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“I hate you.”
Those were the last words Sirius had spoken to his parents.
Three tiny words.
Only one off from the complete opposite.
Regulus had stood above them on the stairwell, listening silently.
Too afraid to move or speak.
Too afraid to do anything but motionlessly watch his family fall apart.
After saying those three tiny words Sirius had packed his bags and he had been gone. Just vanished.
Almost like he had never been there in the first place.
And maybe he hadn’t been, Regulus sometimes thought.
“He’ll be back,” Orion Black had promised absentmindedly when Regulus had asked about it during dinner the following evening.
But he hadn’t been.
And the Blacks adjusted.
They didn’t speak his name.
They didn’t open the door to his room.
They didn’t ask Regulus about seeing him at school.
Almost like he had never been there in the first place.
But Regulus wasn’t as adept at changing his reality as his parents were.
Self-deception didn’t come to him quite as easily as it did to Orion and Walburga Black.
Sometimes at night, he would sit in his room. He would look at the muggle posters, the red and gold Gryffindor decorations and think about his brother.
His red and gold lion of a brother, who had been so fittingly named for a star.
Sometimes Regulus would even whisper his name.
“Sirius.”
Then he would immediately scoff at this display of childish foolishness.
He didn’t know how to feel about Sirius. About his parents. About any of it.
Sirius was a blood traitor after all.
But he was also his brother.
How could one person be the epitome of both everything one stood for as well as everything one was against?
Sirius was his brother. His flesh and blood.
Family above all else. Blood above all else. Wasn’t that the dogma all pure-blood families lived by?
Then why were they always so quick to cast out one of their own? And weren’t they “Blood traitors” just the same as muggle sympathizers were for doing so?
He shook his head trying to rid himself of these thoughts. Thoughts that would get him killed or worse.
Sirius still had a hold over him, Regulus thought as he quietly made his way out of the room. Simply being in this room made him question things. Things that shouldn’t be questioned.