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The water appeared from nowhere, and concentrated into freezing cold puddles. Sirius had first discovered one when he had blindly left his bed in the middle of the night for a quick piss, only to be jarred wide awake by the wet frigidity that had enveloped his foot.

From then on, it seemed every time he turned around, there was a new puddle to mop up. He had checked the ceiling for leaks, but every corner was bone dry. He’d taken a look at the A/C unit, but the puddles weren’t confined to the floorspace below the vents. Sometimes he would sit on the couch and find it sopping wet, and no matter how long the water must have been sitting at room temperature, it was always just a degree above freezing.

Eventually, Sirius noticed that it was all salt water, which just made the whole ordeal more confusing. The phenomenon lasted for weeks, with Sirius becoming more and more frustrated every day— and it only got worse.

While he was crouched on his hands and knees to wipe up yet another pool of standing water, Sirius watched a heavy-looking chain slither along the floor, seemingly on its own, following a trail of small puddles. It nestled itself against the wall and wrapped around the corner until the tail end of it disappeared into the kitchen.

“Hey!” he shouted, almost slipping in his rush to get to his feet. He dashed after the chain into the tiny kitchen, but stopped short when he discovered the source of it.

A man stood with his back to Sirius. He was dressed sharply in a dress shirt and vest, but the fabric hung off of him awkwardly, completely waterlogged. His wet hair was pressed flat against his skull, and there were broken chains attached to each of his ankles, one longer than the other, cut at different points.

“How the hell did you get in here?!” Sirius demanded, but the man remained perfectly still and silent as the pool of water beneath him grew and grew. He reached out to grab the man’s shoulder, but his hand phased right through it. A chill crept up his arm, and he shivered, quickly pulling it back to hold against his chest. “What the fuck?”

Very slowly, the man turned to face Sirius, revealing himself. His features were familiar, and matched many of Sirius’s own.

“Regulus?”

His brother’s face was pale as death, and his blue lips contrasted brightly against it. Dark circles like Sirius had never seen hung beneath his lifeless gray eyes. Sirius took a step back from him.

“Geez, what happened to you?”

Regulus’s eyebrows furrowed angrily, and his mouth turned downward into a frown. There, that was the brother Sirius remembered. “What does it matter to you?” he asked sharply.

“You’re the one in my flat, Reg. Really, how did you get in here?”

“Just how stupid are you?” Regulus asked crossly. The man floated upward, and the chains dragged noisily against the tile until they lifted from the ground. The silence in their wake was deafening. Sirius could only watch in shocked awe as his brother phased right through the ceiling.

And then it finally occurred to him: he had to have been speaking with a ghost.

Did that mean Regulus was dead?

The ghost didn’t appear before Sirius again for at least a week, but the water didn’t go anywhere. Sirius had searched through news sources and obituaries for any mention of his brother’s death, but he had come up with nothing. He had begun to wonder if the ghost had been some sort of trick of the brain, grasping for an explanation to his ongoing problem.

With every new wet spot he found, Sirius’s fuse became shorter and shorter. His flat had begun to smell like a damn beach.

“You’re making yourself right at home, aren’t you?” Sirius snapped at the (possibly imaginary) ghost as he peeled off his wet socks, a casualty of his brother’s apparent sogginess. “Just packed up all your misery and brought it over to share! Are you here to haunt me? Did you really hate me that much?”

“You always have to make it about you, don’t you? As if you’re so fucking important.”

Sirius spun around, searching the room for the source of the voice, and found Regulus hovering in the corner near the ceiling. Sirius rubbed his eyes, but when he opened them again, his brother was still there with his ghastly chains dangling below him.

“What are you doing here, then?”

Regulus threw his hands up dramatically. “How the hell should I know?! Trust me, if I could just leave I’d have done so already.”

Sirius momentarily ceased his arguing just to stare up at the pathetic form his brother had taken. His tone shifted to one a bit more somber, which was confusing even for him. “Are you really dead?”

Regulus rolled his eyes, arms crossed. “What do you think?”

“It wasn’t announced anywhere.”

“Yeah, they probably haven’t found my body yet.”

“Where’s your body?”

“If I tell you, are you going to go looking for it like some kind of hero?”

“Well there’s not much I can do to save you now, is there?” Sirius asked sarcastically. Regulus tilted his chin up, glaring down at his brother haughtily.

“It’s at the bottom of the Atlantic.”

“You drowned,” Sirius realized. Looking at his brother now, he understood that this was how he must have looked at his moment of death. A pang of grief hit him, which was ridiculous to feel for Regulus, the brother he’d cut off years ago. “What were the chains attached to?”

“Cinder blocks.”

Sirius grimaced. The Black family had their share of enemies, sure, but he’d never thought anyone might resort to something like this. “Shouldn’t I let someone know what happened to you? If they’re looking for you—“

“No.” Regulus’s answer was fast and firm.

“What about the guy who did this to you?! If there’s a murderer out there, he needs to be locked up!”

“Whatever you do, Sirius, don’t you dare utter a word of this to anyone.”

Sirius sighed dramatically and sank down onto the couch, ignoring the dampness of the cushions. “What, are you so damn repressed you’re ashamed of dying?”

“Shut up.”

“Is that why you’re stuck here as a ghost? You just can’t shake all the shame they forced on you—“

“I said shut UP!”

Regulus flew backward to disappear into the wall, and Sirius stood to follow him into the bedroom on the other side. As soon as he opened the door, he was hit by the drop in temperature. The entire room was frigid, and his brother was curled up in a ball in the center of the room. His chains floated around him like rings around a small planet, and the puddle that had begun to form beneath him was frozen solid, spreading frost across the hardwood.

Was this what a post-death anxiety attack looked like?

“Fuck, Reg, breathe,” Sirius said, rubbing the goosebumps on his arms as he approached. Two silver eyes glared daggers at him, and Sirius put his hands up. “Okay, poor choice of words,” he admitted.

Regulus’s lack of breath meant there was no chance of hyperventilation, at least. Sirius sat down on the edge of his bed, watching as Regulus slowly rotated as if he were somersaulting on some kind of axis. It was a heartbreaking sight, even for someone so hard-headed and annoying.

“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” Sirius said casually. “What I said was insensitive— I’ve been told that’s something I’m good at.”

Regulus’s eyes squeezed shut like he was in pain. “I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with feelings like this after I was dead,” he said rather pathetically, and Sirius winced.

“Yeah, well,” he started directionlessly, “what kind of feelings?”

“Why should you care?”

“Oh my god, Reg, I’m capable of basic fucking empathy.”

“And I’m capable of handling myself without your help, thank you.”

Sirius threw his head back and groaned. “You’re fucking dead and you still won’t talk things out? If you keep all that shit bottled up, you’ll just keep feeling like this for the rest of your afterlife.”

Very slowly, as if releasing his ghostly muscles one by one, Regulus uncurled, and his chains fell limply to hang from his ankles once more. Sirius thought he might actually be getting somewhere, but his brother only turned away from him. “So be it,” he spat, and his form blurred slightly as he parted from the room at an inhuman speed.

Things seemed to mellow out after their talk— at least, as much as they could with Regulus's thick head in the way. It was just like gaining an angry, floating roommate. Not ideal, but livable.

“Want some eggs?” Sirius found himself asking the air one morning as he sleepily stumbled into the kitchen. As expected, Regulus seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“How would you expect me to eat them?”

Sirius shrugged, lazily cracking two eggs for himself over a frying pan. “I don’t know if ghosts eat or not. I was just offering.”

Surprisingly, he wasn’t met with more hostile arguing from his brother. Sirius made his breakfast in comfortable silence, then sat down at the table while Regulus hovered over the chair across from him.

“So you don’t eat,” Sirius mumbled around a mouthful of toast. “Do you sleep?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess you didn’t do much of that, anyway. Is there any way you can stop the water?”

“Why do you expect me to know everything about ghosts? Just because I am one? It’s not like I was given a fucking guidebook when I died.”

“I was just asking,” Sirius grumbled defensively.

A knock at the door made both of them jump, and Sirius found it amusing that even ghosts could still get startled. He shoved the last bite of toast in his mouth as he stood.

“Stay here,” he instructed Regulus. “Probably best not to scare the delivery man.”

Regulus followed him anyway, hovering just behind the couch as Sirius opened the door to sign for whatever package had arrived— but instead of a delivery man, he came face to face with his best friend.

“Prongs?” Sirius’s face broke out in a grin. “What’re you doing here? It’s early!”

James snickered as he crossed the threshold into the living room. “Eleven isn’t particularly early for everyone, mate. Just because you sleep until the afternoon—”

“Well maybe everyone else should take it easy for once.” Sirius turned to follow James back into the flat, expecting to have to explain his brother’s appearance— but Regulus had disappeared from behind the couch. “I was just having breakfast, you want some?”

“Sure. You can start repaying me now for all the times I’ve fed you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sirius returned to the kitchen to throw another two eggs onto the stove. James sat down in Sirius’s spot to pick at his abandoned bacon.

“Wormy and I are hitting up a comedy club tonight if you want to come,” he offered. “It’d just be the three of us, since Moony hasn’t been well—“ he seemed to stop short, and Sirius glanced over at him. James was holding one hand palm-up, staring up at the ceiling in confusion. When Sirius followed his gaze, he found Regulus curled up in his anxious planetary rotation, dripping water slowly but steadily onto James’s plate.

“Oh,” Sirius said stupidly, and James merely looked at him with his eyebrows drawn together.

“Is your ceiling leaking? There’s water dripping from somewhere.”

He couldn’t see Regulus. Sirius glanced between the two of them, then shrugged. “Yeah, it’s been a problem. I really need to talk to the landlord about it.”

“Yeah, you’ll probably want to do that soon. Water damage is no joke.”

“Trust me, I know.”

James moved into a different seat, abandoning Sirius's now-soggy food. Sirius flipped the eggs onto a plate once they’d finished.

“Want toast, mate?”

“The hell?”

Sirius peered at James again, and this time his hand rested on his head, forming a valley in his unruly hair. Regulus had moved with James, continuing to drip onto him.

“Just how leaky is your place, man? Is this salt water? It smells like ass.”

“Sorry,” Sirius said sheepishly, deciding that was probably a no on the toast. He handed the plate to James. “Maybe you ought to take that to-go. I’ll see you tonight, yeah?”

“Yeah, alright,” James agreed, accepting the plate. He kept his eyes on the ceiling as he headed back to the front door. “Good luck with the leak, mate, that really sucks.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Sirius answered dryly.

As soon as the door closed, Sirius rounded on his brother, who was still in his levitating fetal position. “What the fuck, Reg? You did that on purpose.”

Regulus uncurled enough to glare at Sirius with all of his hostility returned full-force.

“I get it, you don’t like James. But shit, man, you don’t have to be a dick.”

“You don’t get it,” Regulus argued.

“Yeah, you know? I don’t. I never get anything that goes on in your paranoid little brain. Why couldn’t he see you?”

“I can choose whether or not to appear for individual people.”

“Oh, so you figured that out without your fancy ghost handbook, but not how to stop fucking dripping all over the place.”

Arguments with his brother had always gone the same way: one of them would eventually storm off, and the other would follow, refusing to let the fight end. Regulus didn’t just storm off anymore, though; he disappeared completely. Sirius couldn’t exactly follow that.

“Fuck you too!” Sirius shouted to the now-empty room, kicking at one of the chairs.

Days passed with no sign of Regulus aside from the ever-present water. He was likely pouting self-righteously somewhere in the walls, judging by the stains spreading on the old wallpaper. He was no doubt causing irreparable damage to the insulation. Stubbornly, Sirius made no effort to call out to him.

When Regulus finally showed up again, Sirius hadn’t expected to find him sitting on the couch so sadly. His back was against the armrest, and he had his knees pulled up to his chest, staring at the wall emptily. The longer chain dropped from his ankle down off of the couch with its end resting on the floor.

Sirius ignored him at first. He left to run errands in the afternoon, and met his friends in the evening. When he came back, Regulus hadn’t moved an inch. Sirius still pretended not to notice him, going about his night as he would have before Regulus had ever appeared.

When midnight struck without any sign of change from his brother, Sirius finally decided that maybe his resolute silence wasn’t actually born of obstinacy, but something darker. He took a seat on the other side of the couch, which had become entirely soaked after a full day of being subjected to Regulus’s strange seawater. (It was definitely going to mold. Sirius was definitely going to need to get a new couch.) However, Regulus’s eyes showed no sign of recognition.

Uneasy, Sirius waved his hand in front of his brother’s face. “Hey, anyone in there?”

Though his expression remained unmoving, Regulus turned his head away from Sirius.

“This is weird, Reg, even from you. Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

Regulus closed his eyes, and a familiar look of pain etched its way back onto his face. “I just want to stop existing,” he said. His tone was bitter, yet almost pleading. “I’m so fucking tired.”

Sirius leaned back against the armrest opposite his brother so he could face him fully. “Right. I can’t imagine your state of mind has improved since dying.”

“I thought I would just die, and that would be it. No more thoughts, no more anything. If even dying won’t make it all stop, what am I supposed to do?”

Something terrible made a connection in Sirius’s brain, and his heart stopped. “Regulus…” he started slowly, eyes wide with horror. “Did you kill yourself?”

Regulus said nothing, and it was all the answer Sirius needed. His throat tightened, and he tried to swallow the lump forming there. His voice was barely there as he formed his next question.

“Why?”

Regulus’s eyes snapped open. “What do you mean why?” he asked sharply. “I was left drowning for years before I finally finished the job myself. What else was I supposed to do?!

“You could have come here.”

“It was too late for that.”

“What makes you think it was too late?”

Regulus laughed bitterly. “After everything we’d been through, Sirius? The last time we spoke you made it very clear you were washing your hands of me.”

“It doesn’t matter what we’ve been through,” Sirius argued. “If you’d shown up at my door, we would have fought, sure, but I never would have turned you away.”

Regulus’s eyes widened. He finally looked at his brother, and for a moment, Sirius saw the child he’d once known; the boy he’d been forced to accept was never coming back. But as quickly as that boy had appeared, he vanished. Regulus’s ghostly form was gone from the couch.

Sirius felt a bizarre rush of panic. “Reg?” he called out, standing to search the room in vain. The sound of running water emerged from the bathroom. Sirius rushed to check it out; both the sink and the shower had turned on. Sirius tried to turn off the tap, but the flow of water didn’t cease. In fact, it kept rushing faster and faster until the shower head broke and flew from the spout with such intensity that it cracked the tile wall.

“Fuck!” Sirius shouted, throwing himself backwards away from the shower. He stepped right into a large quantity of water, and realized that the toilet, too, was overflowing and rapidly gushing water. “Regulus, stop it!” He backed out of the bathroom, but only stepped into more water. The kitchen sink was behaving the same as all the other water sources, spurting water all the way to the living room.

As soon as the water flowing from the bathroom connected with the larger puddle, all of it rose from the floor in a strange sheet, forming a liquid ceiling above Sirius. As he looked up at it, everything beneath suddenly became a sea of water, churning dangerously with the force of a storm.

Sirius was thrown around in the currents like a rag doll, inhaling salt water as he fought to reach the air above. His head broke the surface long enough to gulp in a short breath of air before he was plunged once more into the depths.

This time, there were chains around his ankles. Something heavy forced him down further from his chance of life and secured him to the floor. He grew lightheaded, and he fought to hold his breath. Was Regulus trying to kill him? Did he mean for his brother to join him as a ghost—?

But Sirius’s head filled with thoughts that weren’t his own. They were panicked, jumbled, desperate.

I’m letting everyone down. Our family line ends here.

I won’t bring any more shame to the Black name.

Darkness clouded Sirius’s vision as the last of his air escaped him.

I don’t want to die.

I should have gone with him.

Sirius woke on the stairs, convulsing and coughing, but no water was pulled up from his lungs. His clothes and hair were bone dry— in fact, nothing in the apartment seemed to be wet at all following the tsunami that had raged through it.

Still coughing unproductively, he sat up to reorient himself. At the bottom of the stairs, Regulus sat with his face in his knees. He was the only thing in the room that had remained waterlogged.

“Reg?” Sirius choked, and his brother lifted his head. “What the hell was that?”

“I… don’t know.” Regulus averted his eyes. “I guess I’m not used to… feeling this way.”

Sirius ran his hands through his hair, and found that although the water was gone, sea salt crusted his scalp. “Feeling what, exactly?”

Regulus seemed to struggle with finding the words. “Hopeful, I guess?”

“Whatever that was didn’t exactly feel hopeful.”

“Because it’s pointless to feel that way now. Finding something like hope after I’ve already died feels like a waste.”

“So that sea was… what, your regrets?”

“Maybe.”

Sirius had never seen Regulus so open and vulnerable. He understood what his brother meant— it did feel like a waste. Maybe if they’d managed to talk like this earlier, then Regulus wouldn’t have felt like he needed to die.

Maybe he wouldn’t have thought his best option was to anchor himself to the ocean floor.

“I shouldn’t have given up on you,” Sirius breathed.

“What?”

“Maybe if I’d just kept pushing, I could have eventually broken through to you—“

“You couldn’t have.”

“You don’t know that—“

“I do know it! It didn’t matter what you could have said to me, Sirius, I never would have gone with you. I preferred death over the shame of leaving.”

Sirius felt crushed. It was the same overwhelming feeling of powerlessness that he’d felt every time he and Regulus had spoken in school, every time he had tried and failed to get him to open up. It was this hopeless sense of despair that had finally led to the final time they'd spoken when Sirius was seventeen— when he'd given up on his brother once and for all. He couldn’t have done anything then, and he couldn’t do anything now.

The thoughts that had filled his mind as he drowned— Regulus’s dying thoughts, he realized— echoed in his head. His death had been drawn out for so long that he’d had time to recall every regret. He had to have been acutely aware of just how long it would take for his lungs to give out. Sirius lowered his head.

“Of all the ways to die, why did you choose to drown?”

Regulus was quiet for a long moment, likely searching Sirius's wavering voice for signs of tears. “Because I never wanted anyone to find me,” he explained at last. “I didn’t want anyone to know how weak I was.”

“You weren’t weak,” Sirius said adamantly. “They broke you down again and again until you felt your only choice was to die.”

“Because I wasn’t strong enough!” Regulus argued. “It didn’t matter how hard I tried, it always resulted in failure!”

“I know, Reg! Nothing was ever going to be good enough for them— but they aren’t the only people who could have appreciated you. Their standard is fucked. You weren’t a failure just because you didn’t fit into the mold they created for you.”

Regulus’s shoulders sagged.

“Do you still think I was weak?” Sirius continued, and Regulus shook his head.

“No,” he said in almost a whisper. “You were stronger than me. Braver than me.”

“Geez, it's not a competition. Neither of us fit into that mold. I wasn’t weak for leaving, just like you weren’t weak for staying. We were both seeking what we needed most— Mother and Father let you down by refusing to provide that for you.”

Regulus brought his forearm up to cover his eyes. Was he crying? It was hard to tell, given the water droplets that always covered his face anyway.

“Please don’t make another tsunami—“

“I won’t!” Regulus dropped his arm to aim a short glare toward his brother, but it fell from his face again quickly. “You could have provided that for me all along, couldn’t you? If I hadn’t been so stupid.”

Sirius rose to his feet, brushed some salt from his knees, and descended the stairs until he sat on the step right in front of his brother. “They say hindsight is 20/20, right?” He offered Regulus a small smile, then elbowed him in the ribs— or rather, put his elbow through his ribs. “But listen, Reg— no matter if they find your body or not, and no matter what they might say about you, you were good enough. It’s a shame for them that they never realized that.”

As water continued to drip from Regulus onto the stairs below, it didn’t reappear on his face. His clothes and hair lifted from his skin, looking less soaked and more just damp.

“I think that’s exactly what I needed to hear,” Regulus said in stunned awe. “If even one person had said that to me…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry we couldn’t have been real brothers when I was still alive.”

The remaining droplets on Regulus’s skin dried until the only salt water left on him was contained in the tear tracks on his cheeks. Tears welled up in Sirius’s own eyes, and he brought his arm up in the same fashion Regulus had earlier. “Fuck, you’re making me cry!”

“What? But you never cry!”

“I do cry, just never in front you, asshole! You’re the one who never cries! How’s it feel?!”

“…Freeing.”

Sirius dropped his arm again, and the look on Regulus’s face could only be described as peaceful. It was a tranquility he may never have felt, even as a child. The chains on his ankles loosened, fell off, and vanished.

This was the brother Sirius had always known was buried in there somewhere. This wasn’t the cookie cutter shape he had always striven to be— this was Regulus, true down to his core. For the first time since childhood, he felt true pride for his brother.

“I’m glad you got stuck here,” he admitted. “Even if you ruined all my furniture and any chance I had of getting my security deposit back.”

Regulus actually let out a short laugh. “I think I understand why I wound up here, now. I never even let myself think it until I faced death— but my biggest regret was refusing your offers to leave. I think I came here because… this is where I should have been. I just never let myself realize it, because it would have broken me.”

Sirius gave him a watery smile, and tried once again to punch his brother’s shoulder. His fist went right through. “You showed up here in the end, though, no matter how long it took. And now I can say— I was proud of my brother.” He choked up a little at the end, and the words seemed to leave Regulus visibly shaken. He ran his hands through his now-dry hair— but he didn’t pull as he’d always done when he was alive, a habit of nerves or frustration.

Regulus’s form began to blur, and Sirius tried to blink the tears out of his eyes to clear his vision— but when he looked again, his brother had turned transparent. He was staring down at his hands with true fear in his eyes.

“I don’t want to go,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t— want to die.”

Sirius didn’t want to see him go, either— not when they had just connected for the first time. But if Regulus had sought peace when he had ended his life, maybe it was time he finally earned it.

“Wherever you’re going,” Sirius promised, “I’ll meet you there.”

Regulus smiled, and for once, nothing about it was forced. It was melancholy, yet radiant. His face was filled with a gratitude Sirius never would have imagined on him. It was a genuine response to Sirius’s words, a promise that he wouldn’t be left alone; a promise that at least one person would be waiting to see him again.

It was the last thing he saw of his brother before he was gone, and the emotion that followed was gut-wrenching. No matter what he may have said about Regulus before, no matter how long it had taken to reach this point, no matter the circumstances that surrounded it— Sirius was honored to have been the cause of that smile.

In the end, Sirius did have to replace his molding couch, and he was scrubbing sea salt off of everything in the flat until the day he moved— but every time his hand brushed over some of the sticky grit he’d missed, he felt the corners of his mouth turn upward.