Chapter Text
When you emerge from a fight, people often carry scars that run deep, wounds that are bandaged and tucked away, bruises that never leave.
Regulus has seen people come out from fights—he’s seen Sirius emerging from a fair handful of them, with split lips marring his chin with crimson, with dark stains around his eyes that cradle him like wildflower bruises. When Sirius emerges from his fights, he rises like a firebird from ashes, bearing his wounds with reckless pride. Even with battered knuckles, aching lungs, wild gazes, Sirius Black can leave a fight he physically lost, looking like he’s the victor.
Regulus Black isn’t like that.
He doesn’t get into messy fights, with flying fists that rarely land and crude drawls spilled from ferocious mouths. The fights Regulus gets into are within—nobody else can see them, because nobody really sees Regulus.
The battles he enters are ones with sharp edges, jagged and torturous, and they’ve engrained into his mind since the night Sirius ran away. Since the night he was no longer the second option, but became the only hope. Those kind of battles are battles of the mind—trying to spin tyranny and lies upon withered parchments, spoken in hushed whispers from shadowed alleyways and crowded streets that he goes unnoticed in.
In a twisted way, Regulus wins fights against everyone but himself.
Because he really is his own enemy.
“You’re holding back,” he remembers his father telling him, steady and dangerous, not even looking up at him over the dining room table. “You’re holding yourself back, Regulus. Why?”
His father never yelled. There was no need to. Orion Black got what he wanted without needing to raise his voice, or cause a scene, or being the centre of everyone’s thoughts. He remained in the shadows, but only because he wanted to.
“I don’t know,” Regulus responds with, hating the way his voice wavers, hating the way he can’t tear his eyes away from his father, hating the way he can’t even deny the accusation. Because he always holds back, he’s never enough—never at the place he should be, even though he doesn’t know where that might be. His life is like reading a map blind, trying to trace the roads and pathways with only the tip of his finger. It’s so easy to get lost.
Even when the answer is returned, hollow and empty, his father doesn’t look up.
He acts as though gammon is more interesting than his son. Sometimes Regulus believes his parents forgot they still had a son after Sirius left—like they were too busy mourning their best to remember they still had one, who was still breathing, still waiting to be called upon, still ready to tear himself apart if they asked him to.
“Time to figure it out, boy,” Orion Black had responded with, and the command still echoes in Regulus’ ears today.
The War left them all struggling to stay afloat.
It felt like, for the first times in all their silver-lined lives, the Black family were just a handful of survivors. They weren’t victors, they weren’t glorious—the end of the war fell away, and it stripped them of their dented armour, their jagged masks, and left them naked. Exposed, to all who looked on in that moment, and stared at the piles of torn minds and tired hearts. For the first time, the Blacks were simply human. Nothing more than that.
The War left Regulus with an inked mark on his forearm, that remained covered beneath long sleeves and away from prying eyes. It also left him with a tendency to flinch at loud noises, and go achingly long nights living off of alcohol and cigarettes, trying to drown everything out. It left him with fears he’d never felt before, and more mental fights than he could count.
It’s the fights within his head that are the most brutal to him. The cruelest.
They leave him staring at his reflection in shattered mirrors, gazing at a face he can no longer recognise, hanging in jagged derelicts. He looks at himself after a bender, a long night of nothing but booze and filling his lungs with ash, and thinks it’s a face that only the lovely mothers on telly could love.
But Regulus’ mother isn’t much of a mother at all, so who’s going to love him now?
It seems that Regulus Black is lost within eternity. He’s a forever person, meaning that he can wish he’s six feet under, and he can wish that he’s only temporary in his world, and he can wish that people won’t flinch when they hear his name, but they always will. Because he’s forever. He’s rotting, decaying, wilting like a flower—but then again, he doesn’t think he ever bloomed. And if he did, it was far from beautiful.
Regulus Black will forever be Regulus Black. His name will always be etched down in history books, twisted with death and cruelty and the unknown. Nobody will ever see beyond that, because he’s Regulus Black forever. The aftermath of the War gives him plenty of time to realise that.
And in trying so hard to be happy, to forget the things his hands have done, to beg for forgiveness for who he is (a sin), he feels its so easy to forget himself along the way.
When Regulus blinks himself awake, the room feels like a never-ending blur. It’s spinning and taunting him, and it takes him too long to blink and blink some more, and then finally realise where he is. When he does, he releases a low, strangled groan, and presses his face further into the fabric of the dusty old sofa.
“Mornin’, you ray of sunshine,” Dorcas sings to him from somewhere far away, or perhaps somewhere very close—is it even Dorcas? His head hurts. He can’t tell up from down anymore. He closes his eyes. “Rise and shine, Black. Rise and shine.”
It’s definitely Dorcas.
“Fuck you, Meadowes,” he manages to grumble, and he wonders for a second if it was intelligible, given the way he grumbles it into the itchy sofa. His own voice seems to dig into his skull, pressing in all the wrong places. Everything still seems to spin, even when his eyes are closed, even when he wants everything to slow down.
“Love you too,” she tells him flatly, and Christ, she’s in the same room as him.
Mustering up as much strength and willpower as he can gather in that moment, Regulus tilts his head up, squinting against the spillage of sunlight that weaves the room into a golden haze. He blinks once, twice, and Dorcas swims into focus—she’s sat on the floor by the coffee table, and they’re in their living room. She’s clutching a steaming mug of black coffee, and it’s suddenly too much for him, the scent clutching at his mind and wringing out coherent thoughts.
Once again, he releases a low and strangled groan, curses the world for the existence of hangovers, and presses his face back into the cushion.
“Awh, come on, Reggie—aren’t you glad to see me? Me and my beautiful face?”
“Don’t call me that,” he reminds her, but the fierceness of the reminder is probably lost in the way his words get all tangled and slur together, and the way he’s still on the receiving end of a face full of dusty sofa. Almost as an afterthought, he mumbles, “Prick.”
All he receives is a snort.
There’s a pause then, in which Regulus realises a record is playing, spinning away on the vinyl player. It’s deep and strumming, rebounding through his skull. A Bowie record, then. They have plenty because he’s Pandora’s favourite, and she (almost passive aggressively) buys them Bowie records for every birthday and every Christmas, just so she can play them when she comes round. But really, they all pretend to have a distaste for Bowie. After all, the man’s a musical genius.
Regulus is only opposed to Bowie because it reminds him of his good-for-nothing brother, which is why he releases a third, louder groan.
“Is that all you’re communicating with? Was that a way of you agreeing? That I have a beautiful face?”
“No,” is all Regulus can muster.
“No? Was it an I love you then?”
“No. I hate you,” he informs her, still ensuring his eyes are kept tightly shut as he starts to lift himself off the sofa. His arms feel weak and shaky as he pushes his torso up, trying to stretch his clumsy limbs out, trying to shake his legs so he regains motion in them—his body hardly feels like his own in this morning light. When he stares down at his hands, they look so unfamiliar, tethered to a body that isn’t his to torment.
Dorcas’ voice is warm, “Hate’s a strong word, darling. You really mean that?”
“I don’t—” Regulus begins, then pauses, looking down at himself and realising something rather crucial, “—say things I don’t mean. Where’s my shirt?”
“Oh, yeah, my bad,” Dorcas tells him, sounding nowhere near sorry and seems to be enjoying herself far too much as she sips at her coffee. He blinks over at her, hair tickling his forehead, and he’s feeling a bit chilly now that he’s realised he’s half-naked. If his parents could see him now. “There was an incident.”
“What kind of incident?”
“Well, it involved me, a loose floorboard, and a glass full of firewhiskey and lemonade. Quite an unfortunate incident, really. Oh, and you, of course. Your shirt got rather damp, but you announced that it didn’t matter, because you were hot anyway, and so you—”
“Took it off,” Regulus finished, with yet another groan, squeezing his eyes shut as he was drowned in a flood of blurry memories.
Luminescent, neon lights; too many drinks; too many beautiful, happy strangers; too many beautiful, happy friends; swathing music; Pandora guarding the record player; too much alcohol; too many cigarettes; too much alcohol; too many cigarettes.
“Christ,” he breathes out, and decides to try and move into a sitting position.
It’s not an easy task, trying to gather his unruly limbs and sit up on the sofa, that offers nothing but grating creaks as he moves. He gathers up his knees and drags them to his chest, hating the way it makes him feel like a little kid again, and hating the way he wishes he still was one. Maybe then things would be different. He blinks over at Dorcas, takes in the way she’s looking at him, too fond and too amused, and even though she’s probably laughing internally at his state, it warms something in his chest.
Dorcas Meadowes has been his roommate since he moved back to London, a year after the War ended.
It’s been two years now, and he hasn’t looked back.
She’s been all he’s needed—and there once was a time when Regulus Black thought he never would’ve needed someone in his lifetime. But then Dorcas Meadowes came along, alongside all the other fuck-ups she’d hoarded from their school days. She’d sent him a letter, with words of a flat she was looking at in Covent Garden, and notes from Barty and Evan and Pandora, who had enthusiastically sent their love.
To love is a foolish thing. It consumes you entirely, and leaves you barren and bare.
So he never sends I love you back in his letter, a part of him afraid of leaving those words to be immortal, stained upon paper that eyes may look upon and condemn him for.
Regulus remembers reading her letter under a flickering streetlight in Paris, cigarette clutched between his teeth, and gnawed lips sucked down on it hardest when tears began to sting, burning away behind his eyes. We love you, Regulus, we miss you. The words had clutched his heart in a grip that bruised. It was a punishment, the way the smoke had stained his mouth, his lungs, and everything else—within a few hours, he had sent a letter back, accepting.
She took him in with no further questions, not asking about why he had disappeared for the past year, nor why he hadn’t contacted them, nor why he didn’t use magic much anymore, nor why he would wake up in the middle of the night, cries dying in the back if his throat like a sick animal, bloodied and useless.
Dorcas is a God amongst men, she truly is.
So, as the angelic being she is, she simply smiles crookedly at him that hungover morning, and leaves to get him a glass of water.
“I lied to you. I don’t hate you,” Regulus rasps at her from his perch on the sofa, when she returns, soft-footed and soft-smiled, handing him a glass of water to soothe the sharp dryness of his throat. Any other day, he would’ve cursed her and her infuriating resistance to hangovers, but today it’s a blessing more than anything else.
In that warm, quiet way, Dorcas smiles at him, “I know you don’t. You love me. Steady on with that—you drink too fast and it’ll come right back up again.”
There’s a stretch of silence, and Regulus sits with his hands cupped around the glass, Dorcas sat back on the floor with her mug of coffee.
It has a corny message on the side.
Keep calm and be happy.
It’s such a ridiculously Pandora thing to say that Regulus doesn’t have to wrack his memory to know that she was the one who bought them it. She probably bought the whole group one—trying to boost morale had been her best hobby during the War, and even if she hadn’t been utterly successful, she still gives it her best shot now, too.
“I love nobody,” Regulus lies through a haze of distorted fondness, thinking of his friends. Dorcas turns to look at him, and her eyebrows raise slightly—she doesn’t believe him. “I’m cold-hearted, loveless, pure evil from the very core.”
“Regulus Black,” Dorcas says to him, smiling with only her eyes, skin crinkling at the edges, light dancing in her dark irises. “You haven’t a shred of evil in you. Merlin himself had more evil stuffed in his pinky finger than you do in your entire body. So shut up and sip your tepid water like a gentleman.”
A pause. “Tepid water?”
“The cold tap’s gone again. Properly gone this time—it was only letting a trickle out.”
“Should I ring the plumber?”
“Nah,” Dorcas shakes her head, lifting the rim of the mug to her lips. “We’ll get Barty to take a look.”
Regulus feels his lips twitch, and for a brief moment he can forget about the crushing weight sat upon his shoulders, a weight that he can’t place. He can forget about the mark sat on his arm, that feels like an open wound, despite it being older than his freedom—it rests as a cruel part of him now, and will forever. He can try to ignore the constant pulse of a long-lost ache in his chest, that could be one of many things.
Loneliness? Longing for things he’ll never have? Missing things he never had?
Or just emptiness? A void?
Instead of wondering, he too lifts his drink to his lips and smiles into his strange, tepid water. “Ah. Sweet joy.”