Chapter Text
Regulus’s fingers were laced with James’s as they followed Sirius into his office. At least, James assumed it was an office. It had a desk in the center of the room full of a mess of papers thrown around in disarray. There wasn’t anything else on the desk though, no computer or any decorations. There was no bed either, but James figured that was due to the whole never-sleeping thing that Regulus had just mentioned.
“Just ignore all that,” Sirius said offhandedly, waving his hand around to indicate the mess he’d made.
“What have you been working on?” Regulus asked in that judgmental voice that only a younger sibling could use and get away with.
Sirius rolled his eyes, but when he looked at James, James was surprised to find that he looked a bit embarrassed. It was strange to see that expression on someone who looked so sure and confident. And attractive, obviously. He wasn’t blind, okay?
“You have a lot of free time when you don’t need sleep,” he replied, aiming the words at James as if Regulus wasn’t even in the room. James believed that, if only because he could imagine how much free time he would have if sleep didn’t fill so much of his life.
James chuckled though, intrigued by the way Sirius's eyes glanced over to the desk and back again. It was like he couldn't be sure if he wanted to explain it or not.
“Honestly, I don’t think James is going to judge you for it,” Regulus said dismissively. James could practically hear the eye roll. James jumped slightly.
“No, no! Of course, I wouldn’t! I would never do something like —”
“James,” Regulus said, chuckling softly. Sirius’s lips were tucked between his teeth as he held back laughter.
“I believe Reggie is just messing with you,” Sirius said.
“Oh, right,” James said, letting out a relieved laugh.
“I’ve been writing music,” Sirius confessed. “It’s not very good. But, you know, maybe I’ll show you another time,” he said noncommittally.
“Cool,” James replied encouragingly, unreasonably interested in hearing what kind of music an immortal vampire might write. “I’d love to hear it.”
Sirius gave him a grateful smile before turning to look at a large painting on the wall next to his desk. James hadn’t noticed it upon first entering the room. A small alcove had been carved into the wall in the perfect shape to fit the painting so that it wasn’t visible from the doorway. There was a small shadow cast over it making the old wooden frame look even more ancient.
The painting was of two young boys, both pale and unhappy looking, their eyes a matching shade of gray. Their clothes were old-fashioned, frilly, and bizarre to his modern eyes. He didn’t know time periods well enough to understand when they might have lived, but he could tell that they were much older than he’d originally thought.
“Is this a painting of the two of you?” James asked, his voice a distant whisper. Regulus’s hand in his tightened slightly, as if he didn’t like looking at the painting.
“Yes,” Sirius said, gazing at it just as James was. “It’s customary for children to have their portraits painted when they reach the age of eight. I was nine when mine was done, I had to wait for Regulus to turn eight.” He grinned when Regulus let out a small huff like he was annoyed. “They didn’t want to bother hiring someone to do two separate portraits, not when we were so close in age.”
“Right,” James said like he understood, even though nothing could have been further from the truth. He’d already known that Regulus was rich, but he hadn’t imagined that he was rich while still human as well. He supposed it made sense, he had that stiffness to him that people had when they were raised to be proper.
“You see, James,” Sirius went on, “our family is rather unique. Though our mother and father were human when they had us, once they successfully brought an heir and a spare into the world, they were finally allowed to join their parents as vampires.”
“Oh?” James said, the word escaping him without his permission. “Your — your parents are vampires?”
Sirius nodded once, finally dragging his eyes away from the portrait to look at James. There was a deep frown on his lips, some memory clearly bothering him. “We come from a large family of vampires. Neither Regulus nor I are sure who was the first one to be changed, the legends our family likes to share don’t go far enough back, and our family members love to invent new stories when the mood hits them.”
“More like when the lies benefit them,” Regulus muttered.
Sirius shrugged one elegant shoulder. “That’s true.”
“Don’t let Sirius fool you,” Regulus said, his voice like a dance on James’s eardrum, playfulness returning to the conversation in an instance. “He created plenty of lies himself.”
“Stories, Reggie,” Sirius said with a grin. “They were stories, not lies. And anyway, you always got a kick out of them when we were children. I had to keep you entertained.”
Regulus let out a quiet huff of laughter. “Sure,” he said, “Whatever you need to tell yourself.”
“Anyway,” Sirius said, rolling his eyes playfully, “the point is that we don’t know who the first vampire of the Black family was, but we were raised among them. Or at least with the stories about them. Human children aren’t allowed among the vampires, especially not their newly changed parents. For vampires that have only tasted human blood, children are too much of a lure. Especially for vampires from our family who have never had to control themselves.”
James shivered slightly, Regulus squeezed his hand. “So who raised you?”
“They hired human caretakers to teach us. Our parents were changed shortly after this painting was completed, so we knew them when we were very little, but once they were changed, they vanished from our lives until we came of age. Of age meant twenty-five in our family. Not the eighteen you would think of nowadays.”
“Did you know any of your other family?” James asked.
“Our Uncle wasn’t terrible either, though he only visited us twice. We were also brought before our great-grandfather a few times,” Regulus answered. “He seemed to have more… control over himself than most of the other family members did.”
“He scared Reggie,” Sirius said without mercy.
“I was a child, Sirius. All adults scared me.”
Sirius barked a laugh, and even James couldn’t help the soft chuckle that escaped him. Trying to imagine Regulus scared of anyone was quite the feat, he seemed so intimidating, so sure of himself.
“So you always knew about the… vampires?” James asked. The word still felt wrong on his tongue, as if he wasn’t allowed to say it.
Sirius nodded. “We were always told what the expectations for us were. If we wanted to join our family, then we would have to follow their rules.”
“By join, you mean —”
“If we wanted to be gifted,” he said the word like it had wronged him, “immortal life, then we needed to produce heirs, we needed to carry on the bloodline.”
“Oh,” James breathed.
“Yes, oh,” Sirius said with an unhappy nod. “So we always knew what our fates would be.”
“What if you —” James cut himself off, suddenly unsure of if his question would be considered rude or not.
"What if we what?” Regulus asked, knocking his shoulder lightly against James’s, a comforting touch that made James relax just a tiny bit.
“What if you didn’t want to become a vampire?” James asked, cringing slightly. Sirius gave him a kind look.
“Then you died,” he answered bluntly.
James felt oddly like he’d just been slapped. “What?”
“They couldn’t allow our family to continue unchecked,” Regulus said, his voice distant. “If you refused to fulfill your purpose, then you were killed.”
It took James a moment to digest that. He was suddenly very worried about where this conversation was going. Did Sirius have a child out there somewhere? Did Regulus?
“Why eight years old?”
“Good question,” Sirius said. “Back then, children weren’t as likely to survive their first few years of life as they are now. They had to be sure that the children would reach adulthood before turning the parents into vampires. Vampires can’t have children, not in our frozen state, so they only had a few chances.”
“So once you were eight years old, that meant you would probably survive?”
"Generally speaking,” Sirius said. “It was more likely at least, there is never a guarantee of course.” James thought he saw Sirius’s eyes flash to Regulus, but he couldn’t be sure, not with the quick way the two of them moved.
“So… how were both you changed? Did you both get married?” He tried not to sound too worried as he asked the question, but he wasn’t sure that he succeeded.
Sirius smirked slightly, his lips held tightly together like he was trying not to laugh. “No, we didn’t go the traditional route.”
Regulus squeezed James’s hand again and James squeezed him back. He couldn’t be sure, but he had the strangest feeling that Regulus needed to comfort.
“When I was almost of age, a family member was sent to help me find a wife. In a family such as ours, you can imagine that they have a tight grip on who we marry. Our parents,” he gestured to Regulus as if James wouldn’t know who he was speaking about, “were easily matched.”
Regulus groaned quietly, James gave him a worried look but Regulus just shook his head, a rueful expression on his face.
“They were cousins,” Sirius said without preamble. “They did love to keep our blood pure.”
“Your parents are cousins?” James said, shocked, looking down at Regulus as he dropped his face into his free hand.
“You enjoy sharing this fact far too much,” Regulus mumbled.
“Yep,” Sirius said, grinning again like this was all so entertaining. “I believe they had a similar plan for me, they wanted me to marry my cousin Bella, but that all fell apart when I was two years away from entering society. I was already having weekly meetings about the proper ladies I would have available to me once I entered the marriage market, but I wasn’t happy about it, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
James nodded because although he didn’t know Sirius well, he couldn’t picture this man being forced into anything.
“Then my eldest cousin disappeared on her wedding night. She was betrothed to some terrible man that my family had chosen for her, and she’d been fighting it the entire time, so when she was about to be forced down the aisle, she ran for the hills.”
“They told us she died,” Regulus whispered. “They said that they killed her for her disobedience.”
Sirius frowned slightly. “It’s true. We didn’t realize that she had survived until nearly two decades later.”
“That’s so sad,” James said.
“It was,” Sirius agreed. "She was always my favorite cousin too. Andromeda is her name.”
“Is? She’s still alive?” James asked.
Sirius smirked. “I’ll get there.”
“Oh, right, sorry, go on,” he rambled quickly. Regulus leaned into his side again. It was the only thing keeping him tethered, he was sure.
“Once Andromeda vanished, the clamps around our lives got that much tighter. It was suffocating.” Sirius swallowed harshly. There was something so strangely human about it, something that made James remember that these were just two men, despite their inhuman abilities. Just two brothers who had been through something unfathomable together. “Regulus and I were getting antsy, so one day, when I was about eight months from entering society, we traveled to the ocean together.”
Regulus leaned even heavier against James’s side, James dropped his hand and put an arm around his shoulders. He noticed Sirius track the movement, but he couldn’t interrupt what his expression meant as he watched it happen.
“We’d been taught to swim as children, and we’d been brought to that manor near the beach many times, so we thought it would be fine. We didn’t account for the storm rolling in, or for the hellish riptides that were forming under the water. Reggie —” Sirius stuttered on his name, pausing only a second before shouldering through the sentence like it was a fight he had to win. “Regulus nearly drowned, he was pulled under the water, nearly dragged out to sea.”
“Oh God,” James said quietly, holding Regulus so tightly that if he’d been human, it likely would have bruised him.
“It was only because of our Uncle that he survived. We’d thought the manor was empty, but our Uncle Alphard had been staying there for a short while, having only just returned from his travels. He rescued Regulus from the ocean, but when he brought him on shore…” Sirius looked haunted.
“I was dead,” Regulus said plainly. Sirius’s gaze snapped up to him.
“You were almost dead,” he corrected, “but Uncle Alphard was sure you wouldn’t survive. I begged him to save you, I couldn’t live with myself if you didn’t make it. If it was anyone else in the family, they would have said no, but Uncle Alphard was always a bit soft, at least that’s what our mother said. He took pity on us and right there on the beach, a storm raging around us, he changed Regulus into a vampire.”
James didn’t know what to say. He felt like he was there, as if he was staring down at Regulus slowly dying on the beach, his face unnaturally pale, his lips blue.
“Our family wasn’t happy about it,” Regulus whispered. Sirius clenched his teeth together.
“No, they weren't happy about it,” Sirius said. “Uncle Alphard paid the price, but they allowed Regulus to survive only because I was still alive, because I was their pawn.” His face changed in the blink of an eye, something like regret weighing down on him.
“It’s fine,” Regulus said. James felt a bit like he was free-falling, as if the ground beneath him had opened up and swallowed him whole.
“I tried to follow their rules, but when I learned of Alphard’s death and without Regulus by my side, they didn’t allow us to see each other after he was transformed, I started to stray. I saw the cruelty of their actions, I knew the horrible way they lived, and I couldn't handle it. I only lasted two months on the marriage market before it became too much for me and I made a run for it.”
“Why didn’t they allow Regulus to see you?” James asked.
“Most vampires at that age are too volatile, too unpredictable. They cannot be allowed around humans they aren’t planning to eat. Regulus was too young, it wasn’t safe, not when they so desperately needed me to carry on the family name.”
“Where did you go when you ran?”
“To the continent,” Sirius said, “then when that didn’t seem far enough, to Africa. I stayed on the run for years, always looking behind me like they would catch up at any moment. It was horrible, but I was free. In a sense, at least. I lived like that for more than ten years. I had just turned thirty when Regulus found me.”
James tensed slightly.
“I thought he was going to kill me,” Sirius said. “I thought he would have been upset that I’d run. It felt so selfish at the time, and I was so young that I didn’t consider how my actions might have affected Regulus, not until much later, not until it was too late to go back.”
“They let me live because they assumed I would be able to find him,” Regulus said quickly. “But I never blamed you, Sirius.”
Sirius gave him a disbelieving look.
“Okay, maybe I did for a year or so there, but I wasn’t allowed to return to the family until I caught him and that time alone gave me the chance to understand.”
“By the time he caught up to me, I was sure I was dead, that he would kill me for what I did,” Sirius jumped in to say. “But he didn’t. He forgave me, but we both knew that if he was able to find me, then the rest of my family would eventually be able to find me as well.”
“So you changed him?” James said, understanding dawning on him. He felt more than saw Regulus nod.
“He changed me,” Sirius confirmed. “When our family discovered what he’d done, a couple of decades later mind you, when they realized that all their future prospects for their family had been squandered, they tried to destroy both of us.”
“Obviously, they didn’t succeed,” James said.
Sirius chuckled. “No, but only barely. We only survived because a war broke out between our family and… well, that’s not for you to worry about. Needless to say, they had enough losses without coming for us as well. We haven’t heard from them since.”
James was dreadfully curious, but he didn’t want to pry about what war Sirius was talking about, so he let that plot point drop.
“And Andromeda?” James asked.
“Oh, yes,” Sirius said, his grin back in full and devastating force. “She found us about ten years after Regulus changed me. While she’d run from our family, she wasn’t alone. It was with her partner, a vampire himself, that she found solace. He wasn’t a member of our family —”
“Thankfully,” Regulus muttered.
“—but he knew who we were and he knew who she was. When she asked for safety, he gave it to her. He changed her only a few months after she ran away. She didn’t ever plan to come back, not until she heard about the multiple failed pregnancies that her sister had gone through. Bella was dying to have a child, she hated her husband, but she wanted what the family had offered her. However, when Andromeda came back to check on her, it was to find Bellatrix nearly dead after another miscarriage.”
“Oh, Jesus,” James breathed, feeling vaguely ill all of a sudden.
“It wasn’t pretty,” Sirius agreed. “Andromeda saved her life, as Uncle Alphard had for Regulus, and when the two planned to escape the family, they were discovered by Narcissa, their youngest sister. She was too young to be engaged yet, and she demanded they take her with them.”
“Did they escape?”
“Surprisingly,” Sirius said with another soft chuckle. “Bellatrix was always a force to be reckoned with. Once she was changed, the family didn’t dare come after her.”
“Those are… unusual names,” James said. It was only a second after the words left his mouth that he realized how rude they sounded.
“The Black family is known for naming their children after astronomical bodies: stars, planets, or constellations. Hence, Sirius and Regulus, both stars,” Sirius asked easily, he didn’t seem offended which James was thankful for.
“Wow,” James replied. “And neither of you have any children, do you?” He couldn’t help the question, he had to double-check.
Sirius barked out a laugh again, James found that the sound was oddly comforting. “No, we don’t have any children.”
James blew out a breath of relief, growing red when both Regulus and Sirius started cackling at his expense.
“So how did you end up in America? And not eating humans? And with the rest of your family?” he asked quickly, urgently trying to get the attention off of himself.
“The not eating humans thing is all Sirius,” Regulus said.
“Our original family fed like it was a frenzy, it made them animalistic, less than human. The surviving ones grew more unhinged by the year.”
“What he isn’t saying,” Regulus interrupted, “is that he’s always had a soft spot for animals. He once found a dying bird on my window seal when we were children and painstakingly nursed it back to health.” James felt suddenly lost, unable to track how that might be related.
“Some of us have a heart, Regulus,” Sirius said jokingly. “But yes, he’s not wrong. I’ve always had a soft spot for them, and I think I always knew that I wasn’t going to be the type of person that could take a human life.”
He paused, his eyes settling on Regulus’s face. Regulus gave a very subtle nod.
“When Regulus found and changed me, he’d been surviving off of human blood for his entire life as a vampire, but I couldn’t do it. Not even as I slowly began to starve in my first couple months as a vampire. It wasn’t until I was out in the forest, trying to escape the incessant smell of human blood, that I discovered my… ability.”
“Ability?” James asked.
“I came across a dying wolf. It was very old and injured, having left its pack so that it did not hold them back. I was so hungry and I could smell its blood, but I still tried to resist. I felt nothing but pity for the creature who couldn’t even run from me. But then I heard a soft sound, something like a voice, but not quite human. It was the wolf. It spoke to me, it demanded a painless end.”
“You can hear animals?” James breathed. He thought he heard Regulus laughing again, but Sirius’s proud smile and nod distracted him.
“I gave the wolf what it asked for, and discovered that its blood replenished my strength. Regulus avoided my way of life at first, but it didn’t take much for him to see things my way. Especially when — well, there were a few moments where we could both see his humanity fading.”
“Yes, I think that’s enough for tonight,” Regulus said stiffly. James felt his heart clench in sympathy, even though he didn’t know the details.
Sirius’s smile was tight, but it didn’t fade. “The others found us, not the other way around,” Sirius said, answering James’s earlier question. “But we’ll have to entertain you with that question another time.”
“Right, sorry,” James said quickly.
“You apologize too much,” Regulus said. “He only means because we’re about to be interrupted.”
“Oh?” James replied just as Lily came flying around the corner into the office.
“Are you done with your tour?” Lily said, knocking into Sirius roughly. She’d clearly done it on purpose if the mischievous look in her eyes was anything to go on.
“Yes,” Sirius said.
“No,” Regulus replied at the same time.
“No?” James asked.
“I was going to show you my bedroom,” Regulus said, his voice low, drawing James in like luring an animal into a trap.
“We don’t have time for that,” Lily said before James could respond and embarrass himself.
Regulus turned to glare at the woman, she only grinned even wider.
“A storm is coming,” she said, and just like that, the energy in the room changed, sparking to life like oxygen feeding a fire.