Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was no reason to say yes.

No reason but the sort that grows quiet in a person and waits. Not logic. Not duty. Something older. The kind of reason that starts in the pit of your stomach and works upward until it knots your throat. Something ancestral. A whisper at the back of your mind that sounds too much like a voice you once loved.

Kingsley didn’t assign me the case, or give me the comfort of protocol or boundaries of duty. He offered it, like a cigarette to someone who’d already quit but still kept the craving in their bones.

His voice had that low, steady rhythm he used when something mattered. Not an invitation, a summons that pretended to be a choice.

“Just talk to him,” he said, sliding the file across the desk.

I didn’t open it. Didn’t need to.

The folder itself gave off that faint hum of Unspeakable binding, quietly threatening, like something watching you even with its eyes closed. There are artifacts that hum. Files. Old portraits. Certain places in London that remember things they shouldn’t. This was different. The folder didn’t hum like a spell. It breathed, faintly, like lungs still trying to forget what they had seen.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not in the mood for ghosts.”

Kingsley leaned back. He didn’t smile. He never did, when something mattered. His chair creaked under the weight of his silence. That, more than his words, gave me pause.

“He’s not a ghost.”

“You sure?”

“No,” he said. “But he’s breathing.”

The light in his office bent slightly as he said it, like something in the wards recoiled at the name that hadn't been spoken yet. Or maybe it was just my nerves, tightening around the silence. That was enough to make me crack the folder.

No photo. No notes. Just a single name typed in an elegant, precise Ministry hand:

Black, Regulus A.

The room went still. Not silent, still. Not in the way a room goes still when someone faits or cries out or dies. No. this was the stillness of recognition. A room holding its breath. Of seeing a ghost. The kind of silence that crawls into the bones and starts gnawing.

I didn’t feel shock. Not in the traditional way. More like… a recognition. A shape you’d trained yourself to forget, showing up at your door with the same expression it had when you left it behind. I felt it in the bones before I felt it in the skin. His name was a bruise pressed too hard.

“He’s alive?”

“He’s in custody,” Kingsley said. “We found him three days ago. Living under an alias. Rural Scotland. Isolated house. Protective wards that were meant to keep everyone out, and him in.”

“How long?”

“Since the end of the war, maybe longer.”

I didn’t look up. “Why me?”

“He asked for you.”

That stopped me.

“You’re joking.”

Kingsley didn’t blink. “We put his name through all standard protocols. Nothing triggered. No warrants. No active Death Eater mark. No legal grounds for detention, just… ambiguity.”

“And he wants to talk.”

“He wants you,” Kingsley said. “To be more precise.”

I stared at the file again, as if the ink might rearrange itself into answers. It didn’t. I closed the folder.

“Why?” I asked, finally.

Kingsley just said, “You tell me.” And then he turned away like a man who had already washed his hands of the matter. As though he hadn’t just lit the match and left me to burn.

I took the long corridor down to the containment wing. Six floors beneath the Department of Mysteries, no visitors, no surveillance. Just one door. One room. One man who shouldn’t exist.

The lift ride down had the quiet tension of descent into something irreversible. My reflection in the mirrored walls fractured, stretched, bent back towards me like a warning. The brass rail under my palm was cold, and I gripped it hard enough to leave crescents in my skin. No one spoke down here. I had a sense the ghosts had been cleared out a long time ago, except for mine.

I walked like someone going to confession.

The kind where you already know the priest can’t save you.

The descent wasn’t lit in any traditional sense. The sconces here flickered with static-blue flame, like memory preserved in saltwater. I passed sigils I didn’t recognize, symbols etched into the marble that vibrated against the bones of my wrist as I moved past. Something in the air tasted faintly of lavender and blood. The entrance to the interview room wasn’t marked, because of course it wasn’t. It was a blank pane of warded glass set into the wall, humming with passive enchantment.

Light didn’t reflect on it properly. You could see in, but never quite comfortably. Shapes bent in strange directions.

Everything looked distant.

Even him.

The moment I saw him, I understood the physics of grief in a new way. It isn’t always sharp. Sometimes it’s just geometry. Angles you thought you’d closed off. Rooms inside you that you swore had been boarded up. But he was there, and suddenly everything inside me rearranged without permission.

Regulus sat at the far side of a table. Simple, steel-framed, nothing sharp, nothing loose. His hands were clasped neatly in front of him, not cuffed. His posture, still perfect. Like a sculpture of someone trying not to betray any inner mechanics. It was like seeing a photograph you thought had been destroyed. Except the subject was breathing, and worse, staring back.
His figure was smaller than I remembered. That was the first betrayal. In my memory, he was always a silhouette, backlit by war, by secrecy, by that peculiar teenage invincibility. Here, under artificial Ministry lighting, he was just a man. Thin. Watchful. A version of symmetry left too long in storage.

He had aged. Not gracefully, not poorly. Deliberately. Like he had curated time. Let it touch his hair just enough. Aged into his own cheekbones. He was still too handsome for his own good, and he knew it. But there was something quieter now. Stillness, but not serenity.

Stillness like still water. The kind that hides someone breathing underneath. He looked like a man who had survived by speaking very little and listening too much.

Even his silence had shape. There was a geometry to it. A way he folded his wrists over one another, not casual, not anxious. Intentional. Everything about him said: I chose this.

I entered the room.

The door whispered shut behind me like a closing hand. The air tasted different in there. Like paper and metal and something sweeter. Old magic. Regret made into architecture.

He didn’t look up at first.

Only when I sat did he lift his gaze. His eyes tracked me the same way predators tracked sound. Not fast, not even with interest. Just inevitability. I had the horrible sensation that he’d been sitting there imagining this moment for years. Turning it over and over like a stone in his hand. Polishing the edges, making it smooth.

“James,” he said, like it was a hypothesis. He said my name like he was trying it out, not like he had said it a million times.

“Regulus.”

He gave no expression. Not cool. Not warm. Just measured.

“Thank you for coming.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“No,” he said. “But you’re here. That counts for something.” He said it the way someone who once told me he loved me did. Without urgency, but with absolute confidence it would land.

The air was different in the room. Not magically, but emotionally. Dense. Like the walls knew what was about to happen and were bracing for it.

“I have some questions,” I said, mostly to reassert my footing.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I asked for you.”

“I’m not an Auror anymore.”

“I know that too.” His tone wasn’t patronising. It was clinical. Like everything about me had been categorised, archived, and lightly dusted off for this moment. The ghost of a smirk threatened at the edge of his mouth, but it didn’t appear. He didn’t need it, his restraint did the talking.

He looked down at the table. As though expecting it to speak.

“You’re not surprised to see me,” I said.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I always knew I wouldn’t stay buried forever.”

I studied him.

He didn’t flinch under it. He looked down then, at the empty surface of the table. Not at his hands, not at the enchanted cuffs, but the exact center, where the symmetry converged. As if he expected it to split open.

There was a faint sheen on his skin but not sweat. Something more like wax. His hair was combined back too precisely, his jaw freshly shaved. All deliberate. He wanted me to see him intact.

There was no mark on his arm. No obvious indication that he’d ever sworn himself to anyone. But he’d been presumed dead. That was enough.

“We thought you were dead.”

“I know.”

“We held a funeral.”

“I’m sure Sirius enjoyed that.”

I said nothing, but I felt my spine stiffen. There were lines that weren’t meant to be walked over, and he’d just traced his toe over one.

Regulus leaned back slightly. His hands were still folded. Too still.

“I disappeared,” he said, “because the alternative was becoming what they wanted me to be.”

“What did they want?”

“A martyr. A traitor. A failure. Take your pick.”

“And what are you now?”

He looked at me directly. “Unresolved.”

That was when I knew I was in trouble.

Because he wasn’t here to confess.

He was here to control the narrative. He always had a gift for that. For building the stage before you knew you were in a play. For speaking with the kind of measured clarity that made you doubt your own instincts.

“Why me?” I asked.

“You’re the only one who’d know if I was lying.”

“Flattering.”

“True.”

“You think I can still read you after all this time?”

“I think,” Regulus said, “that part of you still wants to.”

And just like that, he cracked open my chest. Something I had thought was calcified or cauterised not felt disturbingly raw. The sentence slid between my ribs and stayed there. Not sharp or cruel, just surgical. He said it like someone noting a change in the weather, and it wasn’t a question. It was a test. He was watching to see what would flicker in me when he said it. And I hated that something that did.

“You’re not in any official system,” I said. “No charges pending. No trial scheduled.”

“I’m aware.”

“So, what do you want?”

He didn’t smile.

“I want you to ask me what really happened.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because,” he said, “you’ve spent ten years pretending it didn’t.”

I went still, my mouth dry. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t lean forward. He just let the sentence lie there like a mirror for me to stare back at my own reflection.

He watched me.

And then…

“Would you like to begin the interview?” he asked. And he said it the way someone says would you like to dance? Knowing you’ll say yes, even when you shouldn’t.

There was a subtle lilt to it, a softness calculated to disarm. A performance, maybe, but one he’d been rehearsing for over a decade no doubt. I opened my mouth, willing it to say no. To walk out.

I didn’t answer right away. There’s a moment, just before a dive, where you know your body is about to leave the air and enter something colder. You know the shock is coming. The question is whether you tense or let yourself fall clean.
Regulus waited. He had already been good at waiting. He never filled silences. He curated them, and it was easy to forget that silence was a weapon until he handed it to you.

I leaned forward, resting both hands on the table as if to anchor myself.

“Fine.” I said.

The word tasted strange. Not like surrender, but something worse. Acquiescence. The kind that makes you feel you’ve just stepped over a threshold, even if you didn’t mean to.

He gave no reaction. No smile. No smirk. Just a slow blink. The kind that made you wonder what he was calculated behind his sharp eyes.

“Start with the house,” I said. “Why there?”

He glanced at the far corner of the room, as if remembering something no one else could see.

“It was quiet,” he said. “And I needed somewhere that wouldn’t forget me.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

He turned his gaze back to me, and I remembered, too vividly, what it was like to be looked at by him. Like being studied by someone who wanted to know not just what you were, but what had broken you.

“Houses,” he said, “have memory. You know that. Wood absorbs grief. Brick learns your voice. That one knew me better than anyone.”

“You hid.”

“Yes.”

“For ten years.”

“Maybe longer.”

I exhaled through my nose. The room was cool, but sweat gathered under my collarbone. He always had a way of making your own body betray you.

“What did you think would happen?” I asked. “That the world would forget?”

“No,” he said, simply. “That you wouldn’t.”

I didn’t answer. Because I hadn’t. And we both knew it.

The table between us was narrow, but it felt like an ocean. Every part of this place was designed to distort. The cell was humming again, faint but undeniable. A low frequency that made my molars ache. A sound that was felt more than heard.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why let them find you?”

Regulus folded his hands again, carefully. Almost reverently. “Because the story doesn’t end unless someone writes the last page.”

“And you want me to write it?”

“I want you to hear it,” he said. “That’s all.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not.”

That earned me the ghost of something. Not a smile. A shift. A flicker of emotion too thin to name.

“You always hated half-truths,” he said.

“You always fed them to me anyway.”

“And you always swallowed.”

It wasn’t an accusation. Not entirely. More like a shared memory. A history recited without malice.

The lights overhead dimmed slightly, or maybe the room just adjusted to the emotional temperature. I felt it, again, in my skin. This wasn’t a cell. It was a stage. And Regulus was playing the part he had written in the dark, over and over, until it fit him like a second skin.

I opened the folder again.

Still blank.

The parchment inside it gleamed faintly now. As if it knew it was a lie. As if it resented me for pretending it was useful.
“This file,” I said. “Why is it empty?”

Regulus raised a brow. “Because they didn’t know what to write.”

I looked at him. Really looked. Under the calm. Under the cultivated stillness. There was something unwell in him. Not illness. Just… something unnatural. As if he’d spent too long breathing in memories and not enough time living them.

“You were presumed dead.”

“So were a lot of people.”

“You were different.”

“Because of Sirius?”

“Because of me.”

That silence returned. Dense. Measured. Like the sound between church bells.

Regulus didn’t flinch. “You think I came back for you.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, voice low. “You’ve always known.”

It made my throat tighten. Not from emotion. From recognition. From the way the past loops, doubling back in new language.

“I need facts,” I said, retreating into structure. “Not this.”

“Why?” he asked. “Because facts are easier than guilt?”

“Because they’re provable.”

Regulus tilted his head. “Is that what you want, Jamie? Proof? A ledger of sins you can tally before deciding whether I mattered?”

He had never called me that in this room. Jamie. That name belonged to a time with no clocks. To back alleys and quiet beds and letters we never sent.

“I want clarity,” I said, but it was a weak defence.

“No,” he said, “you want a version of the past that won’t collapse if you say it aloud.”

My jaw clenched. I closed the folder again.

“Let’s talk about Voldemort.”

He arched a brow, but said nothing.

“You were a Death Eater. Or close enough.”

“No.”

“You had the Mark.”

“I didn’t,” he said, tone unchanged. “I was supposed to. But I walked out before the ink dried.”

Something about that felt worse than a lie. It felt like the kind of truth you don’t admit unless you’re already at the end of yourself.

“And what did you do after?”

“I followed orders,” he said. “Just not his.”

“Whose then?”

He didn’t answer.

I leaned forward. “You said you wanted to be remembered.”

He nodded.

“Then tell me something worth remembering.”

There was a beat. One. Two. Then he spoke, softer this time.

“I destroyed something,” he said. “Something that shouldn’t have existed. Something he made.”

I sat up straighter. “A Horcrux?”

He nodded.

“Where?”

“Later.”

“No,” I said. “Now.”

He looked at me with the tired patience of someone who’d been waiting for this exact argument.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “But you have to stay.”

My pulse ticked in my jaw. This was the price. Not information. Not cooperation. Presence. He didn’t want to be believed. He wanted to be witnessed.

“You don’t get to bargain,” I said.

“I’m not bargaining,” he replied. “I’m offering.”

“Why me?” I asked again, quieter this time.

Regulus didn’t speak. He just looked at me. The way he used to. Like the room had emptied itself of everything but our history.

“You’re the only person,” he said, “who knows what my voice sounds like when I’m not lying.”

That was the moment it hit me.

I wasn’t here to interrogate him.

I was here to be remembered.

And memory, I realized, has its own demands. Its own loyalty. It is not kind. It is not clean. It is not even true. But it is loyal. And Regulus had always been loyal… to something. Even if it was just to the version of me he’d kept alive in the dark.

I didn’t speak. Couldn’t. The room was too full now. Of us. Of what we hadn’t said. Of everything we tried to outlive.

The hum in the walls deepened.

And still, Regulus sat.

Waiting.

Chapter Text

The walls of the interview cell weren’t entirely transparent. They gave the illusion of clarity. Polished, reflective, but if you looked long enough, you saw the shimmer. Like oil on water. Something pretending to be clean. The illusion was precise, and that was the most unnerving part. Truth doesn’t always wear a mask. Sometimes, it wears a mirror.

The room was alive, in its own way. Kingsley hadn’t said that, but I could feel it from the moment I stepped inside. It breathed. Not literally, but like the stone had been soaked in too many secrets and began to metabolise them. Like every lie ever told inside its walls was still hanging, disassembled in the air.

Regulus sat across from me, spine straight, elbows resting loosely on the table in that polished way I remembered. He hadn’t moved since I’d entered. Not even to greet me again. His hands were perfectly still, no anxious tapping, no fidgeting. And yet somehow, they seemed like the most expressive thing in the room. Long fingers, pale but not sickly, callused in ways that were surprising. They spoke of years not spent in hiding, but in work. The kind of tactile evidence you don’t earn unless you’ve built or destroyed something with intention.

He looked good. That was the worst of it. He looked like a painting that had survived fire. Slightly singed at the edges, smoke cloying in the varnish, but intact. Whole enough to hurt.

My wand stayed on my hip. I didn’t think I’d need it. Not because I trusted him, but because I knew he wouldn’t use force. He never had. Regulus had always been dangerous in quieter ways. Violence was too obvious and easy to trace. He preferred the elegance of corrosion.

“You look tired,” he said, tilting his head.

My lips tugged with nostalgia, but I couldn’t muster a smile. “You don’t.”

“Good lighting.” He glanced upward, then back. “Or maybe I just got better at hiding everything.”

The rhythm of the exchange was too familiar. Old language spoken like we never stopped.

I let the silence stretch. Regulus had always filled space like a gas. Slowly, invisibly, until you realised there was no oxygen to breath.

“This isn’t a social call,” I said, before flipping open the file. Just a blank parchment sheet. The Ministry’s idea of a joke. Or a warning. Or a metaphor. Empty pages for empty men.

Regulus watched me examining it.

“Do you remember,” he said, “when you told me I was the most dishonest person you had ever met?”

I didn’t answer.

He leaned forward slightly. The motion was small, calculated. “That night in Dover. You said it like it mattered.”
I felt something crawl under my collar, like a trickle of sweat, but colder.

“That’s not why I’m here,” I replied.

He tilted his head again. “Are you sure?”

“Let’s start with the obvious,” I said. “You were presumed dead.”

“Was I?” he murmured. “Funny. I remember being very much alive.”

There was a twist in his voice, subtle and dry. Like a man amused at the idea of his own obituary.

“The war ended. Voldemort disappeared. You were gone.”

“Yes,”” he said, smiling faintly. “And you married the girl.”

I met his eyes this time. “We’re not married anymore.”

It came out too hard. Too fast. Like a wound trying to cauterise itself mid-sentence.

Regulus said nothing. But his mouth quirked, just slightly, like a ghost of satisfaction. I hated that I noticed.

“You’re not under arrest,” I said.

“I know.”

“You’re not being charged.”

“I should be.”

“But you’re not,” I continued. “You were found in a sealed house warded to an unbreakable degree. No one knew it existed.”

“I didn’t want visitors.”

“You were missing for over ten years, Regulus.”

He blinked. Slow. Almost lazy. “Were you looking?”

That stopped me. Not because it was cruel, but because it was accurate. I hadn’t looked. Not after the first year. Not after the war ended. I’d buried the thought of him somewhere colder than any grace.

“You want to know what I was doing,” he said, finally. “Why I disappeared. Why I’m here now.”

I said nothing.

“But you won’t ask outright,” he continued. “Because then you would owe me a truth in return. And you’re not ready for that.”

“I’m not playing your game.”

“No,” he said softly. “You’re playing yours. I’m just better at it.”

I stood. Just to shift the air between us. The cell shimmered slightly at the movement. Not visibly. Not audibly. But emotionally, like something under the surface was taking notes, like it was listening.

Regulus’ gaze followed mine. “They told me the room is alive. That it remembers and reacts.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I do now,” he replied. “It hummed louder the moment you looked away.”

I turned back to him.

“Let me save you some time,” he said. “I won’t tell you what you want to hear. Not yet. And not because I’m protecting myself.”

“Then who?”

His eyes darkened.

“You,” he said simply. The word hit with no flourish. No venom. Just a clean incision meant to bleed later. And I did bleed. Not out loud or visibly. But somewhere deep in the place behind the ribs where I kept the alive version of him, not the ghost. The one I couldn’t name in daylight.

I didn’t move. But something in me curled inward.

He always had that ability. To wound gently. Not with rage. Not with blame. But with quiet knowledge. Like a someone who knows exactly which tendon to cut to collapse the whole body.

“You think I’m your unfinished work,” I said, slowly.

He tilted his head, almost birdlike. A hawk studying its prey, not to strike, but to marvel. “I think you’ve always needed a mirror, James. And I’ve just always been the one brave enough to reflect back the parts you didn’t like.”

“I came here for answers.”

“No,” he said. “You came here because I offered a version of the past that might still love you.”

That broke something. Not a fracture, more like old wallpaper peeling back to reveal mold.

“You disappeared,” I said. “No note. No warning. We thought you were dead.”

“You wanted me dead.”

The accusation came not as a shout, but as a caress. It shamed me more that way. Because I couldn’t deny it. Because he wasn’t wrong.

I looked away.

He let the moment stretch. Let it ache.

“You’re angry,” he observed.

“I’m not.”

“You’re always angry when you don’t know how to leave.”

“I know how to leave.”

“But you never do.”

I sat again, slower this time. Deliberate.

The chair creaked beneath me, an old sound. Like memory rediscovered. Like a habit falling back into place.

Regulus adjusted nothing. He didn’t need to. Stillness had always been his weapon. It was my discomfort he counted on to move the plot forward.

“You always hated being seen,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “I hated being seen by people who didn’t understand what they were looking at.”

“And me?”

“You understood,” he said. “That’s what made it worse.”

I thought of the first time I saw him bleed. Not in battle. Not in war. But in a room too quiet, holding his sleeve tight around his wrist, whispering that he didn’t mean to. That he only wanted to feel something sharp. I had said nothing then. I say too much now.

“I’m not a confession box,” I said.

“No,” he said. “But it’s still penance.”

“For what?”

“For surviving.”

That word hit hard. Because I had survived too. And I knew what it cost.

“You think this is grief,” I said. “But it’s guilt.”

“They’re the same,” Regulus said. “Grief is just guilt after the funeral.”

The walls hummed again, louder. The room was listening now, not like an audience, but like a witness in a trial that never ends.

“You left all of us behind,” I said. “You made us mourn you.”

“You moved on.”

“We had to.”

“No,” he said. “You wanted to.”

And he wasn’t wrong. I had wanted to forget. Not out of cruelty. But out of need. Some memories are like broken glass. They shine. They cut. They glint with the promise of meaning, but all they ever do is bleed.

“You’re a manipulator,” I said, low. “You always were.”

Regulus shrugged slightly. “You knew what I was when you loved me.”

“You make it sound like I still do.”

“Do you?”

I didn’t answer. Because love doesn’t die. Not really. It gets buried. Suffocated. Rewritten in safer language. But it breathes anyway. In quiet moments. In empty rooms. In locked drawers. And sometimes. Across a steel table in a cell that isn’t really a cell.

“I loved the version of you that existed before all this,” I said.

“There is no before,” he whispered. “There’s only what we couldn’t say.”

And wasn’t that the truth of it? Not what we did. But what we left unsaid. Love that goes unspoken doesn’t fade. It calcifies. Becomes structure. Becomes ruin.

“You’ve changed,” I said, because it was easier than saying what I felt.

“So have you.”

“You disappeared into myth, Regulus.”

He met my eyes.

His stare was not cold. It was worse. It was remembering.

“And you disappeared into marriage,” he said. “Into someone else’s arms. Into someone else’s name.”

“We’re not married anymore.”

“I know. I heard.”

“You kept track.”

“I listened for silences,” he said. “Yours were the loudest.”

That did something to me. Like a hand closing around something I didn’t know I’d been protecting.

“Do you want to punish me?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I want you to understand that I never left you. You buried me. There’s a difference.”

“You let me.”

“I didn’t know how to stop you.”

The honesty of that landed with unbearable grace.

“What do you want from me now?” I asked, not out of curiosity, but exhaustion.

“To remember.”

“I already do.”

“Not the facts. The feeling.”

That made something inside me recoil. Because I did remember. I remembered everything. The weight of him. The way he spoke when no one else was listening. The smell of candle smoke in the sleeves of his jumpers.

“You weren’t supposed to survive,” I said. “You were supposed to be a memory.”

“And now I’m a contradiction.”

He said it without bitterness.

“Is that worse?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s just harder to ignore.”

We both went quiet. Not for effect. But because there was nothing left to cover it with. No layers. Just air between us. Thick. Remembering.

Finally, he said, “You came here with questions.”

I nodded.

“So ask them.”

I paused.

“What was the last thing you thought about, before you disappeared?”

He didn’t blink.

“You,” he said.

And the walls didn’t hum this time. They didn’t need to. They already knew.

Chapter Text

“You.”

It didn’t echo. It didn’t need to. The word landed between us like a dropped stone in water, perfectly round, and the ripples were immediate. I didn’t flinch. Not visibly. But my fingers twitched where they rested on the Ministry-issued file. Blank, still blank, so resolutely blank that it had become a character in the room. As if daring me to pretend this was just paperwork. As if this weren’t the most intimate conversation I’d had in a decade, and maybe the most dangerous.

Regulus folded his hands. It was a slow movement, deliberate. He did it the way some men cross themselves before battle. There was a patience to it that unnerved me more than anger would have. A stillness that reminded me of winter.

This wasn’t a reunion. This was a reckoning.

“I knew they’d send someone eventually. I didn’t know it would be you.” Pause. “But I hoped.”

His voice was quiet but not unsure. It moved with the shape of the room, aware of its boundaries. Only the kind of longing that comes after a drought of belief. A hope too old to be called naive. Something calcified and sharp.

I stared. “Why?”

“Because I wanted to see in person how well you’ve aged.”

It wasn’t flirtation, not really. It was worse. It was familiarity. And familiarity, in this context, was more dangerous than lust. Because it suggested endurance. That some version of us had survived the ruin. That some emotion had managed to fossilize, untouched by war or time or marriage or death. That something had fossilized beneath the ruin and was now surfacing, not in heat, but in sediment.

He looked down at his hands. They were pale, too pale, and yet there was something grounded in them. Calluses I hadn’t expected. A faint scar across one knuckle. Regulus had always been beautiful, and he still was, but it had changed. He looked like a marble statue that had been left in the rain. Still elegant, still composed, but worn in places. Time had not spared him. It had negotiated with him.

The cuffs of his shirt brushed the skin at his wrists. Neatly pressed. No wrinkles. Someone had ironed it recently. Probably one of the Unspeakables. Regulus had always remained clean in the unlikeliest places. He didn’t look restored. He looked preserved.

“I disappeared,” he said calmly. “Yes. But it wasn’t to escape.”

“Then what?” I asked, more abruptly than intended.
He looked up at me again, too direct. Too sure of what I would do next. “To wait.”

“For what?”

A pause.

“For the world to forget me. And for you to remember.”

My chest tightened. Not painfully, not yet. It was a remembered sensation. Like an old bruise being pressed by someone who knew exactly where it lived.

The honesty struck hard. Not because it surprised me, but because it didn’t. Because some part of me had always known this moment would come. That we would one day be seated like this, across from each other, not as strangers but as co-authors of a story we never finished.

I should have left.

That’s what I told myself.

That’s what I told Kingsley.

Walk in. Ask the standard questions. Log the interaction. Pass it to someone who wouldn’t bleed over the paperwork.

But of course, that was never going to happen.
Objectivity had been impossible the moment I saw the name on the file.

Black, Regulus A.

A name like a knot in a rope. You tug at it, and something in your chest tightens. It wasn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia had a golden tint. This was darker. Damp. Like a cellar memory and mildewed promises.

He studied me again. Not just my face, but the space around it. The way I sat. The tension in my shoulders.

“You really want to know where I’ve been?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I hesitated.

“You’re not an Auror anymore,” he said. “You’re not even a husband. So, what are you now James Potter?”

He said it without venom. That was what made it worse.

The question didn’t land in my ears. It landed in my spine. There was no shield to absorb it. Not anymore. I had dismantled all my excuses years ago. He knew it. He knew where I kept my soft parts, and he never needed a map.

“Where were you,” I said again, slower this time, “the night Voldemort disappeared?”

He smiled. Not kindly.

“You still call him that. Voldemort.”

“What else would I call him?”

Regulus’ smile widened by half a millimetre. “You used to say Tom.”

I froze. It was an old, offhanded memory. But now, unearthed by his voice, it rang with naïve clarity. Not the moment, but the atmosphere. The smell of old firewhiskey. A lamp flickering in a flat we never called ours. My shirt half-undone. His mouth on my throat. The sound of rain on a skylight.

“You hated the melodrama of the name,” he continued, voice light as thread. “Said it sounded like a child trying to impress himself.”

I remembered it, not the exact moment, but the feeling. The whiskey in my throat. His thigh pressed against mine in a hallway that smelt of old parchment and thunder.

He leaned in. “You forget, James. You’ve always forgotten. But I remember everything.”

It wasn’t arrogance, it was a declaration. A vow.
A cold sensation crept up the backs of my arms. I sat back.

“The cave,” I said. “Tell me what you found.”

He didn’t blink. His eyes didn’t move. Still. Too still. Like he was remembering something through glass.
“You told me you’d leave her,” he said, quietly. My hand closed into a fist on the table.

“And you told me,” I replied evenly, “that you didn’t care if I didn’t. I remember things too, Regulus.”

The words were cold, but they didn’t land evenly. They shattered somewhere in midair and turned to dust between us. The silence that followed was long, like the space between lightning and thunder.

He gave me one of those looks I remembered from the early months. Measured. Calculated. But not cruel. Almost… compassionate. That’s what made it worse.

“You’re still angry,” he said. “Even now.”

“I’m not angry,” I denied. Even I could hear the lie in it.

The walls hummed faintly. Low, like a kettle on the edge of boiling. Regulus turned his face slightly toward the sound. “It agrees with me.”

I took a breath. Let it out slowly. “The cave, Regulus.”

“I drank the potion,” he said, with an unnerving smoothness. “The one your precious Dumbledore couldn’t handle.”

I didn’t take the bait. “And?”

“And it showed me something.”

“What?”

He looked at me, and there was something different in his eyes now. Now mockery. Not even the usual barbed superiority. Something quieter. Something closer to grief.

“It showed me you.”

My skin prickled.

“Dying,” he continued, almost gently. “In a forest. Alone.”

I stared.

“I didn’t know it was real at the time,” he added. “I thought it was a trick. A hallucination. But now-“
“You think it was prophecy,” I said, flatly.

He didn’t answer.

That was the problem with Regulus. His silences weren’t empty. They were crowded. Full of things he wouldn’t let you look at unless you were willing to pay his price. And I always paid it. With time. With guilt. With versions of myself I thought I’d outgrown.

I leaned forward. “You came back because of that?”

“No,” he said. “I came back because I was tired of pretending to be dead.”

He looked like he was describing weather. As if death had been a place, not a state. A room he’d lived in. A house with all the windows blacked out. A place where he folded shirts in the dark and counted the things he missed.

“And I’m supposed to believe you just… walked into the Ministry?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t walk in. I let them find me.”

I exhaled. Rubbed the heel of my hand against my temple. The air in the room was too thick now, too warm. It smelled faintly of steel and dust and something else. Like burnt paper or wilted flowers. The scent of endings.

“Do you think I’m lying?” he asked.

I looked at him. “I think you’re always lying. Even when you’re not.”

He smiled. Not a full smile. Just the idea of one. The suggestion. He liked that I still saw it. He liked that I was still playing the game.

“Then why are you still here?”

The question didn’t accuse. It observed. Like everything Regulus did. He didn’t stab, he suggested.

I stood. Again. The room reacted. I felt it. The shimmer in the wall. The change in pressure. The subtle, psychological clutch of the space. It didn’t want me to leave.

He was still watching me. That same look he’d given me once, years ago, in a corridor after midnight. Me drunk. Him colder than winter. We had argued in whispers. He had looked at me like this then — not angry. Just disappointed in how little I knew myself.

“Next time,” I said, “you’ll actually answer my questions.”

“You never ask the real ones.”

I walked toward the door. The enchantment on the handle flickered under my fingers. Not hot. Not cold. Just aware.

And then he spoke again. Very quiet.

“She didn’t leave you. You pushed her.”

I stopped. Not because I was shocked. But because of how he said it. Not as a weapon. Not as an accusation. As a conclusion. The way a historian would name the date of a battle. As if it were the only logical ending.

I turned.

He hadn’t moved. Still seated. Still composed. But the light had shifted. Or maybe just my vision. His features looked softer now. Not kinder. But more human.

“And you’re still doing it, James,” he said. “With everyone.”

The words didn’t fall like daggers. They fell like dust. Settling into corners I had tried to clean. The corners I had sealed off and renamed progress.

We stared at each other through the quiet. And for the first time since I entered, I felt tired. Not physically. Not emotionally. Existentially. Like I had been holding my breath for ten years and only now noticed it.

The room stopped humming.

And I knew we had finally arrived at the beginning.

Chapter Text

“She didn’t leave you. You pushed her.”

He had said it like a stage direction. Soft. Flat. Delivered without emotion but with infinite rehearsal. Not as an attack, but as a line he had been waiting to recite for years.

I stopped. Not because it was true, though it was.
Not because it was new. But because he said it as if he’d already written it down and folded it into the lining of my coat. As if he knew I’d carry it anyway.

I turned slowly. The air shifted around me. The room shimmered like glass fogging from the inside.
Regulus hadn’t moved. He never did unless it mattered. His elbows rested on the table now, fingers interlaced as though in prayer. But there was nothing holy about him. Just familiarity. Just that same impossible stillness.

Holding breath was instinct around him. Like bracing before impact. Like stealing oxygen from a fire that had already chosen its fuel.

The cuffs at his wrists glowed faintly with containment enchantments, not as threat but as punctuation. A reminder that he was here by design. By his own.

I took a deep breath and didn’t exhale.

“You know nothing about that,” I said sharply.

His head tilted. A fraction. As if observing a painting hung slightly crooked. “Don’t I?”

I stepped back from the door. The cell recognised the decision before I did, the glass shimmered subtly, folding itself into opacity again. Locking us in. Of course it did. The room knew what I wouldn’t say. It was designed to listen for indecision. It could feel the heat of confession before the words.

“I didn’t come here to discuss Lily.”

“No,” he murmured, “you came here to be punished.”

I stared. “What the fuck does that mean, Regulus.”

“It means,” he replied gently, “you’re looking for someone who will finally say it.”

“Say what?”

He didn’t blink.

“That you’re the reason nothing you touch survives.”

My jaw tensed. My hand twitched. The room inhaled.

“I wonder,” he said, his voice like velvet strung over wire, “if you felt it the first time you kissed me. That low, sharp hum. Like something cracking.”
There it was.

Dropped so cleanly that it didn’t break anything on contact, just echoed, long and low, until it became a frequency the room adjusted to. A recalibration of air.

He watched me, waiting for the reflex. Not the reaction. The muscle-memory truth beneath whatever face I was wearing.

I didn’t react. Or rather, I didn’t let myself appear to react. But the room did, always watching, always recording. A faint shimmer slid across the left wall, and for a brief moment, a shadow flickered in the surface. Two bodies, too close. One hand buried in the collar of a coat. Another disappearing into hair. Breath caught between mouths.

It disappeared before I could focus on it.

“You have a theory,” I said carefully, “about why I’m here.”

“I do.”

“And you think it’s… what, penitence?”

He shook his head slowly. “I think it’s recognition.”

I sat again. Not because I wanted to, but because I could feel myself being maneuvered, and I hated standing for it. I knew this choreography. I knew exactly how he built conversations like traps, each step leading to a quieter surrender. Sitting was already a concession. He’d made me concede three before I noticed the game.

Standing also made it too easy to walk away. And if I was honest with myself for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t ready for clean exits. Not from this.

Not from him.

Regulus adjusted his posture, subtle and self-contained. His ankles crossed beneath the table.

He’d always sat like that, even when we were teenagers. Like his bones had been taught manners before his tongue had.

“You think I still care,” I said, watching him.

He didn’t answer.

I leaned in. “I buried you.”

“No,” he said. “You forgot me.”

The room pulsed. I laughed, but there was no humour in it. “You think I had a choice? You vanished. I had a war to end.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, his voice smooth as lacquer.
“Duty. How masculine of you.”

“Don’t start.”

“Oh, James.” His mouth curved, not into a smile exactly. Something else. Something older. “You’ve spent so long punishing yourself for being noble it’s become your only identity.”

I stared at him, a beat too long. He saw it. He catalogued it. He filed it away under some private category labeled: weaknesses James doesn’t know are still open.

“Tell me about the Horcrux.” I said, deflecting.

“Tell me about the night in Knockturn,” he said.

Silence again. Not empty this time. Filled with heat.

“You think you can bait me,” I said.

“I don’t have to,” he murmured. “You’re already baited.

I reached into the file. Of course, it was still blank. But, I held it anyway, like a shield.

“I can leave,” I said.

“You won’t,” Regulus leaned back with the smugness of someone sure he was right.

“You always wanted to be the clever one.”

He nodded, serene. “And you wanted to be wanted. Which was worse.”

That cut sharper than it should have. Because it was true. And worse he had said it with the same voice he’d used, years ago, when he told me I didn’t want to be touched in the daylight. When he told me Sirius couldn’t know. When I kissed him, hard, in the shadows of a war neither of would survive.

“You talk like someone who doesn’t bleed,” I mused.

“I don’t anymore.”

“That isn’t something to be proud of.”

“It’s not pride,” he quipped. “It’s just port-mortem observation.”

There was a weight in his tone that hadn’t been there before. A fatigue deep enough to pass for peace. I didn’t believe it. Peace had never suited him. He wore despair better. He always had.

I felt something in my throat then, tight and dry.
“You want to know what I saw in the cave?” He asked.

“No tricks?”

“No games,” he said. “Just memory.”

I gave him a slight nod. Enough to signal the beginning of something. A ritual. He looked at the centre of the table. “There was a boy.”
“Who?”

“Young. Seventeen, maybe. Reckless. Arrogant. He kissed like he meant it and vanished like he didn’t.”

I swallowed. “And you think that was me.”

The cell shimmered again. This time slower. A hallway. A doorway. Bodies pressed into shadow. Breath hot against fabric. Hands not knowing where to go.

“No,” he said. “I know it was.”

The cell shimmered. A new flicker appeared on the wall. Brief and indistinct. A doorway. A hallway. Bodies pressed into shadow. Heat. Movement. Shame.

Regulus’ gaze didn’t leave mine.

“I thought,” he said, “that dying meant something. That it would undo the feelings. Burn them out. It didn’t.”

“You didn’t die.”

“Oh,” His voice was velvet now, lethal and soft. “Didn’t I?”

The room didn’t react with its usual hum or flicker. It stilled. A quiet so complete it felt carved in stone. He was right, in a way. Something in him had died. Or been buried so thoroughly that it no longer blinked when named.

“When I saw your name,” I said, “in the report… I didn’t believe it. I thought it was some clerical error.”

Regulus tilted his head. The way he used to, when we were young and unbearably stupid. Like asking if he thought things would be better after the war. As if any of us were built for the notion of after.

“And then you volunteered to see me. To confirm it.”

“Someone had to.”

“No,” he said. “Someone wanted to.”

There was no accusation in his voice, only understanding. He had always known the difference between guilt and intention, between duty and desire. He had built his whole life, and disappearance, on it.

We sat in the stillness. The kind of stillness that made you question if time was still passing.

“You know,” he added after a while, “this place, this little cell, they designed it to extract truth.”

“Yes.”

“But what they don’t understand,” he said, eyes on me now like a mirror turned inside out, “is that truth doesn’t arrive cleanly. It arrives like a rot. It’s quiet and hungry. Patient.”

He smiled softly. Leaned forward, just slightly. Enough to disturb the air.

“And you, James Potter, are full of it.”

The truth wasn’t clean. It was sticky. Beautiful.
Viscous with memory.

“There are things I never said,” I murmured, before I could stop myself.

“There always are,” Regulus said.

His voice was softer now. Not tired, he was never tired but frayed at the edges. Like a thread pulled too long and now curling at the end.

The room shimmered again. This time, not with memory. With something closer to possibility. Like the architecture of the future was pressing in, trying to get a glimpse of the present.

“I used to think,” I said, “that if I stayed with you, I’d lose everything else.”

“And?”
“I did anyway.”

Regulus didn’t smile. His mouth twitched. Something between grief and understanding.

“I wasn’t good for you,” he said.

“You were the only thing that ever made me feel honest.”

The words left my mouth and hung in the air like a storm that hadn’t decided where to strike.

We didn’t speak for a long time. The cell watched us, patient. Pacing, in its own way.

Then Regulus asked, “Do you remember the first time?”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant.

The rain. The black lake. His mouth on mine. The sharp bite of guilt that came right after. The way he said my name like it was a dare and a blessing at once.

“Yes,” I said.

“You shook,” he said. “Afterward. You always did.”
“I still do.”

This time, he did smile. But it was quiet. Earned. A ghost of something better.

“I don’t hate you, Jamie.”

I looked at him. Really looked. And there was a boy still there, inside the man. A boy who had once made me laugh. A boy who had once kissed me and whispered that he didn’t believe in futures. Only choices.

“I don’t hate you either,” I said.

We stayed in that moment, the two of us, framed in a room meant to contain only danger and truth. We had always been both.

“I don’t know what happens now,” I said.

Regulus nodded. “Good.”

He leaned back, spine still impossibly straight. Like his body was still living in a world that demanded poise. Like control was the only inheritance he hadn’t burned.

The walls of the room glowed faintly. A memory, not of either of us, but of everything we hadn’t said. Of every version of us that had never been allowed to grow.

The past sat beside us. Not angry. Not mourning. Just watching.

And then Regulus said, “Next time, ask the real question.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You will.”

And somehow, I believed him.

Chapter Text

There are instruments for detecting truth.

Spells. Runes. Enchanted ink. Potions that leave your tongue dry and your heart racing. Little clever horrors designed to catch you in the softest part of your lie.

But nothing prepares you for what it feels like to be told the truth. Not by a stranger. Not by an enemy. But by someone who has studied you like a poem he refused to stop annotating. Who knows the inflection of your silences better than your wife ever did.

Who knows what part of your face twitches when you’re about to run.

Regulus leaned forward. The movement was small. Deliberate. A silent drumbeat only I could hear.

The air changed with it. Grew narrower. Not colder, narrower. Like the walls of the room were leaning in to listen.

“Do you remember what I said to you in the cellar under Grimmauld Place.”

I didn’t answer. I knew, and he knew I knew.
He smiled, slow. “Of course you do. You forget names, facts, consequences. But you remember moments.”

The cell pulsed again, faintly. Not a shimmer this time. More like condensation. Emotion made visible. It turned my stomach.

“I said,” he continued, “that when the war ended, you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. That you needed an enemy to keep you from looking inward.”

I remember that night. I remember the wine. The bitter sting of it, the way he watched me drink too quickly. The way I leaned against a wall I pretended was stable. The way he didn’t touch me because he knew it would have undone me.

“Convenient memory,” I said.

“It wasn’t a prediction,” he said. “It was really a diagnosis.

I shifted in my seat, a small, silent act of rebellion. “You’re deflecting, Regulus. Stop avoiding the subject.”

“I am the subject.”

“Not anymore.”

“You mean because I’m not dangerous?” He laughed quietly. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I mean because I have questions,” I snapped, “and you’re not answering them.”

“You want answers about what, James?” His voice was suddenly sharper. Colder. “The locket? The cave? Voldemort’s pretty little relics? You want something you can put in a report?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“No, it’s not.”

We stared at each other across the table, across a decade of silence and a war we both survived differently. Not as prisoner and interrogator. Not even as ex-lovers. Just two ruins pretending to be architecture.

“You want me to tell you where the Horcruxes are?” He said. “Fine. I’ll tell you. But they won’t save you.”

“I don’t need saving.”

He laughed again. But it wasn’t mirthful. It was sad. A laugh from the bottom of a grave.

“No, you just need someone to bleed for.”

Something in my chest gave. Not a break, not yet. But a flex. A tension long ignored.

“I watched you during the war,” he said. “I had eyes in more places than you think. Do you know what I saw?”

“I don’t care.”

“You do,” he said. “You care deeply. That’s always been your problem.”

I closed the file. I didn’t remember when I’d opened it again.

“You never stopped needing someone to witness you,” he said. “Even when you married her.
Actually, especially then.”

“Don’t talk about her.”

“Why not?” Regulus asked, all poison and elegance. “She loved you. Maybe she still does. But you… you looked at her like she was a place you’d already been.”

I could feel my pulse in my jaw.

“And me?” he said, softer now. “You looked at me like a cliff you wanted to jump from.

I stood so quickly the chair scraped the concrete floor. The cell stilled.

“You keep doing that,” Regulus observed. “Standing. As if leaving would make this go away.”

I didn’t move.

“Sit,” he said, but it wasn’t a command. It was a whispered dare. I didn’t want to obey him. I didn’t want to give him anything. But sitting wasn’t about obedience. It was about information. About the game. About not showing which move rattled you.

So I sat.

Regulus studied me. Not smug. Not satisfied. Just… prepared. Like he had already predicted my return to the seat in one of the mental plays he staged for himself. He was always rehearsing versions of me.

“Better.”

“You said you destroyed one,” I changed the subject. “A horcrux.”

“I did.”

“How?”

He smiled thinly. “You don’t want the mechanics. You want the story.”

“Then tell it.”

He looked away, for the first time since I entered the room.

“There was fire,” he said. “And salt. Blood, of course. Mine.”

“Your blood?”

“The kind that matters. Not the kind the Prophet prints.”

He reached up and touched the inside of his arm. Not the Dark Mark. The opposite. The untouched space. I knew what he was saying. He never bore the brand. But he had carried its weight all the same.

I watched him. “You didn’t have to do it then. So you could’ve just hidden.”

“I tried,” he said. “But I kept seeing things. You. On front pages. In Order meetings. At funerals.” His eyes returned to mine.

“And I remembered something,” he said. “You once told me I could be brave if I stopped trying to impress ghosts.”

“I said that?”

“You said it while you were half-drunk and bleeding,” he said. “But yes. You said it all the same.”

The flicker on the wall returned, just briefly. Two shadows. One holding the other up. Blood on a sleeve. A kiss that didn’t happen. Or maybe it did. It was over too quickly to know.

I cleared my throat. “And the rest of them?”

“What?”

“The other Horcruxes. Did you find them?”

He paused, just long enough to make it hurt.

“I found two more,” he said finally.

“Where?”

“I’m not ready to say.”

“You said you weren’t protecting yourself.”

“I’m not.”

“Then what?”

“I told you, I’m protecting you,” he replied.

The room contracted. Not physically, but emotionally. Like the walls leaned in closer to catch the whisper.

“Don’t flatter me.” I said.

“I’m not,” he replied. “I’m remembering what it did to you. Being noble.”

“I’m not noble.”

“No,” he said. “I guess not.”

Something changed in his expression then.

Something real. For the first time in the conversation, he looked… unsure. Like a man who had chosen to stay alive, and then didn’t know what to do with it.

“I had a letter,” he said. “For you. When I went to the cave. I left it with Kreacher.”

My heart skipped. “I never saw it.”

“I know. I told him not to deliver it unless I didn’t return.”

“But you did return.”

“Yes,” he said. “But by then it was too late.”

“To do what?”

“To be forgiven.”

The room was silent. Even the walls held their breath now.

I wanted to ask what the letter said. I wanted him to offer it. I wanted something tangible. An artifact. But Regulus had never given me anything without reflection. Nothing that wasn’t a mirror.

Instead I said, “You can’t guilt your way into redemption.”

And he replied simply, “I’m not trying to be redeemed. I’m trying to be remembered.”

That was Regulus. Always. Not chasing absolution, chasing permanence.

And the worst part was, I would remember. No matter how much I hated it. No matter what came next. Somewhere beneath the scar tissue and the lies, he was still carved into me. In the soft bone behind the sternum.

The cell was silent now. Not because there was nothing left to say. But because something was beginning.

Something worse than truth.

Memory.

Chapter Text

For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Not because we had run out of things to say, but because the silence had thickened to the point of language. We sat in it like water. Submerged. Still breathing, but only barely.

“I’m not trying to be redeemed,” he’d said. “I’m trying to be remembered.”

The thing about Regulus was that he said things like that and meant them. Not as a performance, though he them until they weren’t words anymore, just survival instincts sharpened into prose.

The table between us felt narrower. The room hadn’t changed shape, but something had. Perspective. Velocity. Intention. Regulus no longer looked contained by the cell, he looked integrated with it. A spectre with a pulse, haunting something he built himself.

“You left a letter,” I ventured, slowly. “With Kreacher.”

“Yes.”

“What did it say.”

“That depends.”

was always performing, but because he’d rehearsed them. Lived with them, paced holes in the floor with
“On what?”

He tilted his head. That same calculated gesture. It used to make me furious. Now it just made me tired.

“On what version of me you want to remember.”

“I want the truth.”

“No,” Regulus replied. “I think you want the version that makes you hate yourself less.”

He said it without cruelty, and that was the cruelty.

I sat back. “You think I’m still in love with you.”
“I think you’ve spent ten years pretending that’s a ridiculous notion.”

The room shimmered at that. Not visibly, more like a shift in temperature this time. A low, sweet ache under the skin. I didn’t respond. Not yet.

Regulus softened his voice. “You’re thinking about the alley.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are. The pub in Dover. The night before you proposed to her.”

“I didn’t propose to her that night.”

“You did,” he said, “in your head. You decided. You left my bed at dawn and bought a ring the next morning.”

I felt heat crawl up my spine. Not shame. Anger. At him for remembering. At myself for not forgetting.

“You said you didn’t want anything real,” I replied, trying to keep my voice level.

“I said I didn’t believe you’d choose me.”
“You were correct.”

“You hated being right more than I did.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t even nod. He just looked at me. Still. As if the next words might finally ruin us properly.

The memory emerged whether I wanted it to or not. A narrow room above a pub. A broken lamp.

Regulus shirtless at the window, smoking something he hadn’t explained, looking like he’d been carved for the express purpose of being missed. I told him I couldn’t stay. He didn’t ask why. Just nodded, once, and never looked back.

The room flickered. A shape like that window formed briefly in the wall behind him. I looked away before it could fully form.

I told myself not to ask about the letter.

“Tell me what the letter said,” I murmured.
He studied me for a moment. Long enough to unsettle. Long enough to make it clear he wanted me to feel the weight of the request. But the second the words were out, small, too controlled, I knew I had already broken some rule I hadn’t admitted to needing.

Regulus didn’t flinch. He rarely did. But his eyes moved — not away from me, just slightly down, to where my hands were. On the table. Clenched. I hadn’t noticed.

“Yes,” he said.

“What did it say?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you’re ready to hear it.”

That was his voice at its most dangerous. Low. Formal. Devoid of malice, but constructed to cut. He didn’t posture, he performed. Every word a move. Every silence a weapon.

“I’m not here for closure,” I said, and I regretted it instantly. It sounded like a lie. Like I had been caught practicing that line in the mirror.

“No,” Regulus agreed. “You never were.”

The room was different now. Not literally, but atmospherically. Something had shifted. A narrowing of breath. The walls had begun to feel porous. Like the space itself was absorbing tension and exhaling it back, hotter, heavier.

He looked me over, slowly. Not in derision — in study.

“You’re unraveling.”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” he said calmly. “The thread’s just still in your pocket.”

I should have stood. That would have felt like power. But something about standing would have made me feel visible. And right now, visibility was a liability. So I stayed seated. Let him win this round. Let him believe I was here for something procedural.

But even I didn’t believe that.

“You still think I’m here because I care,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “I think you’re here because you can’t figure out what would hurt more — forgetting me, or remembering me.”

That stung more than I wanted it to.

“You think very highly of yourself.”

“I think very precisely.”

I looked down at the file again. Still blank. Still immaculate. Untouched by fact, as if history had refused to accommodate him. Or maybe it was me who had refused to write it.

“Tell me what it said,” I said again. “The letter.”

“I told you, it depends.”

“On what version of me you were writing to?”
“No,” he said, voice quieter now. “On whether I believed I was going to die.”

I blinked. Something in my chest tightened. Not a knot, something less noble. A bruise I hadn’t noticed before.

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“So it was a goodbye letter.”

“No,” he said. “It was a warning.”

That made something in me lurch. Like the ground of the conversation had tilted, and now I was sliding sideways.

“A warning about what?”

“About you,” he said.

I stared at him, and for the first time in this whole damn interrogation, I didn’t know what to say.
“Me?”

Regulus nodded once.

“I wrote it for Kreacher to deliver to you if I didn’t come back. But I also knew he’d keep it, if I told him it was dangerous. He’s loyal. To me. To fear. Same thing, sometimes.”

“You wrote me a warning letter about myself?”
He gave me that look. The one I remembered from the library at school. When I misunderstood something obvious, and he didn’t mock me, just stared like I was a thing made of meat and misunderstanding.

“You were always going to survive, James. That was your great big beautiful tragedy. You weren’t built to burn. You were built to endure.”

“And you think that’s something I should apologize for?”

“No,” he said. “I think it’s something you should reckon with.”

I felt a pulse behind my right eye. The kind of pain that had nothing to do with nerves. Just memory. I could almost see myself, ten years ago, laughing too loudly at something Sirius said, while Regulus stood in a doorway, not looking at me, but watching me all the same.

“You think you knew me.”

“I still do.”

My hand moved. I didn’t mean it to. I touched my temple like I could push the memory back in. But it was already out. Already circling.

“Parts of it were angry,” he said. “Petty. I blamed you for things that weren’t your fault. Said I hoped you’d choke on your own uncertainty. I didn’t want to write you a love letter. I was too hurt for that.”
I blinked.

“And then,” he continued, “I said you were the only person who’d ever seen me. Unarmed.”

The room responded this time, visibly. A ripple moved through the far wall, like light on water. The shape of a bed emerged faintly. A sleeping figure. Another body beside it, hand half-curled on a chest. I closed my eyes. When I opened it, it was gone.

“I never meant for you to see it,” Regulus murmured. “That version of me.”

“Then why leave it?”

“Because I thought,” he said, “if I died with something honest in the world, maybe I wouldn’t vanish entirely.”

“And now?”

“Now I realise honesty doesn’t guarantee memory. It just ensures pain.”

He looked at me. Carefully and slow.

“You still want the rest of the Horcruxes?” he asked.
I waited.

“I’ll give you one,” he said. “Today. One location. One relic.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to see what you’ll do with it.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I never trusted you,” he replied simply. “But I loved you.”

That word. It wasn’t new, not exactly. But it had never been said in a room with so many ears. The walls didn’t flicker; they stilled. And I, like the fool he always knew I could be, asked “Do you still?”
He looked at me with something unreadable in his expression. A combination of affection and something colder. Pity, maybe. Or contempt. Or worse, longing.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I let them find me.”

The hum beneath our feet changed, deepened. As if the room had heard a story it recognised.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“The locket,” he said, voice level. “The second one I destroyed.”

“You said you only destroyed one.”

“I lied.”

“Why?”

“To see how much you wanted to believe me.”

I stared at him.

“It’s buried,” he said. “Black Lake. Thirty feet down, in the silt. Noth bank. There’s a marker spell, but only I can trigger it.”

“Why bury it there?”

“Because it’s where we used to meet.”

I closed my eyes. Fuck…

“You remember,” he said, quiet now. I did.

Rain, cold skin, mud on my knees. His hand gripping mine under the water. Holding me still while I shivered, not from cold but from the unbearable clarity of what we were.

“You’re a bastard,” I said softly.

“I was yours,” he replied.

“You know what I remember most?” he said suddenly. “After?”

“After what?”

“You. Marrying her. The photographs. The headlines. You were always framed so perfectly. Like grief had been edited out of you.”

“I didn’t love her less than I loved you.”

“I know,” he said. “That was the problem.”

I looked away. I had to. Because the version of me in those memories didn’t feel real. He felt played. Staged. And Regulus saw that, had always seen it, even when I didn’t.

And maybe this was what he wanted from me all along. Not forgiveness. Not love. Just validation that he wasn’t the only one who remembered. That the ache wasn’t imaginary.

“You want me to feel this forever,” I said.

“No,” he replied. “I want you to feel it honestly. That’s different.”

And it was. The difference between a wound and a scar.

The wall behind him shimmered again. This time not a scene. Just light. Just color. As if even the enchantments didn’t know how to represent us.

“I never stopped wanting you,” I said.

“I know,” Regulus said.

He looked tired now. Not physically. Existentially. Like this was the performance he’d been waiting ten years to give, and now that it was ending, he wasn’t sure he’d survive the quiet after.

I reached into the file. There was nothing there. Of course there wasn’t. I closed it anyway.

And I said, stupidly, selfishly:

“What if we started over?”

He looked at me. Long. With something that resembled pity. But deeper. Something like grief.

“There’s no ‘over,’ James.”

“There’s today.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t blink.

And then he said:

“You never chose me when it mattered. Why should I believe you would now?”

And I had no answer.

Chapter Text

I should have stopped him the moment he mentioned the lake. Should have said something cold. Professional. Detached. Written it down in the file I wasn’t taking notes in. Thanked him. Left.
I had practiced versions of that scene in the lift. Neutral face. Unshaken voice. The quiet righteousness of closure. But my body betrayed me. I sat there anyway, like I didn’t know how to leave a room.

But I didn’t.

I sat there instead, pulse steady in the wrong places. My throat, my wrists, just behind my eyes, while Regulus watched me not write it down. His gaze never wandered. He didn’t blink unnecessarily. He was studying me, cataloguing me, as if this moment, my stillness, my failure to move, was the final piece of evidence he’d always been waiting for.

“North bank,” he said again. “Black Lake.”

“That isn’t helpful.”

“No,” he acknowledged. “But it’s honest.”

Something about that word made my spine stiffen. Honest. As if the act of saying it made it true. As if honesty wasn’t a weapon in this room.

The air between us was thick now. As if the room had grown smaller. We were sitting closer than before, though neither of us had moved. It was the kind of closeness that wasn’t physical. A collapse of emotional distance. He’d cornered me without getting out of his chair.

“And the others?” I asked, finally.

“You get one today. That was the deal.”

“I didn’t agree to a deal.”

“You did,” he said. “The moment you didn’t walk out.”

There was a flicker on the wall again. Not a memory this time, rather, possibility. Two versions of the same man: one standing at the door, leaving cleanly. One seated at the table, knuckles white. It dissolved before I could realise which one was mine. It didn’t matter. Both versions had already failed me.

I narrowed my eyes. “How do I know this isn’t some elaborate fiction?”

“You don’t,” he said. “But you came, which means some part of you wants to believe I’m telling the truth.”

His voice was level. Not smug. Measured. He was always like that in games he’d already won.
I exhaled through my nose. “You’ve always been the best liar.”

“Not always,” he said, more to himself. “Only when I cared.”

The way he said it - tired, not defensive - made something shift in me. Not sympathy. Just… friction. The kind that sparks.

I let that hang. Then: “So that’s it? You spent a decade hiding, and now you want to drip-feed me secrets like a bedtime story?”

“I want you to understand something,” he replied.

“What.”

“That I never did it to hurt you.”

I scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself. You didn’t hurt me. You disappeared. You died. People do that in a war.”
“You’re not angry?”

“No.”

“Good,” he said, leaning in slightly. “Then why are you sweating?”

My jaw clenched. The room noticed. The air shifted, just slightly, a soft re-tuning of tension. I could feel my skin tightening at the collar, the way it used to before duels. Or before goodbyes.

“You think this is some victory,” I said. “Some slow unravelling of me.”

“I don’t need to unravel you. You’ve been falling apart since the war ended.”

“That’s not your concern.”

“No,” he agreed. “But it used to be.”

A pulse passed through the floor, but I didn’t know if it was real or if I’d started imagining the rooms reactions, but something had shifted.

“You had a choice,” I said. “You could’ve stayed, you could’ve-“

“What?” he said sharply. “Marched into headquarters with the Dark Mark fresh on my arm and asked for redemption? You think that was ever truly an option for me?”

“You made it worse,” I said. “By vanishing. You made us all wonder what side you were really on.”
“And now you know,” he said. “Does it help?”

I didn’t reply.

“I left,” he continued. “Because I knew if I stayed, I’d become what they expected. Another Black brother, another martyr, another ghost.”

“You became one anyway.”

“Better that than a hypocrite.”

The blow hit harder than I expected. I leaned forward. The table between us was too short now. Or maybe I was too close to the truth. Or too close to him.

“What do you want from me Regulus?”

“I want you to see me,” he said. “Not as some unfinished thing. Something to be saved. Not as regret. Just… see me.”

“You think I don’t?”

“I think you see a version of me that you can survive,” he replied. “Not the real one, not anymore.”

“Then show me.”

Regulus was quiet. He stared at his hands for a long time.

“Ask me something real,” he said, finally.

“This is real.”

“No,” he said. “It’s safe.”

I hesitated, then asked. Very quietly.

“Did you ever mean it?”

He looked up, almost surprised. “Mean what?”

“When you said you loved me.”

His eyes didn’t change. “Of course I meant it.”
I waited.

“But that isn’t the real question.”

“What is?”

“You want to ask if I still do.”

My throat dried.

“I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “You’re not the same.”

“Neither are you.”

“True,” he said. “But I didn’t build myself around hating who I used to be.”

It was an autopsy of a sentence. Not accusation, observation. And still, it struck.

The room grew cold. He studied me again. “You think if I confess everything, you’ll feel better. Like closure works that simply.”

“I think the truth matters.”

“Only when it doesn’t hurt you.”

“I’ve been hurt worse.”

“Then prove it,” he dared. “Tell me what happened after you left me that night.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t get to have that part of me anymore.”

That silenced him, briefly. The edges of his posture softened, just slightly. Enough that only I would notice. His mouth opened a fraction. Then closed. No cleverness. Just the shape of restraint.

“And yet,” he said. “You’re here.”

“Because of the Horcruxes.”

He tilted his head. “No. You are here because I knew you’d come if I used your guilt as a compass.”
There it was. Laid bare. The strategy behind the whole thing.

“You manipulated me,” I accused.

He didn’t smile. “I missed you.”

The contradiction of that, weapon and wound in the same breath, made me stand again. I turned to the door, my fingers touched the glass. I needed height. Distance. A new vantage point. But all I got was the illusion of separation. He hadn’t moved. And still, I felt farther from him than I ever had.

“I’ll send someone else.” I said.

“You won’t.”

“Watch me.”

I stepped outside, the enchantment blooming around my shoulders as I did. And just before the door closed, I heard his voice again. Quiet, unhurried, and certain.

“I’ll see you soon, Jamie.”

He said it like a fact. Not a hope. Not a threat. Like gravity. Like death. Like something inevitable.
And the worst part was, I didn’t dread it. I didn’t dread it at all.

The hallway outside the cell was colder than I remembered. Not in temperature, exactly. More in atmosphere. Sterile. Quiet. The kind of quiet that suggested surveillance. The kind you weren’t meant to notice. I walked past the viewing window without looking in. I knew what I’d see.

Regulus, still seated. Still waiting.

The bastard never moved unless you did first.
The elevator took six minutes to arrive. I spent all of them staring at the wall. There was a sigil etched faintly into the panelling, barely visible. I traced with my thumb. I don’t know why.

Back on the main floor, Kingsley was waiting by the Pensieve.

“Anything useful?” he asked. I didn’t answer at first, and he glanced at me sideways before returning to the swirling pool of memories.

“He gave us a location. Black Lake.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to?”

That stopped me. Kingsley had a way of asking things without tone, without judgment. Like he didn’t care what you said, only that you said it honestly. It made him unbearable at times. It made him one of the few people I still trusted.

“I think he’s telling the truth,” I said, finally. “But I also think he wants to be caught telling it.”
“Guilt?”

“No.” I replied simply. “Control.”

Kingsley exhaled. “You can pass it to someone else, if you want.”

I should have accepted the offer. Should have nodded, handed off the file, and gone home.

Instead, I said: “Not yet.”

The lake was darker than I remembered.

I don’t mean the color. I mean the sensation of it, the presence of it. Like standing at the edge of something sentient. It didn’t lap or glitter or beckon. It waited.

Waiting was what Regulus had always done best. I hadn’t realized the lake had learned it from him.
I stood on the north bank, boots pressed into soft earth, the sky overhead wide and grey and peeled open like old parchment. The Ministry had sanctioned the search, of course they had. I hadn’t told them why. Only that I was pursuing a lead related to recovered magical artifacts.

They didn’t question me.

Kingsley had looked at me for a long time. Said nothing. Handed me the clearance form.

He knew better than to ask what ghosts I was chasing. He had plenty of his own.

The shoreline curved inward, a crescent of memory. I hadn’t been here in years. Not since-

I don’t let myself finish the sentence.

There were trees behind me. The air smelled of wet leaves and old iron. Somewhere in the distance, a bird called once and stopped, as if rethinking the performance.

I stepped forward. The lake didn’t react. Of course it didn’t. It didn’t need to. That wasn’t how Regulus operated, not through drama like Sirius. Through inertia. Through gravity.

I pulled the small stone from my coat pocket.
Smooth. Cold. Veined with a thin line of runes only visible when you looked sideways.

A marker stone. Set to respond to a very specific magical signature.

His.

He’d handed it to me in silence, back in the cell. No flourish. Just a nod.

“You’ll know,” he said. “When you’re close enough.”
He hadn’t told me what it would do. That was typical. Regulus believed in withholding. In earning revelations. I don’t think he ever handed anyone a full truth in his life.

I stepped into the water.

The water was colder than I expected. Not shocking. Just ancient. That was the sensation… age. Depth. Something preserved beneath it that shouldn’t have survived.

I waded in slowly. The ripples were silent. My wand was in my sleeve, angled downward, fingertips touching the holly like a lifeline.

Halfway up my shins now. The stone warmed in my palm. Just a little. Like a held breath.

I looked back once.

The shore was empty. The trees too still.

That was how I remembered him, too. Always just out of frame. Always watching without reaching. Like a spell waiting for the right incantation.

The stone pulsed again, stronger this time. A throb, faint but deliberate. I turned slightly, adjusted my direction. Twenty feet farther along the bank, the sensation intensified.

And there it was. The place. The absence of something visible. Just an intuitive pressure, like standing above a grave that hadn’t been marked.
I knelt into the water. Hands submerged.

The silt was soft. Smooth. Yielding. It clung to my wrists like it didn’t want me to let go.

“Accio locket,” I whispered.

Nothing.

Of course not.

Regulus didn’t trust magic that came too easily. He would’ve woven protections, not to keep it safe, but to ensure it was retrieved only by someone who understood the price.

I pressed the marker stone deeper into the water, into the bed. A glow surged. Low, green-gold, almost sickly.

And then… resistance.

Something pulled against the water.

I heard it before I saw it. Not sound. Not movement. A shift in pressure. A note in the chest. The way grief announces itself before it becomes identifiable.

The locket rose.

Tarnished. Dull. Still humming with a presence I didn’t want to name.

I caught it gently. The chain tangled with reeds. The metal cold as bone.

It was lighter than I expected. As if Regulus had emptied it of some of its darkness, but not all.

There was still something in there. Some fragment of nightmare. Or memory.

I held it in my palm.

The thing he’d chosen not to give me until now.
Proof he wasn’t what they said he was. Proof he was what I knew he could be.

I didn’t open it.

Not yet.

The water dripped from my sleeve as I stood, cradling it in my hand like something that could still burn me.

Behind me, the wind stirred the trees.

I thought of what Regulus said.

“You never chose me when it mattered.”

And he was right.

Back on the shore, locket in hand, I stood for a long time without moving. The cold sank in slowly. Not the kind that touched your skin, but the kind that rewrote your marrow. I thought of what it meant, truly, that he’d buried it here. That he hadn’t kept it as leverage or vanished with it as proof of his own righteousness. He wanted it found. He wanted it used. And it struck me, sharply, bitterly, that maybe Regulus had always been trying to be on the right side. Not the public one, not the one carved in newspapers or battlefields, but something quieter, harder: the moral side. The side he wasn’t raised to recognize. And I hadn’t believed him. I’d seen the name, the bloodline, the brilliance sharpened into cruelty, and I’d prepared for a fall that never quite came. Even when he warned me. Even when he waited. I had never really given him the chance to be right. And now that he was, now that I was holding the proof of it in my hand, the realization felt like a wound opening inward.

We could’ve been something real.

Something whole.

He had offered it, in ways only he could, and I’d looked away.

The regret wasn’t clean. It was layered. Complicated. I didn’t know if I missed him as he’d been, or as he could have been. I just knew that both versions were gone now.

And I was the one who had outlived them.

Chapter Text

I didn’t go home that night after the Lake. I told myself I was walking, clearing my head. But the path I took wound in only one direction. Down. Back. The kind of walk that ends where it begins. Not aimless. Ritual. I told myself I needed to decompress. Breathe. Maybe eat. But my body made its own decisions, as it always did when Regulus re-entered the orbit.

The Ministry was quieter after hours. Most of the lights were low, enchanted to flicker only when motion passed near them. I liked that, being followed by light. It made the place feel more honest.

It gave the illusion of being chosen. Watched. But gently. The kind of scrutiny I could tolerate. The kind that didn’t ask anything in return.

The door to the observation wing opened without resistance. The cell was dark when I entered. The enchantments adjusted automatically, softening the light until the shadows were visible, but the corners remained hidden. Even light knew when to hold back.

He was still there. He hadn’t moved.

“You came back,” he said, unsurprised.

I didn’t respond, just sat.

Regulus tilted his head. “Did it hurt?”

“What?”

“Leaving.”

I stared at him. “No.”

He gave a slight, ironic smile. “Then why are your knuckles white?”

I looked down at my hands that had curled into fits without me noticing. The skin was drawn tight. I hadn’t unclenched since the lake. Or before. I couldn’t remember the last time I truly did.

“I’m not here for games.” I said.

“Then what?”

“I want the next Horcrux. It’s the next day, technically.”

“No,” Regulus replied.

“You said you’d give one per day.”

“I lied,” he said. “Again.”

“Why?”

“To see if you’d come back anyway.”

My jaw clenched. “And?”

He didn’t smile this time. “You did.”

He said it like he was taking inventory. Of my habits. My hypocrisies. My need for something I refused to name.

I stood up again. I was always standing with him. Always moving like it mattered. He watched me pace the edge of the room. There was nowhere to go. The walls were too close. The corners too silent. Still I walked like I might wear a hole in the floor.

“You think this is some drama,” I said. “Some final act.”

“It’s not final.”

“What is it, then?”

He shrugged. “Rehearsal. Or maybe penance.”
“For what?”

“For loving someone who never chose me.”

That stopped me cold. “I never said I didn’t choose you.”

He looked at me, not mockingly. Not triumphantly. He just looked.

“You said it with your life,” he replied. “Your choices.”

The room flickered. Something between us cracked. A filament, maybe. Something taut and unseen, finally snapping under the strain of all the things we hadn’t said fast enough.

“Why did you come back,” I asked, softer. “Really.”

“Because I dreamed of you dying,” he said. “Over and over.”

“That’s not a reason.”

“It is when it’s the only thing that wakes you.”

I stared at him. “And now?”

He leaned back in his chair, putting distance between us. A shadow passed behind him, not cast by anything in the room, but the shape of a memory.

Mine.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I wanted to see if you’d recognise me.”

I sat again. “I do.”

“No,” he said. “You recognise a version of me. The one you left in a pub. The one you buried next to your guilt.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But that version still wanted you.”
That version had waited. Had watched the door. Had left a space beside him at a table I never returned to. He was quiet. And then:

“Do you want me now?”

The question wasn’t flirtatious. It wasn’t cruel. It was surgical. Precise. Methodical. Stripped of performance. A question cut to fit only me.

I didn’t answer. Not yet. Instead, I asked: “Why tell me this? If not just to play games, why not someone else?”

“Because I never mattered to anyone else.” He leaned forward. “And you never stopped needing me to.”

It landed like truth. Not the clean kind. The kind that stuck to the floorboards.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if he was right. That was the most frightening part.

“Because I never mattered to anyone else.” He leaned forward. “And you never stopped needing me to.”

I didn’t move. I don’t think I even breathed. Not because I didn’t want to respond, but because every possible answer was dishonest. There was no denial clean enough to say aloud. And there was no confession that wouldn’t ruin us both.

For a moment, I hated him. Not truly. Not cleanly. I hated that he still knew how to find the part of me that wasn’t armored. That he’d come back not just with truth, but with timing. That he could still walk into my silences like he owned them.

“I don’t need anything from you,” I said, finally. But the sentence felt secondhand. Rehearsed. Something I’d said before to someone else. Maybe even to him.
Regulus didn’t laugh. He didn’t argue. He just blinked slowly, as if seeing the version of me that said it — and the one underneath.

“No,” he said quietly. “You need what you had. The version of me that hurt less.”

“I need the Horcrux.”

“That’s not what you asked for when you walked in.”
I said nothing.

He was right. Of course he was. He always was when he let the knife rest just under the skin. Not cutting. Just pressing. Just reminding you it was there.

“You think you came back to finish something,” he said. “But you’re only here because you left something unfinished.”

The room was quiet. Heavy. As though even the enchantments were giving us space to wreck each other properly.

“I’m not your unfinished thing,” I said.

He tilted his head. “No. You were just mine.”

It was a strange kind of mercy, the way he said it. Like an old obituary. Like he’d already buried the grief. Only the name remained.

We sat in silence.

Not companionable. Not tense. Just… exhausted. The kind of silence you share when all the damage has already been done, but you haven’t decided yet who gets to live with it.

Eventually, he spoke.

“Tomorrow. I’ll give you the name of the next Horcrux.”

I met his gaze. “Why wait?”

“Because you’ll come back,” he said. “And I need to know if it’s for the Horcrux. Or for me.”

Chapter Text

I didn’t sleep. I didn’t go home either. There was no home left in the usual sense. Just a flat with cold cups in the sink and a bed that had long ago stopped meaning rest. I sat in the Ministry archives until the lights began their nightly dim, as if even they had grown tired of watching.

I should’ve left him there. That would’ve been clean. That would’ve been smart. Instead, I watched the swirl of spelllight across my hands and thought about what he’d said. That I was unfinished. That he was waiting to see who I returned for… the war, or him.

It wasn’t a fair question. But it was the right one.
By the time I returned, it was morning.

The cell lights were still low, not dimmed now, just resigned. Like the room understood it was a space for endings.

Regulus was already seated. He didn’t greet me. Just looked up and nodded once. Not in triumph. In confirmation.

As if we had both woken up inside the same idea.
“I have another one,” Regulus announced.

I looked up. His voice changed too suddenly. Now it was not soft or sharp, just steady and resigned. A sound with no edge. The voice of inevitability.

“A Horcrux?” I asked tiredly from the whiplash of the conversation.

Regulus nodded once. “The ring.”

I hesitated. “The Gaunt ring?” I didn’t believe him.
But I wanted to. “Where?”

He didn’t answer, not yet. The cell was darker today. Or maybe we were. The lights hadn’t shifted, but the atmosphere had. Trembling under some unseen pressure. The room knew. It always knew. It responded to grief the way a chapel responds to song, but amplifying the spaces between notes.
Regulus reached into his pocket and I tensed. He didn’t pull out a wand. Instead, he laid a small, flat stone on the table. Polished, engraved with something circular. Runic.

“A marker,” he said. “Buried with it. I left it in Albania, years before the cave.”

I didn’t touch it. “You lied about the order.”

He smiled faintly. “You were never interested in sequence, only impact.”

“Why give this to me now?”

“Because I’m tired,” he said. “And because I want you to stay.”

The room went still again. I picked up the stone. It was warm. Not just with enchantment. With memory. With regret. With intention.

“You planned this,” I accused.

“Of course.”

“You let them find you.”

“Yes.”

“You waited until I was assigned.”

“That part,” he replied. “I didn’t plan. But I wanted it, so I asked.”

I watched him closely. “And if I had refused?”

He shrugged. “I would’ve stayed here anyway. Rotting. Or dreaming.”

I turned the stone over in my hand. “Did you think this would fix something?”

“No,” he said. “But I thought it might finish it.”

“What?”

“Us.”

The word landed. Not like a blow. Like a hand on a wound already bleeding.

“There is not us,” I replied.

“Then why are you here?”

“To finish the war.”

“You’re ten years too late.”

“No,” I replied. “You are.”

The silence that followed wasn’t cold. It was warm. Familiar. Like the last breath before sleep.

“Tell me,” I said, quitter now. “Why didn’t you send the letter?”

The kind of silence I used to think meant safety. Now it just meant surrender.

Regulus looked down. “I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That you’d read it and feel nothing.” He swallowed. For the first time in hours, he looked young. Just a boy with too many names and no one to hand them to.

“I was afraid,” he continued, “that you’d open it, and it would be like I never existed.”

I didn’t say anything. I remembered the way he slept. Tucked in like a secret. The way he never dreamed unless I was in the room. The way his hand would find mine in the dark like it was muscle memory, not a choice.

I remembered once, in winter, when we hadn’t spoken for days. Not from anger, just inertia… and he reached for my hand in his sleep like it was the only part of him he still trusted. That had ruined me more than the fights. The softness. The default.

“You made your choices,” I said.

“So did you.”

“You left.”

“You married her.”

“You let me.”

That cracked something. In both of us. No lightning. No explosion. Just the slow fracture of something that had already been splintering under the weight of omission.

“I didn’t know how,” I whispered.

“You never wanted to.”

The silence was brutal. Then, in a different voice, softer, older, nearly kind: “Do you want to read it now?”

My breath hitched.

“The letter?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I thought it was gone.”

“It isn’t,” he said. “I memorised it. I rewrote it a hundred times in my head. I’ve been reciting it since the cave.”

Of course he had. Regulus didn’t throw things away. He preserved. Archived. Encased. Sometimes in words, sometimes in grief.

“Then say it.”

His eyes met mine. They didn’t look triumphant. They looked wrecked.

“James,” he began. “If you’re reading this, then I’m dead. Or worse, alive but no longer me. In either case, I need you to know three things.”

His voice was steady, but quiet. Reverent.

“First: I didn’t do this for glory. I did it because I couldn’t stand the thought of your name written on a stone beside mine.”

I looked away. I thought of the markers. The ones from the war. The ones I couldn’t visit. I thought of how many names I’d buried, and how his had never been among them, not officially. Because a part of me had refused to call it over.

“Second: I forgive you. For the pub. For the proposal. For loving me quietly and then walking away loudly.”

My hands were shaking. And still I didn’t stop him. I wanted to hurt. I needed to.

“And third: I hope, Merlin I hope, you never forget what we were. Even if you rewrite it. Even if you you make me a villain, or a footnote. Remember that I loved you. It’s the only thing I ever did in this life without shame.”

He stopped. The room didn’t move. Neither of us did. The words didn’t land like a confession. They landed like proof. Like he’d finally found the right spell to undo everything I’d buried.

Then, softly: “That’s the letter.”

My throat burned. “Why tell me now?”

He didn’t smile. “Because I wanted you to hurt. And because I knew you already were.”

He could’ve laughed. Could’ve twisted the knife. But he didn’t. That was how I knew it was real.

And I hated that it worked. That it opened something in me I couldn’t shut. That I wanted to reach across the table, not to forgive him, but just to be near him.

***

DOVER 1980

The sky over Dover was the color of forgetting.
Grey, endless, spitting a thin mist that clung to everything. The road, the grass, the bones. James stood outside the inn for a long time before going in, breathing in the salt and rot and iron of the air, trying to convince himself he wasn’t already drowning.

The building looked like it had been carved from the cliff and then left to decay. Shuttered windows. Sea-bitten stone. The sign above the door swayed in the wind, the paint faded to nothing. The pub inside was no better. Low ceilings, warped wood. One hearth still lit, more out of habit than hospitality. The bartender glanced up as James entered, gave no greeting, and returned to his newspaper.

Regulus was already seated. Far corner. Always. Half his face in shadow.

James walked over slowly, shoulders soaked, wand tucked up his sleeve like a promise he hoped not to need. He didn’t say anything. Just sat. The bench groaned beneath him.

“You came,” Regulus said, softly.

“You sent the message.”

“You didn’t have to answer it.”

James gave a humorless smile. “You always did assume I’d chase you.”

Regulus poured him a drink without comment.
Something sharp. Bitter. Expensive enough to sting.

“You still let her believe you’re in Yorkshire?”

James took the glass. “We don’t talk about details.”

Regulus’s voice lowered. “That’s all we ever did. Talk about the wrong things.”

He leaned forward just slightly. “Do you say her name when you come, or is it still mine?”

James looked away. The flush rose behind his ears.
“You look like you’ve been hexed sideways,” James muttered.

“I’ve been in hiding.”

“You’ve been in something.”

Regulus laughed, soft and humorless. “Jealous?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“You did once.”

“Yeah,” James said. “And then you started disappearing.”

Regulus glanced toward the fire. “It was the only thing I was ever good at.”

James rubbed a hand over his face. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“You said that last time.”

“I meant it.”

“So why are you?”

The wind howled outside, rattling the windowpane. James stared into his glass.

“Because I keep hoping I’ll see something in your face that tells me I was wrong.”

Regulus was quiet for a moment.

“And do you?”

“No,” James said. “You look exactly like I remember.”
“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

Regulus leaned forward, elbows on the table. His sleeves shifted. James didn’t look, but he felt it. The presence of the Mark beneath the fabric. The absence of denial.

“You didn't have to be on their side,” James said, low.

“There aren’t sides anymore,” Regulus replied. “Just escape routes.”

“You chose one covered in bodies.”

“I chose the one they wouldn’t expect me to survive.”

James slammed his glass down. “Stop making yourself a martyr.”

Regulus didn’t flinch. “Stop pretending you didn’t love me for it.”

That stopped the conversation. Fully. Like a ward activated.

James stared at him, mouth parted slightly. He looked so young all of a sudden. Both of them did.
Regulus sighed. “I didn’t ask you here to fight.”
The room warmed again. James stared at him across the table. “You always looked good in this light.”

Regulus’s lips quirked. “Which part, the firelight or the guilt?”

James scoffed. “Both. Unfortunately.”

The wind howled outside, rattling the windowpane. James stared into his glass.

“Because I keep hoping I’ll see something in your face that tells me I was wrong.”

Regulus was quiet.

“And do you?”

“No,” James said. “You look exactly like I remember.”
“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

Regulus leaned forward. “You used to lie better than that.”

“I wasn’t trying to lie. I was trying not to say I missed you.”

A pause.

“Say it,” Regulus said. “Just once.”

James stared at him for a long time. Then:

“You’re still beautiful when you’re angry.”

Regulus laughed, low. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” James said. “That’s why I said it

“Come upstairs.”

It wasn’t seduction. It wasn’t safety. It was the last thread between them, held out like an ultimatum that didn’t need naming.

James followed.

Upstairs, the room was smaller than memory. One bed. Sloped ceiling. The window was cracked slightly at the edges, letting in the sea air. The walls were painted a color that had long since stopped trying.
Regulus sat on the bed, not looking at him. James hovered by the door.

“She knows, you know,” he said.

Regulus looked up.

“Lily. Not everything. Not us. But she knows when I vanish like this. She doesn’t ask, but she knows.”
There was a pause. Then:

“She’s stronger than you.”

“I know.”

Regulus lay back on the bed, arms folded across his chest. “You’ve made a life.”

James didn’t respond.

“You’re going to marry her.”

Still nothing.

Regulus turned his face away. “And you came anyway.”

James walked to the window. Pressed his palm against the cold glass. The sea below was a bruise. The wind carried something that might’ve once been screaming, or seagulls. He wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know why I came.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Fine,” James snapped. “I came because I thought there might still be something worth salvaging.”
“And?”

James turned around. “You tell me.”

Regulus sat up slowly. Their eyes met across the room.

“You could still choose me,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. Not even a plea. Just a final line drawn in the dust.

James didn’t move.

“I can’t,” he said.

“I know,” Regulus said. “You never could.”

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t want to,” James said quietly. “Doesn’t mean I don’t still.”

Regulus looked at him then. “You always wanted too many things.”

James crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. He didn’t touch him. He didn’t speak. He just sat, feeling the space between them like a second skin.

“You hate me,” James said.

“I resent you,” Regulus corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“Do you think I ever stopped loving you?”

“No,” Regulus said. “But you hated yourself for it. And that’s worse.”

Neither of them moved. Neither of them undressed. They lay side by side, eyes open in the dark.

“I dreamed of this,” Regulus said after a long time. “Not like this, though. Less tired. More hope.”

James stared at the ceiling.

“I used to think,” Regulus continued, “that if we could just get a night like this, just one, we’d remember how to want the same future.”

James turned his face toward him. Barely.

“And?” he asked.

Regulus gave the smallest shake of his head. “Turns out we remembered everything except how to stay.”
James didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His mouth opened once, then closed again. He lay still. Listened to Regulus breathe.

He didn’t know when sleep took them. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe they both just sank.

But in the grey light of early morning, James was already dressed.

Regulus didn’t move when he stood. Didn’t reach for him. He watched from the bed with eyes that no longer hoped, only recorded.

James paused at the door. His hand on the knob.
He didn’t look back.

“Take care of yourself,” he said. Quiet. Like a stranger.

Regulus didn’t speak. His fingers curled slightly in the sheets, the only betrayal of feeling.

And James left.

The door closed behind him with a soft click. Final. The kind of sound you don’t notice until it’s the only one left.

Downstairs, the pub was empty. The bartender gone. The fire out.

He stepped into the mist.

He didn’t cry.

He didn’t speak.

He apparated home, scrubbed the smell of salt from his collar, and walked into the nearest jeweler’s in Diagon Alley.

That night, he bought Lily the ring.

And never once asked if it was the right choice, only whether it was the last one he’d get to make.

Chapter Text

The silence between us was not empty; it was saturated with the weight of unsaid words and shared history. Regulus’s eyes held a storm of emotions, each one threatening to break the surface.

“You wanted me to hurt,” I repeated, my voice barely above a whisper.

Regulus said nothing, his gaze steady.

“That’s why you told me. The letter. The dreams. The lake. Not to help the war. Not to end anything?”

“No,” he admitted. “To finish you. Us.”

The words didn’t sting. They landed with too much precision for that, like a scalpel. Like something meant to reveal.

“And now?” I asked.

He looked at me with the kind of quiet I remembered all too well. The stillness before the kiss. The pause before leaving.

“Now I just want to be seen,” he murmured.
“You are.”

“No,” he replied. “You see a ghost. A guilt-trip. A wrong turn.”

He shifted in his chair, just slightly. The cuffs on his wrist glowed.

“I want to be seen like I was. Not as your mistake.”
I felt something heavy rise in my chest, sharp. “You were a mistake.”

He flinched. I hadn’t expected him to. He looked down at the table, fingers curled inwards.

“And yet,” he said, “you came back to make the mistake again.”

“That doesn’t mean I forgive you.”

“I never asked for your forgiveness.”

“What do you want, then?”

He looked up. “You, but not like this.”

I stared as he leaned forward. “Do you know what I saw in the cave?” he asked.

I didn’t respond.

“I saw you. Not dying. Not fighting. Living. With someone else.” His voice was careful now. Not bitter or angry. Just exhausted.

“I saw you old. Soft. Smiling at a child who wasn’t mine. At a wife who wasn’t me. I watched you live without ever having known me,” he paused. “And I realised, that was the future I gave you.”

My mouth went dry. “You destroyed the locket.”
He nodded.

“You saved me.”

“No,” he said. “I gave you the opportunity to leave me.”

I sat back as the room rippled. Finally, I said: “You think I would have chosen you.”

“I think you did,” he replied. “But you didn’t like who it made you.”

“Do you know how hard it was,” I said, voice low, “to love someone who made hiding an art form?”

“Yes,” he replied, “because I loved you anyway.”

I closed my eyes as I saw it again. The field outside Hogsmeade. Cold grass. Regulus’s mouth on mine. His voice in my ear: “I won’t ask you to stay. But if you do, I’ll never leave.” I left anyway.

“You never forgave me,” I whispered.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But I never stopped trying to.”

That broke me more than anything else. I stood. He didn’t move. The door didn’t open, and I didn’t ask it to. Instead, I stepped to his side. He looked up at me, not defiant, not victorious. Just there. Present. Tired.

I touched the table between us. The stone still sat there, warm.

“Three Horcruxes,” I said.

“One more,” he corrected.

“You said four.”

“I lied,” he said. “But this time, only to myself.”
Silence.

“I thought you were dead,” I said.

“I thought you’d forget.”

“I tried.”

He looked at me. “I think that might be your biggest failure, Jamie.”

Regulus didn’t look up when he spoke again.
“You were wrong, by the way.”

I blinked. “About what?”

“That I was just your mistake.”

The tone wasn’t bitter. It was quiet. Deliberate. Like he’d been waiting years to say it.

“You never did like being reduced to one thing,” I murmured.

He looked at me then, eyes darker than the room around them. “I could’ve been your mistake and still been your something.”

I didn’t answer. Not yet.

Instead, I reached for the stone still resting between us. Warm, yes, but not just from magic. From memory. From time. From him.

He watched my fingers move over it, and for once, he didn’t press.

“You remember how we met?” he asked finally.
It wasn’t rhetorical. He wanted to know if I still carried it.

“Train,” I said. “Your first year. Sirius marched you over like a prize he hadn’t decided whether to be proud of.”

That drew the faintest curl of his lip. “You were already sitting with Remus and Peter. Sprawled out like you owned the whole bloody compartment.”
“I did,” I said. “At least until you walked in. You looked like someone had dared you to wear the wrong skin.”

He smiled, just barely. “And you had the worst haircut I’d ever seen.”

I scoffed. “You said it looked windswept.”

“Windswept by a hurricane,” he teased.

For a moment, just a moment, it felt like we were seventeen again. Bantering across the Gryffindor-Slytherin divide like it was a game. Like it hadn’t ended with betrayal and war.

“You were quiet,” I said, softer now. “I remember thinking you didn’t blink much.”

“I didn’t want to miss anything,” he replied. Then, after a pause: “Especially not you.”

The weight of that landed slowly, like sediment building in the chest.

“You fell in love with me that day, didn’t you?” I asked. Not accusatory. Just… tracing a line we’d both left unfinished.

He didn’t flinch. “Yes. You offered me a Chocolate Frog and told Sirius he should be nicer to me. I didn’t even like sweets, but I kept the wrapper.”
I stared.

“It had Merlin’s card,” he said. “Of course it did.”

“You always did like impossible things.”

“I liked you,” he corrected. “Same difference.”

I leaned back, trying to breathe around the shape of what we’d been. “I didn’t see it. Not then.”

“I know,” he said simply. “You were James Potter. You didn’t have to see me.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No,” he agreed. “It’s just true.”

There was a pause. Then he said, more gently, “When did you start?”

“Start what?”

“Seeing me.”

It was harder to say than I expected. “Fourth year. You disarmed me without blinking and then walked away like it didn’t matter.”

Regulus looked vaguely horrified. “That was when?”
“Shut up,” I said. “I wasn’t used to losing.”

“You still aren’t.”

We shared the kind of smile that meant nothing and everything. Familiar. Fractured.

“I started watching you after that,” I admitted. “Not just in class. In hallways. Meals. Quidditch matches. You moved like you knew you were being watched.”
“I was,” he said.

“You never looked back.”

“I would’ve,” he murmured, “if I thought I could survive what I’d see.”

I swallowed. “You could’ve.”

He tilted his head. “I didn’t want to see you looking through me. I could survive hating you. Not that.”
I rubbed my jaw, shame blooming like something feral. “I never looked through you.”

“Didn’t you?” he asked, but there was no malice in it. Just memory. “When you started dating Lily, I thought… I thought it was over. That you’d filed me away. Slytherin boy. Complication. Ghost.”

“You were never a ghost,” I said. “You were the reason I kept looking over my shoulder.”

That surprised him. “Why?”

“Because I thought I’d made you up,” I said. “You were this… impossible thing. Beautiful and doomed and mine for a moment, and I couldn’t hold it.”

“You could have,” he whispered.

“You kept disappearing. It was like trying to hold water in just my hands.”

We weren’t arguing. Not really. Just drawing maps of what hurt where.

“I never stopped seeing you,” I said. “Even when I tried.”

Regulus leaned in just slightly. “You always had a savior complex.”

“And you always had a martyr complex.”

We both smiled. Broken, amused, tired.

“Do you remember,” he said suddenly, “the last time we kissed?”

I nodded. “Dover..”

“It was raining.”

“You were crying.”

He paused. “You noticed?”

“Always… I just thought if I let you go,” I said, “it would hurt less than being left.”

“You weren’t left,” he whispered. “You walked away first.”

It was too much. I stood up again, pacing once, then back. The magic in the room trembled slightly with the force of what neither of us could undo.

When I looked down at him again, something in my chest loosened.

“You still have that Chocolate Frog wrapper?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “Of course.”

I smirked. “Should’ve kept the frog.”

“You were the frog,” he said.

“That’s not flattering.”

He shrugged. “You were sweet. You made a mess. And I was always a little afraid of what you’d do next.”

I stepped forward, slowly. Not touching. Just nearer.

“Do you regret it?”

He didn’t ask what “it” meant. He never needed to.

“No,” Regulus said. “I regret not holding on longer.”
The lights above us dimmed slightly, a soft suggestion of time passing. Of morning becoming memory.

“One Horcrux left,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Will you lie about that one too?”

“Probably,” he said. “But not to hurt you. Just to keep you close.”

I didn’t move.

“You think that makes it better?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But I think it makes it honest.”

I stared at him for a long time. Then I sat back down, slower this time. Less like a question. More like a promise not to leave.

“We were never supposed to happen,” I said.

“No,” Regulus agreed. “We were just supposed to mean something.”

We sat in that, what we were, what we weren’t, until the morning fully arrived.

And I didn’t look away.

Not once.

Chapter Text

The room was no longer cold, or warm. It had lost its temperature altogether, like grief that had finally burned itself into numbness.

Regulus rested his hands on the table. The cuffs no longer glowed.

He looked tired. Not theatrically. Not beautifully. Just… tired.

And I was tired, too.

“You said there was one more,” I said.

He nodded.

“Where?”

He hesitated.

And then, with a breath: “Inside me.”

He said it so simply, I didn’t hear it at first.

“Inside me.”

The words hung between us like frost, melting as they landed.

I stared.

And he stared back.

Not with defiance. Not with triumph.

With exhaustion.

“You’re lying,” I said.

“I’m not,” he replied. “You just wish I were.”

I felt something uncoil inside my chest. It wasn’t fear, not in the usual sense. It was worse. The sudden knowing that everything I thought I understood was about to change shape, become unspeakable.

“You let yourself be taken into the Ministry,” I said slowly, “with him still inside you?”

He nodded. “Would’ve been easier to let myself be buried again. But you know me. I’ve always been theatrical when I’m desperate.”

“You’re saying you’re a Horcrux.”

“No,” he said. “I’m saying I’m what’s left of one. The final piece. The smallest. The one Voldemort couldn’t place anywhere else.”

“Why?”

“Because I was there. I offered.”

“You wanted this?”

“I wanted him dead more than I wanted to live cleanly. It was better than the alternative option”
I reeled. “You’ve been walking around like this?”

He tilted his head, a worn version of the boy I remembered, all cold wit and collarbones. “I’ve been sleeping inside a house that wanted to eat me. Do you know what that’s like? Living ten years in a place where every wall whispers your name like a threat?”

“I don’t understand.”

“No,” he said. “You understand. You just hate what it means.”

I looked at him. Really looked.

The truth was there. In the way his pupils didn’t reflect the light quite right. In the faint tremor beneath his voice. In the way the room responded, not with its usual humming, but a sharp, glassy silence. As if holding its breath.

“Tell me what it’s like,” I said.

“To live with it?”

“Yes.”

He paused.

Then, quietly: “It’s like dreaming with your eyes open. Like there’s always someone else breathing behind your thoughts. He doesn’t speak. But he remembers. I remember things I shouldn’t. His mother’s hands. The scream he made the first time he split his soul. The way he feared dying more than pain. I wake up knowing what he feared. And still I stayed.”

I couldn’t breathe properly.

I felt like I had in the last battle, standing over a body I didn’t want to recognize, waiting for it to move.

“Why are you telling me now?” I asked.

“Because I’m running out of time,” Regulus said. “And I don’t want to leave the world with him still inside me.”

“There has to be a way,” I said. “We can extract it, contain it. You don’t have to-”

“I do,” he said. “I chose this. You think I didn’t know the cost?”

“You don’t get to martyr yourself.”

“I’m not a martyr,” he said. “I’m the weapon that never got fired.”

“And now you want me to pull the trigger.”

He looked at me for a long time. His face unreadable. Tired. Open.

“I want you to decide what happens to me,” he said.
“I can’t.”

“You already did. Years ago.”

I flinched.

He softened. “James.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t make me hold this.”

“I’ve held it for ten years.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“No,” he said. “But you needed me to.”

The room changed then. Not visually. But in sensation. Like it was listening. Like it was closing in.
Regulus pushed the stone across the table. I didn’t take it.

“I want you to remember something,” he said. “The night after the first time we kissed. You asked me if I could ever leave all of it… the family, the cause, the masks.”

“I remember.”

“And I said yes.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “But you didn’t.”

“I was afraid,” he said. “And so were you.”
We sat with that.

“You said there were three things in the letter,” I said.

“There were.”

“But the third thing wasn’t that you loved me.”

He blinked.

“It was that you hoped I’d never forget.”

He nodded.

“But I did,” I said. “I forgot what you sounded like when you were honest.”

Regulus looked away. “I never expected you to remember that part of me.”

“You’re wrong.”

He looked up. The silence between us was no longer an absence. It was a shape. A decision waiting.

“I can’t destroy you,” I said. “Not like this.”

“I know.”

“Then what?”

His eyes were wet. Not tearful, just glassy. As if the surface of him had finally cracked.

“Stay,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Stay in the room,” he said. “Until it’s done. I don’t want to be alone when I go.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“I am.”

He stood slowly. His cuffs unlatched. I hadn’t noticed when.

The room responded to him now, its attention shifting. Its light dimming. The temperature dropped by degrees.

Regulus looked at me.

“You told me once,” he said, “that love wasn’t about possession. That it was about presence.”

“I was twenty,” I said.

“You were right.”

The room had become a mausoleum of memories, each corner echoing with the ghosts of laughter and whispered confessions. The air was thick, not with tension, but with the heavy stillness that precedes an irrevocable change.

Regulus stood by the window, his silhouette etched against the pale morning light. The cuffs that once bound him lay discarded on the floor, symbols of a freedom that came too late.

“It’s time,” he said, his voice barely audible, yet it resonated with a finality that left no room for argument.

I wanted to protest, to find a loophole in the cruel logic that dictated his fate. But words failed me, choked by the lump in my throat and the weight of impending loss.

He turned to face me, a faint smile playing on his lips. “Don’t look so tragic, Jamie. This isn’t your fault. No time to be a hero.”

“Isn’t it?” I managed to whisper, the guilt gnawing at my insides.

He crossed the room, each step deliberate, as if savoring the last moments of corporeal existence. Reaching out, he took my hand, his touch warm and grounding.

“Remember the lake?” he asked, eyes searching mine.

I nodded, memories flooding back—the sun-dappled water, our laughter echoing across the stillness, the stolen kisses beneath the willow tree.

“That’s how I want you to remember me,” he said.
“Not like this.”

Tears blurred my vision as I pulled him into an embrace, holding on as if my grip could anchor him to this world.

“I love you,” I whispered, the words a balm and a curse.

He pulled back slightly, cupping my face in his hands. “And I, you. Always.”

With a final kiss, he stepped away, positioning himself in the center of the room. The air grew colder, the light dimmer, as if the world itself was mourning.

He walked to the center of the room, the stone still between us. I followed, each step heavier than the last.

“Tell me what to do,” I said.

He turned to face me, the faintest smile on his lips. “Just be here.”

The air thickened, the walls pulsing with an energy I couldn’t name. Regulus closed his eyes, his body trembling.

“I’m scared,” he admitted. I heard a sob emanate from my body.

I reached out, taking his hand. “I know.”

He squeezed my hand, then let go. “Thank you.”

He closed his eyes, a serene expression settling on his face. A soft glow emanated from within, growing brighter until it was blinding. I shielded my eyes, heart pounding.

Then, silence.

When I dared to look, he was gone. Only the faint scent of his cologne lingered, a cruel reminder of what was lost.

I sank to the floor, the weight of grief pressing down, suffocating. The room, once a sanctuary, now felt hollow, a shell of its former self.

Outside, the world continued, oblivious to the tragedy that had unfolded within these walls. But for me, time had stopped.

On the table was a single note, in a hand I knew better than my own:

Letter from Regulus Arcturus Black to James Potter. Never delivered.

Jamie,

If you’re reading this, then I’m either dead or something close enough to not matter.

This is not a confession. Confessions require absolution, and I’m not arrogant enough to think I’ve earned that from you. It’s just ac record, because the worst parts of love are the ones we never say aloud.

There are three things I need you to know.

First: I didn’t do this to be remembered. I know the world will forget me, and maybe it should. What I did wasn’t brave. It was necessary. Cowardice taught me survival. But loving you made me want something more than to just survive. I didn’t want your name on a stone beside mine.

And so I did something irreversible.

Second: I forgive you. Not because you asked me to. You never asked me for anything, not really. You gave me half-promises and whole silences, and I drank them like a fine wine. I forgive you for leaving without looking back. For loving me with hands you kept hidden in your pockets. For marrying someone safe. I forgive you for loving me quietly, and then walking away loudly.

I forgive you, because if you’d stayed, I would’ve never let you go. And that would have been worse.
But I won’t lie to you. There were nights I hated you for it. I hated you in the way that only someone who knows your voice from memory can hate. I hated you like an unfinished sentence. And still, I would have been yours. Maybe in every other lifetime we are.

Third – and this is the only part that matters really: I hope you never forget what we were.

Not the war-stained, half-shadowed version.

The real one.

The one where you called me yours without speaking.

The one where I kissed your pulse and felt it falter.

The one where you didn’t flinch when I said your name like a prayer.

If you must lie about me, let it be that I was brave. If you must forget me, then let it happen slowly. Let it take years. I hope it aches.

But if you remember. Then remember everything. Remember that I loved you when I wasn’t supposed to. Remember that I died with your name in my mouth. Remember that no one else ever saw me the way you did.

There’s no epilogue to this story. Not redemption. No reward or glory.

Only this: I chose you. Even when you didn’t chose me. I still chose you now.

I hope you live. But I hope, selfishly, that there is a part of you that never stops looking for me in the dark.

All my life,

All my ruin,

All my love.

I love you.

- R.A.B.

(And for you: Reggie. Always.)

[FINAL NOTE IN MINISTRY FILE]
Subject: Black, Regulus A
Status: Vanished
Final Contact: James Potter
Outcome: Unclassifiable.

Chapter Text

The letter was still warm in my pocket when I left the Ministry. Not because of magic. Because of him. Because his hands had held it, and now mine did, and there was something in the transfer that didn’t cool.

I walked. Not out of choice. Because walking was the only thing left when the air inside your chest wasn’t yours anymore.

I didn’t take the lift. Couldn’t stand the mirrored walls. Couldn’t face the fragments of myself, reflecting back in strips of suit fabric and grief.

So I took the stairs. Eleven flights. Each one slower than the last, like I was trying to outrun the thing in my pocket without actually running.

My hand brushed the note twice. Maybe three times. Just checking it was still there. It was. Of course it was. The universe wasn’t that merciful.

Outside, the air pressed down like it was trying to bury me. London at night. Pavement slick with the kind of rain that never properly falls. Just hangs in the air, waiting.

A streetlamp flickered as I passed. I told myself it was coincidence. I told myself a lot of things.

I don’t remember the walk home.

I remember my shoes hitting the curb wrong once. An old pain in my ankle flared up. The same one from Quidditch, years ago. I laughed under my breath because it was funny, in a cruel sort of way, that my body still remembered that, but couldn’t forget this.

I had Regulus’s letter in my pocket. And the last words he’d said to me in my head. And the ache of it all in my lungs.

When I got home, the flat felt wrong.

Too still.

The kind of still that comes after battle, when you walk back into a room and realize the ghosts got there first.

Furniture where I left it. Whisky bottle on the kitchen counter. Sirius’s jacket over the back of the couch from three days ago because he never bothered to take it home anymore.

I stood in the doorway too long.

Door still open behind me. Rain clinging to my coat.

I thought about lighting the fireplace. About making tea. About taking the letter out and reading it again just to make sure it was real.

But I didn’t do any of that.

Instead, I sat down on the couch, leaned my head back, and closed my eyes.

My hand found my pocket. The small one inside my jeans. The useless one no one uses.

I slid the letter in there. Safe, I told myself. I’ll lock it away later. But the thing is… Later never comes when you’re grieving.

I don’t know when I lost it.

Somewhere between sitting and standing. Between deciding whether to drink or not drink.

Maybe between the first shot of firewhisky and the fourth.

Maybe between wiping my face with the sleeve of my jumper and realizing I was shaking.

But the letter went missing. Of course it did. It had to. That was how these things worked.

Sirius let himself in the next morning. Didn’t knock. He never did anymore. We were long past knocking.

I heard the front door creak, the familiar scrape of his boots against the floor. A cough. The jingle of the keys he kept in his pocket even though he never needed them.

“James?”

I stayed still. Breathing like something wounded. My throat tasted like copper and iron. I heard him in the kitchen. Opening cabinets, looking for coffee he wouldn’t find.

Then the living room.

Then…

“What the fuck is this?”

His voice sliced through the air. I sat up too fast. My stomach rolled. My vision narrowed to a tunnel.

In his hand… my letter.

No. His letter.

Regulus’s.

Sirius’s face was a shade I hadn’t seen before. Pale, but not soft. More like stone before it breaks.

“I found this,” he said.

His voice was tight. Controlled. Dangerous.

“In your flat. On the floor.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“I thought it was junk mail,” he said, waving the paper like it was nothing. “Until I saw the handwriting.”

His hand shook. Not much. Just enough.

“James.” His eyes locked onto mine. “What the fuck is this.”

My throat clicked when I swallowed.

I thought about lying.

Some instinct still wanted to. Reflex, maybe. From all those years we spent building walls over things too painful to say out loud.

But Sirius wasn’t stupid. And I wasn’t cruel. So I didn’t lie. I just sat there. Silent. While he read.

His lips moved over the words, silently. I watched them. I watched his mouth tighten when he hit the parts he couldn’t process. His eyebrows drew together. Then up. Then down again. Like a man trying to do a puzzle without the box.

“This says…” His voice cracked. His eyes flicked up to mine. “This says Regulus wasn’t dead.”

I said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he barked a laugh. It wasn’t funny. “Is this some… some leftover prank I wasn’t in on?”

His hands were white-knuckled around the paper.

“Sirius”

“This says he was alive.” His voice got thin on the last word. Thin like thread about to snap

“I don’t…” His breath hitched. “I don’t understand.”

He sat down hard in the chair across from me. The letter crinkled in his grip.

“He died,” Sirius whispered. “He died in the cave. He died, James. You told me he died.”

“He did.”

“No.” His eyes flashed. “No, don’t you fucking do that.”

I flinched.

“Don’t play semantics with me. Don’t do the Ministry word games, not with me. He died, and now you’re telling me he didn’t?”

“He died again,” I said quietly.

That was the truth.

That was the worst part.

Sirius shook his head. His hair fell into his face.

“You knew.”

His voice wasn’t loud. It was worse than loud. It was soft.

“You’ve known for a week.”

I nodded.

“And you didn’t tell me.”

I looked at the floor. At my hands. At anything except his face.

“I couldn’t.”

He laughed. Sharp. Cruel.

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

I swallowed.

“He asked me not to.”

“Oh, well then,” Sirius snapped. “By all means. Let’s keep secrets for the dead.”

The letter crumpled in his fist, but he didn’t rip it.

Some part of him still couldn’t.

“He says…” Sirius’s throat worked. “He says he loved you.”

“I know.”

His eyes went flat.

“And you?”

“Yes.”

The answer landed between us like a curse. The silence after that wasn’t empty. It was so full it nearly broke the walls of the room.

Sirius leaned back. His hand covered his mouth. His chest rose, fell, rose again like breathing had turned into math.

“I hated him,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“I hated him for leaving.”

“I know.”

“I thought he died a coward.”

I looked at the floor.

“He didn’t.”

“No.”

Sirius’s laugh was sharp and wrong. “No, apparently not. Apparently he was saving the world behind my back.”

I stayed still. I let him unravel. He deserved that much.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he whispered.

“Because you’d hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You should.”

“I don’t.”

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“I just…” His voice cracked. “I don’t know what to do with this.”

“Me neither.”

We sat there. Breathing.

“He died again,” Sirius said, softer this time. “Didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And you let him.”

“No.” My voice broke. “I held his hand.”

The letter rustled as Sirius folded it.

He stared at the crease like it held the answer to something.

“He loved you,” he said again, like maybe saying it twice would make it hurt less.

“I loved him.”

Sirius’s eyes went glassy.

The letter sat between us like it was still bleeding. Neither of us touched it.

Sirius’s fingers hovered, twitching, like he wanted to pick it up again. Like he wanted to tear it or set it on fire. Or maybe fold it one more time into something small enough to swallow.

His mouth opened once. Closed again. His jaw clenched so hard I heard it click.

“Since when?”

His voice came from somewhere low. Somewhere scraped out.

I swallowed, but my throat didn’t work right.

“Sirius”

“No.” His hand lifted, palm out, shaking. “Since when, James.”

My chest stuttered.

“The Black Lake.”

I don’t know why I said it that way.

Maybe because saying sixth year sounded like a memory. And the Black Lake sounded like a sin.

Sirius blinked at me. His face flickered; confusion first, then recognition.

His lips parted.

“No.”

I nodded.

“Yeah.”

His hands gripped the edge of the couch cushion, hard. White-knuckled.

“Sixth year?”

“Yeah.”

“The night…” His voice broke. “The night you told me you were out with Evans?”

I looked at the floor. My stomach felt like it had been cut open and left there.

Sirius barked a sound that wasn’t a laugh.

“Oh my god.”

His chest rose, fell, rose again.

The air between us went heavier. Like the ceiling had come down a few inches.

“Merlin, James.”

His voice wasn’t angry anymore. It was worse. It was soft.

I tried to find my hands. To make them do something normal. Rest on my knees. Fold together. But they kept twitching.

“Don’t do that,” he whispered.

“Do what?”

“Sit there like a fucking corpse.”

My mouth opened. No words came out.

“I need you to be alive for this.”

His eyes found mine and locked there.

“Tell me the rest.”

“I don’t—”

“Tell me.”

So I did. I told him about sixth year. About the first time it happened. Under the trees near the lake. The moon too high. The grass too cold. About Reg’s mouth, shaking against mine, and how we swore it wouldn’t happen again. How it did anyway. About the quiet parts. The hidden parts. The everything parts.

The nights behind closed curtains in the dormitory. The bruises on my neck I lied about. The fights we had. About family. About the war. About the fact that it would end us before we could end it.

Sirius’s face stayed still through all of it. Too still. Only his eyes moved. Flicked left, flicked right, like he was watching ghosts on the walls.

“We broke it off,” I said.

“When?”

“Seventh year.”

“Why?”

I laughed, sharp and wrong.

“You know why.”

His throat worked.

“For the cause.”

“No.”

“For your image, then.”

“No.”

He looked at me.

The kind of look that peels your skin back.

“Then why?”

“Because we were scared.”

The words landed between us. Heavy. True. Brutal. Final.

“We hated each other after that,” I whispered.

His lips twitched. His jaw locked.

“No,” he said, voice rough. “You didn’t.”

I swallowed hard.

“No,” I agreed. “Probably not.”

The walls of the flat pressed in. The rain outside got heavier. Not falling, still. Just thick in the air. Like it was waiting for something to break.

“We met up a few times after that.”

“When?”

“London. Twice.”

Sirius’s hand curled into a fist. “And Glasgow.”

His breath hitched. “The night before you proposed to Lily.”

I nodded. “I never wanted it to end like that.”

“Well,” his voice cracked, “it did.”

My eyes burned, but I didn’t cry. Not because I was brave. Because there wasn’t anything left to cry with.

“He told me to hate him.”

“What?”

“Reg. He said… he said it would be easier if I hated him.”

Sirius’s eyes went sharp. Like glass about to break.

“And did you?”

I shook my head. “No.”

His mouth opened. Closed. The clock ticked louder.

Somewhere outside, a car splashed through a puddle, and the sound of it felt unfair. Like the world had no right to keep going.

“I loved him, Sirius.” My voice came out cracked. Like it had rust on it. “I loved him.”

Sirius’s throat clicked.

His hand dragged over his face. His hair stuck to his palm, damp with sweat.

“I don’t know what to do with that.”

“Me neither.”

His eyes flicked to the letter again. Then back to me.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” His voice was hoarse. “Why you?”

I looked at my knees. At the line of my jeans where my hands had been fisted too tight.

“Because I was the one who loved him back.”

That landed like a blade. Right under the ribs. Sirius flinched. I did too.

“He loved you more,” Sirius whispered. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t bitter. It was just true. And the truth sits heavier than any spell I’ve ever learned.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Sirius shook his head. “No you’re not.”

I let out a breath that felt like drowning.

“No,” I agreed. “I’m not. He’s the only thing I’ve ever been selfish about I think.”

That seemed to give Sirius pause. The rain started to fall properly now. It hit the windows in long streaks, like the sky had finally given up.

“He died again,” Sirius whispered.

“Yeah.”

“You let him.”

“No.” I swallowed hard.“I held his hand.”

His mouth twitched like he wanted to scream but didn’t know how.

“Ten fucking years, James.”

“I know.”

“He could’ve come back.”

“He thought he was keeping us safe.”

“I don’t give a shit about that.”

“I know.”

Sirius stood. Paced once. His boots left wet marks on the floor where he’d walked through the door too fast this morning. He stopped by the window. Pressed his forehead to the glass.

“I thought I hated him.”

“I know.”

“I thought he was a coward.”

“He wasn’t.”

“No.”

The sound he made then wasn’t a word. It was a break. Something raw and human and shattered.

“I don’t know how to forgive him for this.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t know how to forgive you either.”

“I know.”

He leaned his head harder against the glass. The rain streaked down outside. So did his breath, fogging up the pane.

“I should hate you,” he whispered.

“I know.”

“But I don’t.”

His voice cracked wide open on the last word. And for the first time since the war ended, I felt like maybe we hadn’t survived at all. Not really. Not the parts that mattered.

“I think there is a part of me that is glad someone loved him. That he knew what that was.”

Sirius didn’t move from the window.

I watched his breath fog the glass, fade, fog again. A rhythm older than war. Older than loss. Just the body, remembering to stay.

His reflection blurred there. Mouth tight. Eyes hollow. Hair falling forward like it always did when he was about to break but wouldn’t let himself.

“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be now,” he said, so quietly I almost missed it.

I let the words sit.Didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Some things don’t get an answer.

The room was too small for what was happening in it. For the ghosts pressing close. For the pieces of us left on the floor.

I leaned forward. My elbows on my knees. My palms open, useless.

“Sirius.”

He didn’t look at me.

The rain streaked silver down the windowpane.

“I never stopped loving him,” I said. My voice came out thin. Like something cracked open. “I never stopped hating him either.”

Sirius’s reflection blinked in the glass. The rain blurred his face until it wasn’t a face anymore. Just outlines. Just light and dark.

“I get that,” he whispered. And I knew he did. Because that’s what grief is. A hundred things all at once, and none of them cancel the others out.

Love and hate. Memory and silence. The part of you that wants to scream, and the part of you that already has.

The clock ticked.

Somewhere beneath the floorboards, the pipes sighed. The city outside went on pretending it was ordinary.

“I don’t want to hate you,” Sirius said.

“I know.”

“But I think I might. Later.”

“Okay.”

His hand pressed harder to the window.

“I wish you’d told me.”

“I know.”

“I wish he had.”

“I know.”

The silence came back again. Not empty this time. Full of every version of us that never made it out of that war.

I let my eyes fall shut.

The rain kept falling.

Inside my chest, something ached the way old scars do when the weather changes.

“I don’t know how to live with this,” Sirius whispered.

Neither did I.

But we would.

That was the trick, wasn’t it?

You live with it anyway.

Not because you’re brave.

Because you’re still here.

The letter stayed between us.

A soft ruin.

A last word no one knew how to say.

And somewhere in the stillness, the war ended again.

Quieter this time.

But not softer.

Never softer.