus.
“That’s a promise?” Eagerly, Sirius takes Harry and begins to jiggle him on his hip.
“Right,” says Lily quickly, “time for gifts.” She rummages under the tree, and retrieves a covered plate and a garishly ugly tin. The covered plate she hands to James.
“Oh wow!” He grins and hugs her one-handed, plate of coconut-encrusted chomchoms balanced on one palm. “My favourite!”
He is not acting very surprised. She glares at Regulus, who shrugs. “He guessed.”
“I guessed,” James concurs sheepishly. “But that does not mean I don’t appreciate it!”
“I’ve been undermined in my own home,” says Lily, a joke that she nevertheless is half-serious about.
It had been a long night. Lily likes to think of herself as a staunch feminist, and believes that motherhood is not the measure of a woman’s worth. And yet, having her baby son cry from dusk til dawn without coming up with any means to soothe him has had her severely doubting her womanly credentials. No matter how many times she rationalises it, there’s no easy fix for feeling like a shit mum.
She glares at Regulus. “You were meant to be my secret conspirator.”
“I’m no bloody good at conspiracies,” Regulus pouts. “I would hardly be here if I was.”
“It’s true, he really isn’t,” says Sirius. “Always gives the game away.”
In the corner, Harry has, indeed, stopped crying. This is because Sirius has handed him one of his many leather bracelets to chew. “I am the Harry whisperer!” he announces. Then: “What’s that about being undermined in your own home, Lily?”
“Teething,” says Lily faintly. She wants to smack herself. “The whole night, he’s just been teething?”
“... It’s a possibility,” says James. “Not to worry. What’s that you’ve got there?”
He’s gesturing at the ugly, dented biscuit tin. There is a garish image of apple-cheeked Father Christmas chortling on the lid.
“Oh,” says Lily. “It’s for you, Regulus.”
She hands the tin to Regulus, who looks between herself and cheery, scuffed Father Christmas with polite bemusement. “...Thank you.”
“That’s just the tin. Open it, you muppet.”
Regulus lifts the lid, and goes quite still.
“Sirius told me they were your favourite,” she says. “I’ve had way less practice at making Nice biscuits than at making chomchom, mind, and a few of them are a little bit burnt, and please don’t look too closely at the lettering, I did it with the pointy end of a kebab skewer—”
“You made these for me?” says Regulus.
Sirius peers into the tin. “They look great, actually. Almost as good as Kreacher’s.”
“Sirius, I know you’re lying,” says Lily, patting him fondly on the shoulder, “but I appreciate the thought. Anyway, I had loads of coconut left over from the chomchoms. Killed two birds with one stone, honestly. Really handy, the two men in my life both liking coconut-themed pudding.”
“The two men in your life? What am I, then?” grouses Sirius. “A stuffed pigeon?”
“Think you actually killed three birds with one stone there, Lily,” says James. “May Sirius Black rest in peace.”
“Oi!”
Regulus still hasn’t said anything. He swallows, still looking down at the misshapen, slightly-burnt coconut biscuits. The NICE lettering is distinctly wonky and the notched edges decidedly irregular. The world has seen prettier biscuits.
Then, before she realises what he’s doing, he has leaned forward and kissed her, quick and chaste, on the cheek. “Thank you, Lily.”
“They’re just biscuits,” she says, unsure how to react—weren’t the Blacks obscenely rich? She shuddered to think of what Regulus was used to receiving for Christmas. Surely, her questionable attempt at baking is pitiful in comparison.
“Yeah, they’re just biscuits,” says Sirius, patting Harry on the head. “What did you get your gracious hosts, then, Reggie?”
“A romantic evening,” says James.
Sirius blinks. “Please elaborate before my imagination takes me to dark, dark places.”
“He babysat Harry,” says Lily.
“Actually,” says Regulus, carefully setting the biscuit tin aside as though it’s made of solid crystal and ducking under the Christmas tree, “I did make this in the shed. Though technically, it’s for Harry.” His cheeks have gone slightly pink. He hands something to James, roundish in shape and wrapped roughly in newspaper.
“It’s not a pipe bomb, is it?” says James, beginning to unwrap the parcel; Lily smacks him.
“Pardon me, but what on Earth is a pipe bomb?” says Regulus.
“Never mind that,” says Lily, because the newspaper falls away to reveal what, at first glance, Lily mistakes for some kind of spider-like copper wire sculpture surrounded by spinning gold stars. Then she sees the golden snitch.
“Merlin’s beard,” breathes James.
“It’s, er, a mobile,” says Regulus. “For the nursery.”
A tiny replica of a golden snitch, made from hammered iron either alchemised or spray-painted gold, with wings of angel-hair pilfered from the Christmas tree, has been enchanted to orbit in circles around the central sun, whose twisted-wire flares looked like spider-legs to Lily when first viewed from above, but from below have been spelled to emit the faintest golden glow. The golden stars, again crafted from little pieces of wire, follow the snitch in a row like a glittering comet-trail. There is no string holding up any of the delicate parts; instead, an altered levitation charm has been incorporated into the tangled heart of the sun, holding the snitch and the stars aloft.
“It’s beautiful, Regulus,” she says, extending her arm underneath the mobile and watching as light dances across her skin like golden confetti.
“Still trying to work out how to dim and brighten it on command,” he says, a little awkwardly, twisting his hands together. “I had to make do without a wand, so the charmwork is not particularly precise. And the internal Lumos on the sun will need occasional reinforcement, though the Levitation Charm on the little metal bits should last until Harry’s in his sodding forties.” He pauses. “Er, if we could all momentarily forget that I’m not technically permitted to use magic in any instance, that would be very much appreciated.”
“For the love of Merlin,” says Sirius glumly, “must you always show me up?”
“I was bored. I needed a project,” Regulus tells him primly.
“Good thing I gifted you that bloody scrapbook, then,” says Sirius. He turns to Harry, still balanced on his hip, drooling quite happily over the woven bracelet. “I’ll get you something miles better than a stupid little snitch for your birthday, Harry, just you wait and see.”
James hands Lily the beautiful mobile, and takes Harry from Sirius with a wide grin. “He’s not going to be a Seeker, he’s going to be a Chaser, just like his dad. Isn’t that right, Harry?”
Harry gazes, wide-eyed, at the mobile in Lily’s hands, his eyes following the glimmer of the little snitch keenly, little fist opening and closing as though he wants to reach for it.
“I think you may be out of luck on that front, dear,” she says gently.
*
Sirius whips out the port after dinner, along with his Uncle Alphard’s crystal port glasses, magicked up from God-knows-where. Lily is avoiding alcohol since she’s breastfeeding, so she is the one who volunteers to put Harry to bed.
The mobile, which she had attached to the ceiling, spins in its own little orbit. Harry drops off blissfully quickly. James had quickly located a proper teething toy in one of the baby boxes, as Sirius’s bracelet was both disgusting and a choking hazard, while Lily had acquiesced to giving Harry some, as Regulus puts it, “Muggle Soothing Solution”, or as Lily puts it, “Calpol”. Lily stays for a while longer in the nursery after Harry falls asleep, sitting on the carpet and letting the golden stars flicker before her unfocused eyes.
She isn’t sure where the sudden bout of melancholy came from, only that she’s at a loss as to how to name or negotiate it. She would like to cry, but she’s not sure any tears will come. Her chest feels heavy with it.
The door creaks open.
It’s James, along with the Harry’s First Christmas! card. He sets it gently on top of the dresser, silencing the little bells with his hand, and then comes and joins her on the carpet, casting a quick Muffliato so as not to disturb the sleeping baby.
“You’re sure you want to leave the kids unsupervised?” she whispers.
He sniffs in amusement. “Currently both engrossed in a drunken game of Cluedo.”
“Cluedo? Oh dear. Won’t that give them nasty ideas? We’ll go downstairs and Sirius will have murdered Regulus with the candlestick in the library.”
“Not if Regulus gets Sirius with the spanner in the drawing room first,” says James.
“Well, he evidently knows his way around a Muggle toolbox,” she agrees.
“I doubt they’ll kill each other tonight,” says James cheerfully. “It’s Christmas.”
“You have more faith in them than I do.”
James shrugs, and looks to the gently spinning mobile, the glowing stars reflecting little pinpricks of light in the lenses of his glasses. “So John Lennon goes unavenged.”
“Apparently so.” She gazes upward, marvelling at the intricate craftwork of it, and all made out of bits of chicken wire and scrap metal Regulus had presumably scrounged up from some dusty corner of the garden shed. “He could have been an artist.”
“Yeah, if he weren’t too busy with domestic terrorism.”
“Hush, Jim,” she says. “He’s a terrorist, yes, but he’s our terrorist.”
“He is, isn’t he?” says James. “Merlin. How did we end up here?”
She laughs quietly. “Unprotected sex. That’s how.”
“And I’d do it again,” says James, and licks her ear.
“Disgusting.” She pretends to shove him aside before rubbing his spit from her ear with her sleeve.
“So,” he says, “what’s given you the Christmas blues, love?”
She shrugs. “You don’t feel them?”
“I’ve actually only got enough room in me for one emotion at a time,” says James, “and currently that emotion is dread at the prospect of your sister coming for Boxing Day lunch tomorrow.”
Lily pretends to shove him again. He catches her hands, and plays with her fingers, waiting patiently for her to spill her worries. Sometimes it frightens her how well he knows her.
“I’m scared I’m a shit mum,” she confesses at last, glancing back over her shoulder at Harry, asleep in his cot.
“What?”
“I didn’t realise Harry was teething.”
“You hadn’t slept, Lily.”
“Still,” she says. “I should have known that was the matter with him. A proper mum would have. My mum would have.”
James frowns down at her hands. “You miss her.”
“Yeah.”
“Me too,” he says. “But you’re not a shit mum. You’re a mum in a shit situation. We’ve had to do this on our own. Just us. No parents to help out or give us advice. In the middle of a bloody war, no less. And Harry’s got this great black cloud hanging over him, which makes it even harder. ‘Course you’re feeling a bit rotten about it all. Blimey, it’d be weird if you weren’t.”
“I suppose so,” she says.
“And I didn’t realise he was teething either. So by your logic, I’m a shit dad. D’you reckon I’m a shit dad?”
“You certainly have your moments,” she jokes.
“Shurrup, you. It’s not right that you’re taking on all this guilt. He’s sleeping fine now, isn’t he?”
“Don’t jinx it,” says Lily.
“Anyway,” James continues, “I keep meaning to say that I’ve never seen a man happier about a tin of biscuits than Reg earlier.”
She shakes her head incredulously at the memory. “I still can’t get over that. You’d think I’d given him riches beyond his wildest imagination.”
“I think it’s the effort and the thought he appreciates,” says James. He pauses, a frown appearing between his brows. “That’s actually why I brought it up. Their mum was a shit mum. Imagine him caring so much that you made him some biscuits? Not that I don’t appreciate it every time you make chomchom for me, you know I love you for it,” he adds hastily. “But a little bit of kindness should never come as a shock. And I do think today shocked him.”
Lily narrows her eyes. “When did you get so wise, James Fleamont Potter?”
“Fatherhood did it to me,” he says. “No, but really, Lily. You’re a wonderful mum. I’ve seen the work of a shit mum. I’ve seen it in Sirius. And I’ve seen it in Regulus. But Harry will never go through that. We’ll both make sure of it.”
“And yet it was Sirius, product of an apparently shit mum, who realised Harry was teething,” Lily points out, though she squeezes James’s hand as she does, just to show that she got the message and that she appreciates it.
“I guarantee you that was nothing more than a happy accident,” says James. “Speaking of, we had really better check Regulus hasn’t made good on his promise to jump off that cliff.”
“Sirius has driven saner men to less,” she agrees, and lets James tug her back up to her feet. When he bends down to kiss her, she thinks he tastes of port and coconut. And she's glad he's here with her. She's glad Sirius and Regulus are downstairs, and that Regulus liked his hastily-baked gift, and that he took the time to make Harry something so beautiful when he didn't have to. She's glad that Marlene screeched the chorus of O Holy Night into a Howler in lieu of a proper Christmas card, and that Petunia agreed to come tomorrow, and that Harry has finally gone to sleep. She's glad she has James to love. She's glad she's not doing this on her own.
“Merry Christmas, Lily.”
“Merry Christmas, James.”
When they finally make it downstairs, it is to a heated argument in the sitting room, a second bottle of port emptied, and a smoking Cluedo board.
But mercifully, no one has been murdered with the candlestick in the library.
Notes:
Controversial question: for those familiar with the Grandma's-house-staple that are Nice biscuits, do you pronounce "Nice" like the adjective or like the city in France???
Next up: back to James's POV with a disastrous Boxing Day lunch. Thank you for reading, and of course, any and all feedback is welcome <3
Chapter Text
26th December, 1980
Sirius Black, the cowardly dog, brings Mr and Mrs Dursley around at two in the afternoon on Boxing Day only to immediately scarper under the flimsy pretence of patrolling the area for Death Eaters. Never mind the fact that if there was even half a chance of Death Eaters in the vicinity, they’d all have to hunker down and wait it out under the Fidelius together. No. Sirius goes and does a bloody runner regardless.
James isn't bitter about it, though. He has more pressing concerns. In the short fraction of time during which the Dursleys step over the threshold and into the Potter cottage, he:
- Thinks about locking himself in the bathroom and eating the key. But Lily could spell him out. So that's no good.
- Wishes there were Death Eaters in the area so Sirius would have no choice but to Apparate the Dursleys home.
- Considers swallowing some of that hemlock Reg is always on about. Not enough to kill him, mind. He doesn't want to die over Vernon Dursley. But he’s not above consuming just enough deadly poison to put him out of action for the foreseeable future. Or maybe not. He’s a father now. What’ll Harry do? James has been told he’s arrogant, but he’s not so arrogant to think he can change a nappy from his sickbed.
- Imagines turning into a stag and running away. This is the most attractive option by far. It would, however, possibly end in divorce. And he’s seen what Lily’s like when she’s angry.
In the end, there’s nothing else for it. He has to face it. Screw his Gryffindor courage to the Permanent Sticking Charm, or however the line goes.
“Welcome,” he says. If it’s a strangled-sounding welcome, well. He’s only human.
Petunia has brought her tiny blond son and an utterly hideous vase. Lily takes the vase with such a beatific smile that James is shocked she does not sprout a glowing halo on the spot. “Oh Petunia, you shouldn’t have!”
“You really shouldn’t have,” says James.
Their gift to Vernon and Petunia is an elegant, if decidedly Muggle, set of silverware. James suggested a lovely self-stirring soup pot, which Lily had vetoed at once. Along with a blanket ban on telling them anything about the war, no mention of magic around the in-laws has been made very very clear to every member of the household; Regulus had even been threatened at fork-point over breakfast.
“It’s a housewarming gift,” says Petunia. “Where shall I put it?”
“I’ll take it,” says Lily.
Petunia deflates a little. She was plainly desperate to use the housewarming gift to snoop around. James finds himself blocking the entrance to the front room, which has not yet been charmed to alarm if a Muggle crosses the threshold. Maybe, instead of eating hemlock himself, he could slip some to Vernon? No. No, that’s immoral.
“Bit poky, this place, isn’t it?” says Vernon, looking around the hall. “How many bedrooms?”
“Three,” says James.
“We have four,” says Vernon, savagely smug.
“Vernon and I have bought a beautiful semi-detached house in a lovely town in Surrey,” Petunia explains. “Plenty of space for Dudley to grow!”
“Quiet. Safe. Commutable distance to London. And a very respectable postcode,” says Vernon.
“I’m delighted to hear it. And this must be Dudley! Isn’t he a lovely boy,” says Lily, cooing at the blond baby drooling in the little blue carrier-seat.
The child appears to favour his father over his mother, though James reckons there might be something of Mr Evans in the chin. Dudley, it turns out, is not immune to his aunt’s charms: his face splits into a gummy smile.
“Where is your boy, then?” says Vernon. “Henry, was it?”
“Harry,” says Lily, setting the vase down on the hall table. “He should be up from his nap soon.”
“Up now, actually, Lily,” says Regulus from the top of the stairs, Harry in his arms.
They had considered asking Regulus to stay in his room all afternoon; in fact, James reckons Regulus would have been much happier going with that option, seeing as he is both a fairly introverted and deeply paranoid individual. But Lily had insisted he join them. She had gotten that glint in her eye, and they both knew there was no use in arguing.
James wonders now if Regulus is aware that this is a test, another chance to prove himself. He claims to have denounced his old ways, but by how much? Just how well can their resident ex-Death Eater tolerate a family of Muggles for an entire afternoon?
Just a pity the Muggles in question aren’t more, well, tolerable. But maybe, James thinks (half-heartedly and with limited optimism), it’s better to throw Regulus in the deep end. Give him no other option but sink or swim.
Right now, he appears to be swimming.
“Hello,” he says. “You must be Petunia and Vernon. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Vernon’s eyes narrow as he takes Regulus in, and James tries to imagine what he sees: a blue-blooded, stiff-backed aristocrat, probably. Or a skinny rake of a bloke barely out of his teens. Regulus manages to make the best of both. “And you are?”
“This is Re—Rigel,” says Lily. “He’s been staying with us for the past few weeks.”
Despite all of their assurances to the contrary, Regulus had remained unconvinced that the Dursleys did not, in fact, have a direct line to Lord Voldemort from their new semi-detached in a respectable postcode of Surrey. “Rigel” was the compromise.
James takes Harry. “Look, Harry! This is your cousin Dudley! Wave hello at your cousin Dudley!”
Harry and Dudley stare at one another. James hopes it’s a friendly stare.
“... Shall I make tea?” says Regulus, and sweeps through to the kitchen without waiting for an answer. James curses himself: he should have thought of that. Any brief reprieve will do.
“Was it a lengthy drive?” Lily asks, leading the Dursleys into the living room, which she has spent the morning obsessively tidying. All the furniture has been polished to a shine; there is even a crocheted doily on the coffee table.
“Only two hours or so,” says Vernon, puffing up his chest as he takes a seat on the sofa; Petunia folds in next to him, Dudley sucking on a dummy in her lap. “Of course, with our new Vauxhall, I expect we could have managed it in half the time. Beautifully smooth drive, she is.”
“Vernon has been promoted to junior assistant director in the firm,” says Petunia proudly.
“Ah,” says James, setting Harry on his knee and giving him his glasses to play with. “Better firm than floppy, that’s for certain.”
“A firm is sort of like a company, James,” says Lily quickly. “They sell things.”
“My firm, Grunnings,” says Vernon, “sells drills.”
“Oh!” James perks up. “My father had one of those. A firm, not a drill. I’m actually not certain what a drill is.” He looks to Lily, and asks, somewhat desperately, “what is a drill, dear?”
“It’s an electric tool for putting holes in things,” says Lily. “People need them when they’re building houses. They use drills to make holes for the nails.”
“You don’t know what a drill is?” says Vernon, incredulous.
“James isn’t very interested in construction,” Lily interjects anxiously.
“Clearly,” says Vernon, giving James the once-over.
James thinks again about how terrible it would feel if Lily divorced him. Then, he plasters a smile on his face. “Sounds very interesting. And, er. Lucrative. There’re always houses needing to be built, I suppose.”
“Quite right,” says Vernon. “And what was your father’s firm in, then?”
“Oh, Sleekeazy’s. He invented hair poti—”
“Hair products,” interrupts Lily. Her smile is growing slightly strained.
“Hair products? For women and nancy-boys?” Vernon guffaws.
“Oh yes,” says James coldly. “And there are plenty of samples upstairs if you’d like to try some.”
Regulus, who had appeared at the door with a plate of biscuits and leftover chomchom, looks alarmed at this turn in the conversation. James can't help but recall that strange, fractured summer after Fifth Year in which Walburga had called Sirius much worse than nancy-boy via a barrage of Howlers daily. It had taken Euphemia and Fleamont weeks to work out a way to stop the owls from coming. Regulus must remember it, too, James thinks, unless Grimmauld Place is the best-soundproofed house in Britain; the Howlers had clearly been recorded at quite the volume.
“Tea!” says Lily. “Why don’t you go and help Regu—Rigel with tea, Jim?”
“Gladly,” says James, and is halfway to the kitchen before he realises he’s still holding Harry, and has to double back to hand him to Lily.
In the kitchen, Regulus fiddles with the teapot. “Er, are you…?”
“I’m fine,” says James.
Regulus does not look convinced. “He’s… something of a character, isn’t he? Are all Muggles so… er… outspoken?”
“Lily’s dad wasn’t like him at all,” says James, “I reckon Vernon’s just a… well—.”
“A git?” Regulus suggests, setting the teapot on the tray next to the sandwiches.
“You said it, not me,” James says. “But yeah. He’s definitely… that.”
“Quite,” says Regulus wryly. Then, his brow furrows. “ Are you alright, though?”
James sighs, leaning against the kitchen counter and gazing resolutely out the window at the frosty garden. “It’s fine. It’s just for an afternoon. It’s fine.”
“It will be fine,” says Regulus. James had never thought him a particularly tactile person, and yet Regulus reaches out and squeezes James’s forearm regardless. Maybe he’d misjudged him. Or maybe he looks as pathetically frustrated as he feels. At any rate, the touch is grounding, if brief; Regulus then turns away and carries the tray through to the living room (exceedingly carefully, evidently still not quite used to doing Muggle things the Muggle way).
Alone in the kitchen, James takes three deep breaths and counts to ten before following.
*
Sometime after the abhorrent Japanese golfer joke, James excuses himself to go to the toilet. He does not lock himself in. But he really, really, really considers it. By the time he comes back, Vernon has decided to bring up the recession (of which James knows relatively little) and Margaret Thatcher (about whom James knows even less). Regulus, meanwhile, is expressionless as he listens to Vernon pontificate; James is almost certain this is because Regulus has no idea what inflation is, or how it could possibly matter. As James also grew up grossly wealthy, he suspects he doesn’t have much of a high ground there.
“Well, I’m not a fan,” says Lily. “Of Thatcher, I mean.”
Vernon firstly appears confused that Lily has chosen to speak up – he does not strike James as the sort of man who likes to be challenged on his opinions – before he lets out another snorting laugh.
“That’s the problem with you girls,” he declares, “first you say you want more women in government, but then the minute a woman is elected, you decide you don’t like her!”
“Now, Vernon,” says Petunia, evidently uncomfortable.
Lily blinks. “Ah, yes,” she says, “it’s because all women share a brain.”
Petunia glares at Lily. “Lily wanted to join the Women’s Liberation Movement when she was ten.”
“If you ask me,” says Vernon, “that Women Liberation nonsense has a lot to answer for. It’s a slippery slope. They’re out to undermine the very idea of the normal family.”
“More tea?” says Lily.
“Let me get it,” says Regulus.
He hurries out of the room.
“Like that bloke,” says Vernon, frowning after him. “That’s what I’m talking about. Leaping out of his chair to serve tea like he’s a maid or that. It’s not natural. Why’s he even staying with you lot, anyway? Seems a bit too familiar to be a short-term guest.”
Petunia’s eyes gleam. “Yes. Why is he here?”
“He needed somewhere to stay,” Lily says, icy and neutral.
“Thrown out of home, was he? What for?” Vernon asks. “Posh accent, he’s got. He anything to that Serious bloke who met us on the way here?”
“Sirius is estranged from his family,” says James in a weak attempt to deflect.
“Well, you always did like a charity case, Lily,” says Petunia acidly. “Where’s that Snape boy these days?”
James is surprised he doesn’t break his teacup.
“Severus and I no longer speak,” Lily says shortly.
“I see.” Petunia does not say I told you so in words: her face says it for her. Then, glancing around, she asks, “May I use the loo?”
Lily’s smile is tight and brittle, but she still smiles; every day, James thinks he loves her more. “Of course, it’s just at the top of the stairs. Let me show you.”
And then, it’s just Vernon and James. Dudley has dozed off. Harry is chewing quite cheerfully on his teething ring. And the silence is truly dreadful. James thinks about joining Regulus in the kitchen, but before he can excuse himself, Vernon speaks:
“Not worried, are you? With another man living in your house?”
James has never been particularly adept at hiding his emotions. He knows he looks as incredulous as he feels. “What on earth do you mean?”
“Not threatened,” Vernon clarifies. “I mean, it’s a bit odd, isn’t it? If it were a woman, it’d be different. I’ve heard of live-in nannies and that. But a bloke?”
“Why would it be different?”
Vernon huffs. “Petunia always said you were some sort of hippie. But surely you’re not stupid?” He takes another biscuit. Mouth full, he says, “It’s just not normal, is it?”
“What’s not normal?” Regulus asks as he comes through the door. He’s smiling as he strides over to the coffee table and sets down a fresh teapot. It’s the coldest smile James has ever seen. Maybe he learned it from Lily.
“Our, er, arrangement, I think,” James explains, distracted with glaring at Vernon, all his previous attempts at politeness damned.
It’s the wrong thing to say. Vernon’s eyes widen. “Arrangement?” he repeats.
Oh, shite. That’s not what James meant. That’s not what James meant at all–
“Oh?” says Regulus airily, interrupting James’s frazzled trail of thought as he seats himself not on his own chair, but on the armrest of James’s. “That’s interesting, James dear. To me, it seems the most natural thing in the world.” Then he lifts a biscuit, and takes a deliberate, delicate bite.
Vernon splutters, spraying crumbs over Lily’s doily. “I knew you were all—abnormal—but this arrangement you have—what sort of place to raise a child?—ought to call the authorities on you—what is this—this—this little—menagerie-a-twats!”
At that, Regulus also chokes on his biscuit. Hand over his mouth, he stares at Vernon in gleeful disbelief, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter. “…Menagerie-a-twats?” he repeats. “Do… do you mean ménage à trois?”
Vernon’s face has now reached a shade that, were it on anyone else, might indicate some sort of medical emergency. “Are you calling me stupid, boy?”
“Oh, Vernon, I would never,” says Regulus, grinning. It’s a real one, too.
James says weakly, “This has all been a terrible misunderstanding—”
“What is there to misunderstand?!” bellows Vernon.
“The French language, for one thing,” says Regulus; James elbows him. Meanwhile, startled by the loud noise, Harry begins to cry. And once Harry cries, Dudley decides to join in, evidently anxious that he not be left out.
“Oh dear, oh dear, Harry darling, hush,” James says, rushing forward to pick Harry up. “It’s alright, it’s alright—”
Vernon’s eyes bulge as he stares at his crying son. It’s clear he is not the parent Dudley generally turns to for comfort.
“What in heaven's name is going on in here?!”
Lily and Petunia have returned from the toilet.
“Vernon is somehow under the impression we are in some kind of three-way marriage,” James says through his teeth; Regulus, the irredeemable bastard, is still smugly eating his biscuit on the armrest of James’s chair.
“THAT ONE ALL BUT CONFIRMED IT!” Vernon yells, pointing at Regulus. Dudley and Harry both cry louder.
“I confirmed no such thing,” says Regulus, and it must be magic, how clearly his voice sounds out in the midst of all the din, “I’m afraid, Vernon, you must have quite the overactive imagination.”
*
Lily and Petunia’s relationship might not be irreparable. James had once thought the same thing about Regulus and Sirius, after all: and now, Sirius is in fits of hysterical laughter as James explains just how his brother had reduced Vernon Dursley to conniptions, while the brother in question begs Lily’s forgiveness in the kitchen.
“You’re not off the hook, either, James!” Lily yells down the hall.
“But you still love me, don’t you, Lily?” Sirius yells back.
Lily stomps down the hall and pops her head through the door. “Of course, darling. I'll always love you. In fact, how would you and Remus feel about joining me in a bloody ménage à trois?”
Notes:
All silly threesome jokes aside, this was a bit of a meta chapter regarding the ship. Since I've got two more chapters planned of this story, bringing us to the end of 1980, I've decided I'm going to keep it relatively platonic until the end. That said, I'm planning a couple of 1981 one-shots in the same universe that will be much more explicitly shippy -- but I'm hoping that this story will stand on its own, so you won't have to read those if you don't want to, as I know Jegulily isn't everyone's jam.
Chapter 6: New Year's Eve
Notes:
Warning for depictions of a PTSD-induced depressive episode.
Chapter Text
27th December, 1980
Lily gives Regulus the cold shoulder for the entire morning until James recounts what, precisely, Vernon Dursley had said leading up to the oh-so-offensive insinuation that the three of them were engaging in some sort of polyamorous tryst.
“It had nothing to do with Vernon being a Muggle, and everything to do with Vernon being… Vernon,” says James.
“I’m sorry, Lily, I really am, but he was being frightfully rude,” Regulus adds.
She softens. But not by very much. “I still think you could have handled it better. Petunia and I were making a real breakthrough on the way back from the loo, you know.”
“A breakthrough?” James leans forward, interest piqued. “Merlin’s beard. Over what?”
She squints at him. “I don’t think you want to know.”
“What if there ever comes an opportunity to rebuild the bridges Regulus has burnt—”
Regulus, who is busying himself with tea at the kitchen counter, loudly scoffs. “Pardon me, but I was hardly the sole offender—”
“—And it becomes imperative,” James continues, “that I know what it is my wife and her beloved sister reconnected over, so that I can make similar gestures of reconciliation myself?”
“We talked about yeast infections,” says Lily shortly. “Heartburn. And the worst constipation I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Petunia and I had very similar pregnancies, apparently. Must run in the family, but Mum died long before either of us could ask her about it. You were saying, James?”
“...Er,” says James, “never mind.”
“Thought so,” says Lily.
Regulus slides yet another cup of tea Lily’s way.
“I’ve already forgiven you, you know,” she sighs, accepting the tea.
“I know,” he says, “this is just to sweeten you up.”
James splutters. “Oi, that’s my wife you’re talking about.”
“ Our wife, James.”
James wheezes, and Lily reaches up to playfully smack Regulus on the back of the head. He grins wide and crooked and warm enough to melt the embroidery of frost on the kitchen windowsill.
28th December, 1980
Snow is forecast, but does not arrive.
29th December, 1980
After lunch, Harry reaches over James’s shoulder and knocks a crystal ball off the mantelpiece. It smashes to pieces. An hour later, Sirius emerges, dripping, from the bathroom after somehow breaking the shower. Then at teatime, Regulus drops a mug on his own foot. The mug is easier repaired than the toe. It’s probably just an unlucky day.
All the same, Lily bans James from even touching the TV.
30th December, 1980
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Vernon Dursley, does it?” Lily asks, looking askance at the wealth of “tools” James and Regulus had dug out of the box kept in the cupboard beneath the sink, currently scattered over the bathroom tiles. The toolbox is a very important Muggle household essential. James knows at least that much.
Regulus, who is closely examining the sinister looking thing that Lily says is called a screwdriver, asks, “What would this have to do with Vernon Dursley?”
“He emasculated James.”
“He emasculated you?”
“He emasculated me,” James glumly confirms. “I don’t know anything about drills.”
Regulus’s eyes widen comically. “A drill? ” His gaze flits wildly from tool to tool before he grabs one and brandishes it at James. “Which of these is a drill?”
“Well, first off, that’s a spanner,” supplies Lily.
Regulus stares in utter dismay at the spanner. “Like in Cluedo. Merlin. Why are there so many of them? What do they all do? There cannot possibly be a different function for each of these objects. It’s absurd.”
“It’s science,” says James. He shakes a small plastic box of torture implements (iron nails). It makes a sound like a maraca. “Leave us, Lily. We’re remasculating.”
Next to him on the bathroom floor, Regulus is still muttering to himself. “Pliers! I understand pliers. And the hammer. The hammer makes sense to me. I know how to use the hammer. But the spanner?”
Lily, meanwhile, fights a smile. “Remasculating?”
“Yes. We’re men. We need to reassert our masculinity. To re-masculate.”
He is joking. Mostly. About eighty percent joking. Seventy-five. Seventy.
“You’re the one who was emasculated, not me,” Regulus points out distractedly. “I don’t need to reassert anything. I’m very masculine. I now know what a spanner is. Though I admit I remain at a loss to what the blasted thing actually does, aside from being a potential murder weapon—”
“We’re men,” says James, but louder this time. “We need to remasculate. And we’re doing it the Muggle way.” He pauses, glances up at Lily, and adds: “I love you. Give Harry a kiss from me.”
“Oh yeah, because he won’t recognise you when he sees you again, you’ll be so masculated,” says Lily.
Regulus finally looks up from the spanner. “Won’t you help, Lily?”
“Nah. It’s like Jim said. This is a man’s job.”
He frowns. “Really? Since when?”
“Since I decided I didn’t want to do it,” she says.
“...That seems fair enough. Oh! I know this one!” Regulus proudly produces a fused lightbulb from the bottom of the box and waves it in front of James’s face. “This is the fire-maker in the ceiling lamp, James! The—the—the BULB!”
“Stay on task. No lightbulbs. Just pipes and drains and faucets,” says James. “A stream. Flowing water. Rain. River. Lake. Ocean. We’ll have this shower up and running in an hour, tops. And then you’ll see, Lily. Then you’ll see.”
Three hours later:
“I really don’t think this is going to work,” says Regulus.
The two of them are standing in the bath, directly underneath the faucet of the broken shower. James had insisted on pulling the shower curtain closed on the pretence of not letting Lily see they had given up on doing things the Muggle way. Unfortunately, he still does not know what he is doing. Reparo had been tried once yesterday and tried again thrice today: it just made something inside the wall go creeeeeeak. When they turn the knob, the faucet sputters ominously while producing no actual water. But James remains (delusionally) optimistic. “It will work.”
“No it will not, and I want to make it very clear right here and right now that I believe this to be a terrible idea and claim no responsibility for it.”
“You’ll claim none of the praise then, either. No risk, no reward, mate. Oldest lesson in the book.”
“How positively, hideously Gryffindor.”
“Exactly.” Squinting at the weird wall-box, wand in hand, James considers how best to go about this. Surely it can’t be that hard? It’s just water from a box. And he’s a wizard. He can make water whenever he likes. “This contraption right here is where the water comes from, I’m certain of it.”
“Cleaning spells exist.”
“Cleaning spells are not the same, Mister-I-Hate-Showers-And-Refuse-To-Take-Baths. There’s no compromise on hygiene.”
Regulus scowls. James ignores him, sticking the handle of his wand in his mouth for safekeeping while he fiddles with the shower box. Or whatever its actual name is. The thing with the knobs on it.
“Maybe we should ask—”
James takes his wand out of his mouth, and glares over his shoulder at Regulus. “We are not asking Lily.”
“Fine.” Regulus raises his hands, mollifying. “No word of this to Lily. Even if it’s a terrible idea.”
—The shower curtain sharply flies back to reveal his wife.
—“No word to me about which terrible idea?”
—At that very moment, James jabs the box with his wand, incantating a (slightly uncertain) “Augamenti!”
—And the faucet, suspended right over their heads, decides to explode.
“MERLIN’S BOLLOCKS—”
James jerks backwards in shock. He immediately collides with Regulus, knocking them both off their feet and sending them crashing down into the tub … just as a great big flood of water gushes over them from above and slops out the sides of the bath to soak Lily’s socks.
Regulus is scrabbling like a monkey to get out of the rapidly-filling bathtub, which doesn’t work because he’s pinned to the bottom of the bath by James’s arse. James, meanwhile, shrieks and tries to pull himself vertical again under the deluge currently pummelling downwards on their heads with all the force and volume of a small waterfall.
“Finite! FINITE!” With narrowed eyes James jabs his wand at the faucet, writhing on the end of its pipe like a snake possessed by a poltergeist, but the water does not stop spraying what feels like ten gallons a second every which direction. Regulus’s bony knee is jammed into the small of his back, while his arm is wrapped around James’s chest from behind, fingers digging into his ribs—James tries in vain to sit up again–but Regulus is pulling him down—and the water won’t stop coming–
“ FINITE INCANTATEM! ”
The water cuts off at once. The faucet, which had been suspended in mid-air by the pressure of the water pumping through the long tube, suddenly goes limp, drops, and lands with a splash in the bathtub between James’s knees, looking like the head of a sad plastic dinosaur with a broken neck.
Lily is breathing heavily. She is drenched. The bathtub Regulus and James are sitting in is filled completely; enough runoff has poured out the sides to flood the bathroom floor with about an inch of water. The abandoned Muggle tools float idly around the loo like debris after some sort of natural disaster. Lily slowly lowers her wand. She says, “Boys.”
James hoists himself up to his feet, which lowers the water levels considerably. He stands there in the half-full bath, at a loss for what to say.
He settles on, “Well played, love. You always were Flitwick’s favourite.”
But Lily isn’t listening.
“Regulus?” she says.
Regulus looks like a drowned rat, but James doesn’t want to laugh, because he is shaking. His face has gone white as bone. There is an awful look in his eyes, a raw, desperate blankness; it reminds James of that dreadful day when Sirius had first carried Regulus over their threshold, soaked to the bone and unable to catch his breath.
“Regulus,” Lily says again, but Regulus is on his feet, shoving past her, stumbling out of the bathroom and down the stairs. Somewhere in the house, Harry starts crying. They hear the front door open a second before it slams.
“Go after him,” Lily says sharply, “I’ll get Harry and sort out this mess. Go, James.”
James stumbles, still soaking wet himself, out of the bathtub, and wades across the flooded tiles to the hall and down the stairs, the carpet squelching unpleasantly under his feet with every step.
He’s dimly terrified that when he opens the front door, Regulus will be gone, so it’s with a mixture of relief and worry that he sees a familiar figure standing at the end of the garden, shoulders hunched and hands braced against the wall.
“Reg?” he says softly. “Everything alright?”
“Fine,” says Regulus, hoarsely. It’s a weak deflection; when he straightens up, he’s still trembling. By the way his chest hitches, James can tell he’s suppressing the urge to either hyperventilate or sob—perhaps both. His eyes still have that wild, lost look, like he isn’t sure where he is, like he half-expects the ground to flip out from under him any moment.
“It’s the water, isn’t it?” says James. “You don’t like water.”
Regulus says, “I don’t want to talk about this.”
James thinks Regulus might have gotten sick. His lips look red and wet; he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand.
So James doesn’t ask any more questions. Instead, he says, “You know what you need?”
Regulus scrunches up his nose. “A lobotomy?”
“Merlin— No!” James scowls. “A Harry Hug.”
“A what?”
“A Harry Hug. Which is precisely what it sounds like. Clinically and alchemically proven to cure all ills.”
“Is that so?”
“Would I lie?”
“Well, in that case, how could I refuse?” Regulus says. It doesn't have any of his usual sardonic bite. He just sounds tired. And cold. It might not have snowed yet, but it’s certainly cold enough, and the two of them are standing in the frozen garden, both soaked to the skin.
“Can I dry you off?” James asks, quietly.
Regulus just nods.
James sets a hand on that bony shoulder, and with the other, waves his wand over the length of him. The water dissipates in a cloud of steam. Regulus shudders. James finds himself rather unwilling to remove his hand.
“You know you can talk about it with us, don’t you?” says James.
Regulus doesn’t meet his gaze. His grey eyes catch the weak winter light, glinting like flint where he stares at the frosty, bare rosebushes. He shrugs James’s hand off. “Dry yourself off too, James,” he says, “or you’ll catch your death.”
James watches him go back inside without another word.
*
The first time they wake to choked-off screams that night, Lily says, “Maybe give him some space?”
The second time, James rolls over in bed. It’s dark in their bedroom, but Lily can just about make out the harsh set of his clenched jaw. “I thought he was getting better.”
“I don’t know if it’s that easy,” Lily murmurs. “Did you muffle Harry’s cot?”
“Yeah. Used your one-way charm. We’ll hear him if he cries, but he can’t hear us.”
“Maybe we should teach Reg that one.”
James shakes his head. She can hear his deep, animal sigh, the rustle of the sheets, his mussed hair, his hand finding hers underneath the duvet. She imagines the space in his chest filling up and emptying, his heart beating firmly between his lungs: alive, alive, alive.
“I’d rather Reg wake us up with it than leave him to suffer it alone,” James says at last. “I’d rather know he’s there.”
The third time they hear the choked-off screams, James says, “That’s enough.” He climbs out of bed and throws a t-shirt on.
Silently, Lily follows him.
*
“I feel fine,” says Regulus when they knock on the door. He can’t seem to stand still. His hands tremble. The bed is unmade, the sheets clearly drenched, and more cold sweat darkening the neck of Regulus’s sleep shirt. The curtains are half-open. “I’m alright. Go back to bed.”
“You’re not,” says James. “Alright, I mean.”
Regulus is pacing around his room like a lion in a too-small cage; he has never reminded James of Sirius more. At James’s words, his lip curls. “And how would you know, Potter?”
“Because we know you,” says James. And he does. He’s been through this sort of thing before, at any rate. This is textbook Sirius—when cornered, he shows teeth. And despite all their differences, it looks like Regulus is cut from the same cloth. Offence isn’t just the best form of defence; it’s the only form of defence either of them know.
“We know what alright looks like,” James insists. “This isn’t it.” Lily comes to stand beside him, and he feels stronger, surer, with her there. If there is anyone who knows her way around an argument, it’s Lily—though he hopes it won’t come to that. “We know you,” he says again, “and we care about you. Is that so hard to accept?”
“And I told you I’m fine,” says Regulus.
“James…” Lily says quietly, but James meant it when he said he’d had enough:
“You’re not fine,” he says shortly. “I know you’re not. So stop the act. I’m sorry for the bathtub incident earlier, you know I am, anyone can see how much it’s thrown you—so just sit down, talk to us, let us help.”
“I don’t want your help.”
“Tough shit,” says James.
Regulus stops pacing. His sneer could curdle milk. “Oh, do fuck off,” he says. “You don’t know anything about me. How would either of you know anything about me? About how I feel? Stuck here for fucking weeks on end, my whole fucking life up-ended. Look at you. Everything has always come so easy to the perfect fucking Potters. I see why Sirius was so taken by your lot. The both of you, so smug, so comfortably good, as if that’s even a possibility for the rest of us!”
“Regulus—”
“Is that how the two of you get your kicks? Is it? Running a little rescue-and-rehabilitation centre? Am I your latest project? Just more fuel for your swollen egos? You and Dumbledore and Sirius and your colossal fucking saviour complexes—”
“You would be dead if you weren’t here,” James says hotly, “so I really don't think you’ve got much of a leg to stand on there, mate—”
“I meant to die!” Regulus yells, voice cracked open, hysteric. “I was planning on it! I wanted it! I wanted it all to end! But you and Sirius, oh, you always have to ruin everything—”
“Regulus.”
Lily’s tone brokers no further argument. At once, Regulus folds. He stares at her for a moment, eyes red and nostrils flaring, before his legs seem to give out underneath him. He sinks to the ground, hugging his knees, and finally breaks down into awful, painful-sounding sobs that wrack his body from his belly all the way up. And Lily drops down next to Regulus, beckoning James forward with a wave of her hand—
And wraps her arms around him.
James pauses.
“I—” Regulus gasps for breath. “I didn’t—”
“You don’t have to explain it,” says Lily. “You don’t have to talk.”
James lowers himself down next to them. Over the top of Regulus’s head, Lily gives a short sharp shake of the head: don’t say anything.
So instead, James shuffles over to Regulus’s other side. Snakes his arm around Regulus’s back, where he can feel the knobs of his spine and the ridges of his ribs. Drops his head onto Regulus’s shoulder. Lets him shake and sob in silence until the shakes and sobs lessen, slow, and then stop. They linger there, the three of them gathered in a knot on the bedroom floor, for another soft, quiet minute.
“Shall we go to bed?” Lily whispers at last.
“Come on,” says James.
“Mm,” says Regulus, letting them help him to his feet. He pulls away, makes for his bed pushed against the wall, but Lily doesn’t let go of his arm.
“No, not there; your sheets need changed. Come in with us.”
He looks at her wretchedly, shoulders slumped, eyes swollen, face pale. “What d’you mean?” he says, voice hoarse.
All she says is, “James’ll lend you a shirt. Dawn won’t come for hours yet.”
James digs a clean t-shirt out of his drawers once they’re back in his and Lily’s room, and hands it to Regulus, whose war with exhaustion is writ large on his drawn, pallid face. “Are you sure?” he croaks.
Lily is drawing back the duvet. She sniffs. “Wouldn’t offer if we weren’t sure. Come on. Everything else can wait until morning.”
Regulus shrugs out of his sweat-damp t-shirt, and into James’s spare. It’s too big on him, but not by very much. The tides turn in whatever internal fight he’s having, and then comes a sudden surrender. The bed is more than big enough for three; Regulus crawls into the middle, nestled between the two of them, and James turns out the light with a wave of his finger.
In the dark, he listens as Lily’s breathing evens out first, closely followed by Regulus’s. He doesn’t expect he’ll sleep, too riled-up and anxious, but he’s wrong; he drops off without warning, and once he’s asleep, he doesn’t wake until dawn has greyed the borders of the curtains and Harry is chattering to himself in the other room. He climbs out of bed as quietly as he is able.
Lily and Regulus sleep on. Both are buried in blankets, and all that’s visible of each are their heads: black curls and red satin mingle on the pillows. Even though his heart is heavy, that does not feel as foreign as he thought it might.
31st December, 1980
When Regulus wakes up he has no idea where he is. The stain of light across the ceiling is unfamiliar to him; it comes from the wrong direction. The bed is softer than his own, or maybe just warmer. He sits up, and at once, the events of the previous evening all come rushing back. His mood sours immediately. He isn’t certain if he’s more embarrassed or ashamed of his little episode. A quick glance at the alarm clock on the Potters’ nightstand tells him that it’s already one in the afternoon; he’d slept through the entire morning.
Was it very strange to have slept with James and Lily in their bed? Perhaps. He isn’t sure he cares. None of this is normal.
Laughter sounds out from below: Sirius has brought Remus Lupin here. Can’t go downstairs then. Regulus flops back on the pillows with a groan. He’d like a shower—he feels sticky, and the cold sweat he’d woken up in last night has dried on his skin—but the thought of getting under the water again makes his skin crawl and his stomach contract. It’s stupid and it’s irrational. He’s stupid and irrational. And weak. Pathetically so. Scared of a shower—what a joke.
He doesn’t want to get out of bed. So he doesn’t.
Sometime later, with the narrow finger of daylight having tracked several inches further across the ceiling, he hears a small knock.
“Hey,” says Sirius.
Regulus does not move. “What do you want?”
Sirius comes and sits on the foot of the bed. “Just checking you hadn’t suffocated. Lily likes her pillows.”
There are about six pillows on this bed, which seems about four too many for two people, but Regulus isn’t complaining. He yanks the duvet up higher around his shoulders; Sirius, rather strangely, is obliging enough to lift his arse and free up the ends. Regulus would like to glare at his brother, just for normality’s sake, but he doesn’t have the energy. Instead, he settles his gaze back on the patterns the daylight makes on the ceiling. It’ll get dark again soon. Days don’t last long this deep in winter.
“There’s food downstairs for you,” says Sirius.
“Not hungry,” says Regulus.
“D’you want me to open the curtains? Crack a window or something?” Sirius asks.
“No.”
He half-expects Sirius to do it anyway; Sirius has never shown much care for Regulus’s preferences before. But Sirius doesn’t move from the foot of the bed.
“What did they tell you?” Regulus asks at last.
“Nothing,” says Sirius. “Just that you were in their bed because you hadn’t slept well, so to let you lie on.”
Regulus acknowledges that with a tilt of his head. He doesn’t ask if Sirius thinks he’s weak, or pathetic, perhaps because what Sirius thinks of him is Sirius’s business alone, but mostly because he's too wrung out to really care. Knowing won't change it.
Sirius scoots up the bed until his back is resting against the headboard. He still doesn’t say anything.
“How’s the war going?” says Regulus, mostly just to break the silence.
“Woeful,” says Sirius flatly. “We gain an inch, they gain a mile. People are getting desperate. Panicking. Bagnold’s losing her grip on power, I reckon, not that she ever had much; she was subbed in on a losing game. There are calls for Dumbledore to take office. He won’t, though Merlin knows why. Mum thinks you’re dead. I’ve had three Howlers begging me to get back in contact with Grandfather.”
“She didn’t mourn me much, then.”
“She did in her own way,” says Sirius, which is perhaps the most generous thing he’s ever said about their mother. “Old bitch.” Ah, there it is.
Regulus sighs. Closes his eyes. A hand begins to thread through his hair, even though he’s not washed it since before the shower broke and it’s probably filthy. But Sirius still scratches gently at his scalp, cards through his curls, works some of the tangles out. And Regulus lets him do it; he doesn’t realise until he wakes that it was enough to put him to sleep again. When he opens his eyes, the room is almost totally dark, and Sirius is long gone. The television is playing downstairs. Some New Year special, sounds like. He can’t quite believe he’s spent the last day of nineteen-eighty feeling sorry for himself in James and Lily Potter’s bed—oh, what can change in a year, he thinks drily—but he still isn’t sure he’s got enough energy, guts, courage, or whatever other sort of mettle might be necessary to face the world downstairs.
More time passes. He does not look at the clock. He doesn’t think he can bear it. If he could wave a wand and invent a spell that would put him to sleep for a hundred years, he would. He hates this bed. He never wants to leave it.
Another knock. “There’s still dinner,” says Lily.
He sits up. She cracks open the door, and smiles gently at him. It should rankle his nerves, having someone like her feel sorry for someone like him, but he doesn't have any nerves left to rankle, and even if he had, he doesn’t believe that Lily ought to rankle them. Not anymore. He’s tired. He’s had enough of this.
“Come on, sweetheart,” she says. “You have to eat something, else you’ll waste away.”
He nods, slowly, because it’s Lily, and she shouldn’t have to worry about him or feel sorry for him. So he lifts the duvet. Slides his feet out of bed, but doesn’t stand up. He’s still wearing nothing but James’s t-shirt and his boxer shorts. He ought to find a pair of trousers somewhere. Be half-way decent. Maybe he’ll have a shower. Maybe not. No, he’ll definitely put that off a while longer.
“Harry missed you today,” she tells him.
“How late is it?” he asks.
“Nearly eleven. Didn’t want you to miss the New Year.”
He braces his hands on his bare knees. Nods again. All day, he’d spent in bed.
“You go get dressed,” she says, “I’ll have James bring something up.”
He makes his way slowly to his own room, which feels strange and alien for all that his absence wasn’t even twenty-four hours. Locating a pair of trousers and socks before taking a moment in the loo for a piss, he avoids his reflection in the mirror, certain that he looks about as awful as he feels. He ought to be over this. He’d gotten over this weeks ago. So now, why had it all come rushing back? It’s as if that little blip of time in which he’d actually felt alright had never happened at all. It would be so much easier now not to go downstairs, not to wait for James, but just to climb straight back into bed and die there.
Actually, maybe not. He’s not sure if he can be arsed with taking his trousers off again.
James meets him on the stairs. He’s got food on a plate—some sort of pasta, with an actual sauce that did not come from a jar. “I heated it up,” he says.
Regulus takes the plate, and sits down right there on the second step. James smiles at that and joins him.
“So,” he says, “sleep well?”
“Who needs six pillows?”
“Lily does. Don’t ask me why.”
The pasta is good. He was hungry, even though he hadn’t been able to feel it.
“We’re going to start giving Harry big boy food soon,” James tells him. “Lily reckons he’s ready. Can you believe he's six months old already? He can have mashed potatoes and mushy peas.”
“Poor thing.”
“Nothing wrong with mushy peas, mate. Want a drink? Sirius and Remus are half-pissed already.”
He stiffens. “Lupin is still here?”
Just then, the door crashes open.
“He’s up?” Sirius raises his glass. “There’s our Reggie!”
And just behind Sirius, Remus Lupin looks directly at him, and shows no surprise.
“You told Remus I’m alive,” says Regulus.
Something in his tone must give Sirius warning, because his grin fades from his face. Good. First time for everything.
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s Remus,” Sirius says. “I’m over here at least twice a week. You’re meant to be dead, and I haven’t exactly been doing much public grieving. Come on, I could hardly keep you a secret forever.”
“Who else?” Regulus is standing. All his tiredness is gone. Instead, there’s a fire lighting up in his belly, and his breath won’t come right. He hands the plate of half-eaten pasta back to James for fear that he might otherwise throw it. “Who else, Sirius?”
“No one,” says James. “Reg—”
“That was my rule,” Regulus says. “That no one know I was here. Merlin, are you all as soft in the head as you are soft in the heart? Do any of you have any idea what, exactly, it was that I did to the Dark Lord? Do you?”
“What’s going on?” Lily pops her head around the door.
“McKinnon? Pettigrew?” Regulus demands. “Do they know?”
“No, but why can’t they? Apologies if this bursts your engorged purebred ego, mate, but you’re hardly the first person stowed away in a safehouse—”
“BECAUSE NONE OF YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I DID!” Regulus roars. “None of you have a fucking clue! If he knows I’m alive he will stop at nothing to find me!”
“He’s already after Harry—” James protests, harshly, but Regulus scoffs.
“Oh, the search for the baby will pale in comparison, I assure you.” He clears the last step. He thinks about punching Sirius. He thinks about throwing up. “The baby didn’t do what I did. And the baby didn’t sign his damn work.”
None of them get it. None of them can get it. None of them know what it feels like to drown. None of them saw the light above them begin to dim, lungs scalded, desperate for breath but knowing that taking it meant death. None of them sold their soul to a madman who had split his own. None of them know, and none of them care, and he hates being here, and he has had enough of it.
“OK,” says Lily, “clearly, telling Remus crossed a boundary, Regulus, and I think Sirius should apologise for that—”
“I will most certainly not, not when he’s being such a bloody diva over it—”
“But,” she continues, eyes flashing, “I will not have you yelling and shouting abuse in my house—”
Regulus’s fury has made the world narrow. All he can see is what is right in front of his nose. Currently, that is the door. “Fine then.”
“What?” says Sirius.
“I’ll go.”
“No, you won’t,” says James, striding forward to grab ahold of Regulus; Regulus jerks the door open and steps out into the cold before he can. “Where the hell do you think you’re going, Regulus?”
“Out of your house. Just like you bloody asked. Won’t be long.”
Regulus makes sure to slam the door shut behind him, not caring if it wakes the baby—in fact, not caring much about anything at all.
Chapter Text
Midnight
Regulus has stalked all the way down the lane and come crashing halfway into the Godric’s Hollow churchyard before he slows and takes stock, his anger finally shrinking enough to allow all of his other thoughts some elbow-room.
He could run, he realises. He could leave. Getting ahold of a new wand might be tricky, but until then, he’s got enough wandless magic to make do—his little mobile contraption for Harry had proved as much. And once he does manage to get a wand there’ll be nothing stopping him. He could go to the Continent. Maybe Africa. Somewhere that they speak French. Or he could learn a different language altogether. Shed all his skins. Become somebody else. Somebody new. Somebody no one would recognise.
But even as he fantasises about it, the glamour of the dream fades. He doesn’t want to run. That’s what Sirius does, a horrible voice whispers—but that’s not true either, is it? All the frustration of the past few months (the past few years) , trapped in a cottage with blood traitors and a baby (leaping head-first into a blood war, his small secret doubts damned), cut off from everyone that matters (cut off from Sirius) and everything he knows (leaving his convictions at the cave entrance, counterfeit locket in hand). Did they really expect him to tolerate this? To be happy rubbing shoulders with James bloody Potter and his filthy Mudblood wife—
He stops dead, braces his weight on the stone wall, and tries not to throw up as an overpowering wave of revulsion rises in him. Because there’s nowhere else for that revulsion to go: it’s directed at himself.
He’s been such a fool, and wilfully, too. Casting Nox over his eyes, choosing to believe such foul things because it was the easier thing to do; fumbling, spiteful and arrogant, through the dark rather than up-ending his entire life in pursuit of justice—truth—virtue—morality—
It quietens. A clump of cottony snow lands on the back of his hand. Another on his eyelashes; one quarter of the frozen world blurs. He blinks it away. He exhales another flume of breath in the dark. And what had been a few scattered, lonely flurries of white steadily begin to thicken, muffling all sound in an already silent graveyard. The snowflakes will lie, he thinks. It’s cold enough. The whole West Country will wake white tomorrow morning. It’ll be Harry’s first sight of snow.
All his angry thoughts have sputtered out into dead ends, irrational and unfair and utterly useless to him. Because it’s not Lily and James, or Sirius and Remus, that he’s angry with. A part of him knows that. And Regulus, for all his flaws, has had quite enough of self-deception.
He doesn’t hate Lily. He doesn’t hate Lily at all. And he doesn’t hate James or Harry or Sirius or Remus. What he hates, really, is that there was ever a day that he did.
The snow keeps falling. He takes deep breaths, the bitter cold searing his throat, and wipes the tears from his eyes. Self-pity is about as useless as self-deception, he knows that, but he isn’t quite ready to turn back.
Striding around the churchyard without direction for either his feet or his fury, he starts feeling very cold very quickly. He didn't even put on any shoes, or a jacket; his toes are numb, his socks soaked through. He's still wearing James's spare t-shirt, his arms bare, his Dark Mark exposed. The snowfall grows heavier. Soon, not even spite will keep him warm. He knows this, but he refuses to go back. Instead, he stomps between the irregular, leaning shapes of snow-capped gravestones, glaring upwards at the heavy curtain of cloud, weighed down and bulging. He wishes he could see the stars, something that—paradoxical as it might seem—he’s always found grounding. But tonight the stars are hidden. The skies remain impassive, impenetrable, inscrutable, as though they know something he doesn’t and they don’t want to let him in on the secret. He shivers.
The clock strikes midnight just as Regulus finally surrenders to the thought of turning back. He pauses, leaning against a crooked cross dedicated to a long-dead mother and her long-dead daughter whose names he doesn’t care to read, and closes his eyes until the church bells have counted down the twelve joyful peals that ring in the new year. Nineteen-eighty-one.
They’ll be celebrating back in the house. Lily and James. Sharing New Year kisses to Sirius’s offkey rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Remus Lupin grinning, looping an arm over Sirius’s shoulders. They’ll have forgotten him, and rightly so, for throwing a tantrum hardly worthy of the infant upstairs asleep in his cot. Instead of being with them, Regulus is here, alone in the cold with only the dead for company.
He opens his eyes.
And suddenly he isn’t alone.
Something shimmers on the other end of the churchyard. Something, he thinks, that is suspiciously like an Invisibility Cloak…
His feet carry him forward before he can think to stop. He goes for his wand, comes up empty, having forgotten in his fright that he’d lost it in that blasted lake—but it’s fine. It’s just James and Lily, standing by a small, inconspicuous grave just to the left of the old yew tree, a tree almost certainly as old as the Godric’s Hollow churchyard in which it grows.
“I told you I wouldn’t be long,” Regulus grumbles.
Lily grabs James’s arm in fright.
Only—she isn’t Lily. This girl is narrow where Lily is plump, her bushy hair bursting free from her cap. Snow dusts her eyelashes. She stares at him, mouth open in shock. But the boy is James, he must be—same catastrophically messy dark hair and warm brown face, he’s even got James’s glasses—
James looks up from the small black gemstone he’s got cradled in his palm. Even in the dark, even as the snow falls gently all around them, his eyes shine.
But they are Lily’s eyes.
Regulus stops dead an inch from the stone grave. He stares. It cannot possibly be…
“It’s you,” says Harry Potter. “Regulus Black.”
Regulus says, “Harry?” His voice sounds weak. Insubstantial. Hoarse with fright, and maybe with something other than fright. He isn't shivering anymore.
“Yeah,” says Harry. “Yeah, it’s me.”
It must be some kind of trick. But it doesn’t feel like a trick. Regulus should be panicking, but panic no longer exists; in fact, he feels utterly calm. He thinks he should have questions, and he does, but they aren’t pressing. He’s content just to take the sight of Harry in.
The girl looks between Regulus and Harry. She squeezes his arm, and says, “I’ll wait by the lychgate, Harry.”
Regulus watches her walk away; she quickly fades from view. Perhaps it is the snow, still falling softly, or perhaps it is something else, but the world outside this churchyard feels distant to him. Almost as though none of it is real. The girl almost looks transparent. Harry, too. A pair of ghosts glimpsed only through a tear in time, while Regulus stands alone on the other side of that ravine. It should be impossible. Harry is a baby asleep in his cot in a cottage three streets down. But Regulus does not doubt that this young man in front of him is also Harry Potter, impossible or not.
“They’d be furious with me,” says Harry. He laughs a little. “Mum and Dad. If they knew I was here. It’s the first place they’ll look. Vo— You-Know-Who and the Death Eaters, I mean. But I think I had to come. I had to do this.”
Regulus doesn’t say anything. He just looks at Harry. He’s tall and thin like James, but there’s something of Lily’s softness to him, too—not a physical thing, but a more immaterial quality to the way he moves through the world. Less arrogant, but just as self-assured. He’s handsome. He’s inherited the best of both of them. Maybe, too, there is something of Sirius in the way he smiles: a little bit crooked, one corner of his mouth lifting more than the other. He looks loved.
“You grew up,” says Regulus.
“I did, I suppose,” says Harry.
“You should talk to them,” says Regulus. “Lily and James. Your mum and dad.”
“They wouldn’t understand,” says Harry. “They can’t protect me. Not from this.”
Regulus has questions, hundreds of them, all swelling up behind his eyes. But as soon as one rises to the forefront — What happened? When did it happen? How did it happen? How are you? Are you happy? Do you play Quidditch? Are Lily and James happy? Is Sirius happy? Are they safe? Are you safe? Is there any such thing as safety left in the world? Why did the prophecy choose you? — it suddenly loses all urgency. None of his questions matter. Apart from one:
“Why are you here, Harry?” Regulus asks.
Harry pauses. “We moved away. After. To Surrey. The house was ruined and I don’t think my parents could bear to stay. But I wanted to come back. I wanted to see the place where it happened.”
Regulus says nothing. He stays where he is. He isn’t quite sure why, but a sudden, dreadful sense of foreboding comes over him. He thinks about laying a hand on the stone edge of the gravestone that stands between them, between himself and Harry—but a part of him is certain that, somehow, his hand will pass straight through.
“I see,” he realises.
“I’m… You have to know,” says Harry, “that I never wanted—”
“Don’t,” says Regulus. “Please, Harry. Don’t apologise to me.”
Harry’s got Lily’s unflinching stare. It cuts through the sixteen years and six feet between them.
If Regulus closes his eyes, this is what he sees:
Coconut biscuits and chomchom. Laughter. Tears. Apple blossoms in the garden. Harry’s first word: Mama. Contentment. An ugly orange cat curled up at the foot of the bed. Harry’s second word: Dada. Sunshine. A letter in July: Marlene McKinnon. More tears. Harry’s third word: Baba. (Regulus, he will console himself, is too much of a mouthful). Birthday cake. A toy broomstick. A letter in August: the Prewetts. Warm bodies in a dim room. Harry cooing on his chest. A feeling so incomprehensibly big it makes him want to burst. The leaves turn gold. A letter in September: Evan Rosier. Scrapbooking, but only begrudgingly. Cracks: Remus and Sirius, visiting separately. A broken vase. Dread. Between it all, some soft thing he had never before understood and never expected to find. The details escape him. The future is not so clear. But these things he knows as if they’ve happened already, as if they’ve always been happening, as if there is no stopping them. A wand left on the table. A spell. A promise. Last frost will fall in mid-March. And on Halloween, there will come a knock on the door.
—But Regulus does not close his eyes. He meets Harry’s stare instead.
Harry asks his next question quietly so that the girl by the lychgate won’t hear. Regulus, however, hears it clearly, because the question is meant for him, it is a question only he can answer:
“Does it hurt?”
A cold wind blows across the churchyard, tousling Harry’s hair, revealing a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.
Oh. Harry, he realises. Then: Oh, Harry.
But it’s an unusual sort of realisation; one that comes out of that strange space that has opened up between them, the sort of revelation that is dulled by the creeping certainty that perhaps he knew the truth all along. Or, rather, that he will know the truth, whatever he is and wherever he is going. A memory, unfolded in reverse. None of that changes the fact that sadness cracks Regulus open, rushes through him, threatens to wear whatever is left of him down to sand. He might blow away in the wind.
Harry’s hands shake, so he closes his fist around the strange black stone. He’s scared. So is Regulus. But that’s what courage is, isn’t it? Pretending you aren’t scared, even when you are. Or being scared and carrying on anyway. Facing death with hope.
So Regulus shakes his head, even though he cannot recall something that hasn’t yet happened, so he cannot be sure it’s the truth, only that a feeling half-foreign and half-known tells him that it is true, and he knows it—has known it, and will know it. “It doesn’t hurt. Not in the way you’re scared of.”
“Yeah?”
“Hurt stops mattering.”
Harry pauses to take that in. Then, even softer, he asks, “Can I… will you stay with me? When…”
His voice trails off into a whisper, lost in falling snow. But Regulus finally takes a step forward, past the grave by the yew tree, close enough to Harry that he could reach out and touch him.
This truth Regulus knows is unequivocal:
“I’ve been with you all along.”
Harry just nods. Tears have clumped his lashes into spider’s legs; the years haven’t changed his eyes.
“Yeah,” Harry says again. “Yeah.”
He wishes he had some profound thing to say to Harry, to console him and bolster him. But he doesn’t. There isn’t any consolation here.
“I might come back here,” says Harry. “To see you. I don’t know how much time I have left, I’ve still got things to do—to sort out—there are more to find—but I think I might come back.”
Regulus thinks Harry won’t.
Still, he says, “I’ll be here.”
Harry nods. Wipes at his eyes. Regulus can tell he is thinking about saying something else, but he doesn’t.
“Regulus!”
It’s Lily’s voice. He turns and looks for her, but he can’t see anything past the snow, gathering thickly on his shoulders, capping his head with white. When he turns back, Harry is gone, and Regulus is alone again. There is no girl by the lychgate. Just over his head, the branches of the old yew tree creak in the wind.
“There you are,” says Lily.
She has come up behind him. Her mascara has smeared underneath her eyes, and her voice is thick and sniffly. “We thought you were gone. That you were going to freeze to death. What were you thinking, running off without even a jacket?”
Regulus shakes his head. “No, I—” He sucks in a shaky breath. “I’m sorry.”
Suddenly, Lily is hugging him. Her hands dig into his shoulders. He can feel the soft swell of her body against his, real and solid and sure. It should feel stranger than it does. (It doesn’t feel strange at all). “I thought you were gone,” she says again.
He shakes his head. Wraps his arms around her shoulders. She’s warm underneath his hands. “I’m not gone,” he says.
“We thought you had left,” she says into his neck.
“I’m still here. I’m still here, Lily.”
“It’s cold,” she says once she has finally disentangled herself. “Come on.”
He lets her lead him away, past rows of graves and under the frosted lychgate, never once loosening her grip on his arm. They come to a slow stop on the deserted street, between the low wall and the shadow of the chapel to their left, and the row of little houses to their right, certain that they have come to some kind of crossroads, but neither quite sure how to voice it.
“Lily,” he finds himself saying, “I need you to know—”
“Don’t,” says Lily. She lets go, moves to stand in front of him, so that he cannot look away from her earnest gaze, her beautiful eyes, as familiar to him by now as his own. James and Harry, too. They've gotten under his skin. He would have to cut himself open to get them out.
“Don’t apologise to me,” Lily says. “Please. There isn’t any need for that. I’ve already seen who you are. You’ve shown me.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve been a genuine git, Lily—”
“I know you have. And you’ve been hurt,” she interrupts. “You’ve been scared. So have we. But it’s alright. Because you’re still here. And we—James and I—we promise not to hurt you or scare you. And we know you won't hurt or scare us.”
“I—”
“You don’t have to say anything. I just needed you to know that.”
He nods.
When he looks back at the lonely churchyard, something has changed. The yew tree remains, rising crookedly out of the ground. But there is no headstone to its left. There is no grave there. There had never been a grave there. And Regulus can’t quite remember why he had been so convinced that there was.
“Are you alright?” says Lily, following his gaze to the yew tree. “What is it?”
“Just a funny feeling,” says Regulus. He looks away from the yew tree and wraps his arms around his chest—cold, and lonely, and a little unsure. “It’ll pass.”
“All things do,” says Lily. “Are you coming home?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
“Good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s fucking freezing,” she says, slipping her right arm through his left, “and James has promised to send a bloody search party out if we aren’t back in fifteen minutes. He’ll be bouncing off the walls back home. Remus had to tackle Sirius not to come tearing after you. If the cottage is still standing by the time we make it back, it’ll be an honest-to-God miracle.”
Regulus laughs, small and weak, but real. Arm-in-arm, they make their way slowly through the snow back to the warm light of the Potters’ cottage, the shadow of a slanted roof and a candle flickering in every window, lighting the way home.
“I promise, too,” he says, half-silenced by snowfall.
In reply, she squeezes his arm, down his wrist, his frozen palm, his numb fingers.
They pass through the creaking gate together, but as they approach the door, Lily lets go of his hand.
“You have to go in first,” she says, wry. “First footing, and all that.”
“First footing?”
“It’s a Hogmanay thing,” she tells him. “A Scottish superstition. The first foot that passes through the door after the New Year has to belong to a tall man with dark hair. It can’t be me; I’m a ginger woman. Terrible misfortune might befall the house. But you…” She gestures to him: a tall man with dark hair. “You’ll bring good luck for the year ahead. And I reckon we need a bit of luck, don’t you?”
He is about to say, I don’t feel very lucky. But that isn’t true. He’s lucky. He has Lily to fetch him home, and James inside waiting for him. He has Sirius, and Remus by extension. He has Harry. He even has that blasted cat. That’s lucky. That’s more luck than a man like him deserves.
“Alright then,” he says.
He opens the door, and steps back inside.
1st January, 1981
James gathers him into his arms the minute he’s crossed the threshold. He has no mascara smudged down his cheeks, but his eyes are red and wet.
“Thank God you’re alright,” he says, voice cracking, “I’m sorry, Sirius is too, that was your rule and we broke it. We should never have pushed—”
“I’m sorry, too,” Regulus interrupts. “For everything.”
Lily shuts the door behind them. James tugs her into their hug, “C’mere, let me warm the two of you up a bit–” until they’re all gathered so closely together it’s impossible to tell who is who.
“You’ve been crying, James,” says Lily, accusatory, voice muffled by James’s shoulder. “That’s my job, remember? I cry for the three of us.”
“Reckoned we ought to share the burden once or twice,” says James with a sniffle.
“I’m sorry,” says Regulus again, as if, once he’s started, he can’t stop.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” says James. “Not for the three of us. Not tonight.”
“Reckon we can share that burden?” says Lily, elbowing him.
“Reckon we can,” says Regulus.
“Happy New Year, you two,” says James, and kisses them each on the cheek.
“Happy New Year,” says Lily, and tugs them both closer.
“Happy New Year,” says Regulus, feeling strange and yet, almost OK—not lucky, exactly, but something much more mysterious. Something harder to grasp. Something better.
Outside the candlelit windows of the cottage, snow keeps falling, falling, and will fall all night.
Notes:
Shoutout to the ending of James Joyce's "The Dead". Gotta be one of my favourite snowy graveyards.
As I am a sworn Jegulily zealot, I promise there will be more in this AU, but I wanted to leave this part of the story here because it felt like enough of an ending.
First footing is a real thing in Scotland, parts of Ireland, and parts of England, though I'm not sure as to what degree it's observed in those places, and stories vary on who, exactly, brings good/bad luck.
Feedback is always appreciated (even if it's angry yelling, though please do be kind, I have a tender underbelly). Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this. And, uh, happy 2022?
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