Chapter Text
The first two words that come to Regulus’ mind are ‘blue’ and ‘boring’, which match his expectations of the small town; he wanted boring and he can work with blue. He struggles to get off the train while carrying his suitcases, not because they’re heavy but because of the gap between the tracks and the platform, added to the poor state of the floor. An old lady helps by holding the back of the suitcase and Regulus smiles in gratitude.
“Thank you.” He ends up following the woman across the lane; the signs are blurry on his vision and he trusts her to know the exit better than him.
A big clock hangs over the vaulted wall that leads to the street. It marks just a little over twelve and Regulus doesn’t pay much attention to it at first. He doesn’t realise until he’s halfway through the street, in fact, when his mind ejects most of the noise and smoke it caught on the station. But then he does realise: the big clock is wrong; according to his wristwatch, it is almost two in the afternoon. Regulus can think of a couple issues that a broken clock can cause in a train station, but it is someone else’s job to care about that. Do they even have a watchmaker in town? It seems like the kind of place where a single shop owned by a family of legacy has monopolised most market sectors: from baking their daily breakfast’s bread to unclogging toilets and drains.
His suitcases ricochet on the grain road and Regulus has half the mind to carry them on his arms not to draw attention to himself, he can sense the vibrations of each wheel hitting the rocky ground and the gossip eyes shot in his direction from every balcony. He can guess people there are used to visitors from neighbouring towns in the search of the sea, but those don’t carry a suitcase on each arm and dress in long trousers. It is making him hot to the point of sweat strings running down his spine, Regulus has to admit, but in his defence it was cold when he left his apartment in the morning back in the city.
The walk to his summer residence isn’t supposed to be long, but Regulus has accumulated fatigue of at least three days over his shoulders that stretches it to a whole morning of jogging. He distracts his mind with curious eyes, taking in the colour palette of the village. Most shutters are tea green and aquamarine, helping to the seaside magic that emanates from the very sky, clear, pure blue sky scattered with seagulls and swallows. A couple of yellow or red shutters break the pattern and, in Regulus’ opinion, they are what seal the landscape. The exceptions to the norm that give the village life, raciness.
By the time he gets to the street down the line of the beach, Regulus is done with tea greens and aquamarines, he would give everything for the coldness of grey and white of his apartment’s ceiling. He pulls the suitcases up the stairs and mangles with his pocket in search of the keys. They got to his hands just a week ago, on the daily mail and with nothing but a short list of basic indications such as no smoking allowed and no pets allowed and no party allowed and no nothing. Regulus guesses they will be easy to follow, given that he has no plan to leave his desk if not to go write at the library or somewhere calm near the sea.
The keys feel slippery between his fingers until he manages to open the door, which falls back against the frame with heaviness so he has to put a foot in between. Holding the door open with his foot, Regulus gets his things inside the entrance and then lets it close behind his back with a solid thud. Inside, the air is not exactly fresh, but Regulus can smell that it hasn’t been closed for too long, for which he is grateful; he still runs to open the two main windows that look to the sea. Once the salt breeze starts to caress his cheeks, Regulus lets his shoulder—and his whole body—plunge.
He walks around the dining room and kitchen, both within a single stance, and then across an arched doorway that leads to a small living room and the entrance where the suitcases wait for him to unpack them. Both these rooms have windows facing the sea, with a beach of rocks in the middle and a pathway that must run down the beach. Finally, he opens a door that reveals his room for the summer, which window looks on the opposite side and so to a floral landscape of trees and tall grass. The bathroom must be the other door that he saw was also closed, but at the sight of an unmade yet comfortable looking bed, Regulus gives up his muscles and falls backwards on it.
His mind calms along with his lungs and the chirping of birds outside compose the perfect lullaby for him to fall asleep.
When Regulus wakes up, the light coming from the window casts a deep orange puddle on the floor and the atmosphere feels somehow heavier as the sun sets down between the branches. He brings a hand over his eyes and slowly stretches himself, feeling the carvings left on his skin by the fabric of his clothes, muscles aching in well-known morning pain. He did throw his shoes off before giving in to Morpheus’ spell, but the seams of his trousers and shirt are deeply drawn on his skin. As he gets up, Regulus gets rid of the rest of clothes, carelessly throwing them across the floor where his shoes must be too, somewhere. On his way to the bathroom, he only keeps his underwear, rubbing at his sides with the palms of his hands.
The water runs cold when Regulus opens the tap and he waits standing on the small rug while he keeps pressing his palms over his skin, the pressure has always helped with his muscle pain. Sometimes it reminds him of times long ago, when he would climb up Sirius’ bed and ask his brother to lay on top of him, arms over arms and legs over legs, like two sea stars overlapping. Most times he ended up falling asleep and he would be alone but perfectly covered when he woke up; Sirius didn’t like sleeping in the same bed as other people, even when she would make an exception for him sometimes. They shared a room, even if it was technically Regulus’ room and Sirius had only his bed there and another room for himself; having their beds together was enough for Regulus.
The water is warm to the point of burning when he wanders back from his mind and he regulates it while taking off his underwear. The shower feels like heaven after all the transports and walking he endured in the morning. He should unpack the necessary to go to bed comfortably that night and then get ready in the morning to go get groceries. He didn’t have breakfast either (it was in his planning to go shopping that afternoon, but he has to acknowledge how ambitious that had been, pushing the inhumanly possible), so he would need to pay a visit to that probably multipurpose store for some pastry. Maybe he’d have time left for a walk along the beach before midday, he refuses to step outside while the sun is right above his head.
Regulus hadn’t think much before getting in the shower (well, he did think, just not the right things), and he finds himself without clean clothes to put on; again, he’s grateful with the owner for being considerate enough to leave a pair of towels near the tub, he expected the house to be less equipped for the price he paid for two months. He still felt the walk of shame after he was dried enough to go grab some clothes from the suitcase.
The day before, he had been a little more realistic with his plannings and so he rearranged the main suitcase to have underwear and his pyjamas on top, marvellous thinking, so he grabs those and goes back to the bathroom to put them on.
It is still hot despite the wind coming through the windows and the sun almost gone, but a comfortable amount of hot. Regulus would be lying if he said he doesn’t like a change of weather, even if he still prefers the rain and coldness of the city. He can do two months of sun, and he’ll enjoy the coldness more once he’s back home. It isn't on his plans to visit the beach to go swimming or tan, he doesn’t see the appeal on spending hours being slowly cooked alive, but if he finds a quiet corner close to the water where he can sit with his notebook and write, it would be a pleasant summer of getting work done without the stress and rottenness of daily traffic noise and crowds of people.
Once he is clean and clothed, he reaches for the poorly packed sandwich he made himself for dinner and sits on the sofa, legs curled to one side, to eat. The house is slowly running out of light and he can hear distant barking of dogs and the sound of crickets. He eats calmly and finds out he doesn’t feel sleepy anymore after the not so short nap of half the day. Regulus decides that’s not a negative, he could start unpacking now or he could try to have some writing done until the exasperation was enough to make him want to go to bed. With the hope that he will get at least half the night of sleep, he takes the latest and reaches for his notebook.
He has been working on that project for almost a year now, and it has been an abstract idea residing in his mind for several years before. After giving the plot numerous surgeries and even attempting to recast the main characters for different versions, all of them failed attempts to get past the block he finds himself in, he decided what wasn’t working properly was not the project but himself. He needed (and wanted) a change of air; or more open air, to be specific. So he contacted his parents to let them know he would be out of town for the summer, and asked his scarce friends to leave him be for a couple of months. Everything is settled and ready for a calm summer of writing in a boring and blue town where the main expectations for social interactions are grocery shopping and a nice old lady at the train station.
A clean, new sheet of paper stares back at him from where he is curled in the sofa, light almost too dim to write comfortably and thoughts as blank as the paper. It is okay, though, a whole night of sleep would also be nice, and he will be more inspired to write tomorrow after a walk downtown.
With that in mind, Regulus gives up the paper and leaves the notebook on the table, stretching his legs deliberately before getting up.
He shoots a glance to both suitcases near the door and quickly tears his eyes away, as if taking them out of his view was the equivalent of actually unpacking. The world keeps testing his patience and skills, it turns out, as he is met with the sight of the still unmade bed back to his room. Defeated, he walks to the entrance and ends up opening the bigger suitcase to pick up the sheets, then walks back to the room and makes the bed in the almost darkness of the night. The moon is not visible from his window, her glow hits the front windows of the house on the opposite side, the same way the sunrise will do in the morning.
Once the bed is made, Regulus falls into it with the same heaviness he did the first time, even if now there isn’t any actual reason behind the tiredness. It won’t be the first time Regulus goes to bed out of boredom and exasperation, he will live; he was already expecting that, too, knowing himself.
The sky seems to take pity on him and decides to brighten his first night in the town. He had thought of this, multiple times, it was one of the reasons he wanted a faraway seaside town, but right now it comes as a surprise to his worn mind: the twinkling of stars outside the window.
With as much quickness as his muscles permit, Regulus sits straight in bed and crawls to the side closer to the window. The foot of the bed touches the wall, a small desk to one side right below it, so he has the plain sight of the sky while sitting cross legged on the bed and resting his elbows on the desk.
His eyes don’t focus properly due to the distance, but he refuses to get up again and grab his glasses, even less to put on contacts. His eyesight is fit enough for him not to need them for most tasks, but after a day of reading signs and the literal change of air he can feel his eyes are tired. Still, the clearness of the sky helps him locate the tiny glittering dots. He scans the patterns and tries to centre his mind around the disposition, as to search for any constellation. The irony or in fact the destiny can be amusing sometimes, as he locates Ursa Major and so, almost automatically, his eyes deviate west to search for Bootes. And there it is, Arcturus beaming on the summer night.
The starry sky has a soothing effect on him, it always had, and his arms deflate over his elbows as his back relaxes arching back. He stares at that single pin of light among all the rest, his own pin of light. He has two, really, since Regulus must be not far from there but lower on the skyline, probably covered by the trees.
It is an ache on his lower back that finally tears his eyes from the sky after what felt like at least half an hour. Regulus doesn’t bother checking the time on his clock, but he crawls back to a sleeping position and stretches his back and shoulders.
The night is warm but not suffocating, wind comes through the window to let him breath the salt air even from the opposite side, along with the calming sound of the swinging of branches. A stubborn cricket breaks the calmness, but Regulus can stand it as he feels sleep come and grab his body, easier than it ever does in the city nights.
The morning welcomes Regulus with the chanting of birds and some scarce cars in the distance. He forgot to set an alarm the day before, but the light coming through his window and the tweeting of an especially insistent bird manage to wake him up before nine in the morning.
He pulls the covers up and doesn’t care to throw them to the end of the bed while stretching arms and legs. The sky already shows a perfect shade of blue, a couple of clouds only adding to its beauty with their equally perfect white. A soft yellowish light squints through the door, coming from the front side of the house, and Regulus waits until his eyes are accustomed to it before getting up.
His body moves with shyness at first, as if he was but a guest in someone else’s house, but it slowly dries off at the sight of his belongings scattered around the place. The sight of the sea right in front of him, barely two hundred metres from the door, is enough to dry the last drop of strangeness, replacing it with a desire of belonging. It hits him now, not the day before, that this is the closest he’s ever been to the waters. He grew up in a city where the river dominated the landscape and the rain was a daily occurrence, and he liked the sight of the river from his window, but this is different. It is more than the water, it is the sense of infinity that gives you looking across it and not seeing an end; the fine line separating sea and sky being the invisible barrier between here and beyond. Regulus has a sudden need to watch the sky fall from the beach, see the moon and stars surging from the water like Aphrodite’s blessings.
The spell is broken by his hungry stomach reclaiming a nonexistent breakfast, so he tears his eyes away from the sea and locks them in the suitcases. Regulus knows he’ll have to unpack, but it will have to wait for now. He pulls some clothes out, throwing some to the floor too, and walks to the bathroom to get dressed, dragging his feet at the prospect of stepping outside under the sun.
By the time he is ready and has checked he hasn’t forgotten anything necessary, the clock is reaching ten in the morning and the sky has become even more blue, if that was possible. This time, he is wearing shorts, if only to fit in among the local people at the bakery and supermarket.
Regulus leaves the house and walks the short stretch of promenade until the main street to the town’s centre. His door is the first on the road to the beach, the smallest one as well as it’s separated into two different properties, but it is bigger than he even needs.
He takes in the small details he can see about the place. Even if he tagged it as mainly blue the day before, now under the morning sun it is easier to pick in the colourfulness of it all. Yellow, red and green are visible in almost every panoramic you take of the city, be it in the natural or domestic plants, house’s decoration or the vehicles and people walking by. Regulus would still say blue is the main colour, since not only the sky but the sea too work as the frame for the landscape that is the town. Little windmills turn to the wind in the rooftop of some houses, others are cheerfully decorated with seashells or chalk paint; the grass of each square or beside the roads is splattered by dots of colours in the form of flowers and Regulus spots a lanky cat bathing in sunlight among the weeds.
Between watching birds or rolling leaves, Regulus finds himself walking into the first bakery he encounters, a friendly looking man behind the desk. He manages through the social interaction with almost naturality, a success, and gets back to the street with a croissant and takeaway coffee. Walking again under the sun, Regulus doesn’t find it as uncomfortable as he thought, it is still hotter than in the city, but the wind coming directly from the sea helps to soothe the heat and the sun doesn’t bite at his skin as much as he expected. It is probably because they’re still at the beginning of July, he doesn’t doubt it will get warmer as the days pass.
He squints his eyes to read a sign indicating the way to the supermarket, less than fifteen minutes from where he is, and he returns to scanning his surroundings. He has already walked past a square with a fountain and flower bouquets but he sees a second one, a park with a small artificial lake in the middle. He can see the pipelines that feed it, but the sight is still pretty, it is framed by a wooden bridge that connects to the other side, a dog park; a similarly wooden cellar stands in the middle of the bridge, right over the water.
As he walks by the park, Regulus notices a small group of people, mostly children but some adults too, seated in the grass. A pair of children have taken a more original seat, though: they are hanging from a crooked tree’s trunk. When he gets closer, Regulus hears one of them talk. Read actually, he realises when he looks closely and sees a book on their hand, which they wave while walking between the children. Regulus doesn’t understand a thing they’re saying.
Curiosity crawls its way to his chest and Regulus takes a turn on the next crosswalk. The park is right in front of an old building and he reaches to read ‘Library’ engraved in the stone of its walls. He tries to walk casually by the grass, stealing glances at the group while the stream of words keeps getting mangled as they cross his ears. When he is close enough, he recognises that they are speaking Spanish.
The person reading aloud doesn’t seem to notice his staring, which is for the better because Regulus may be staring a little too much. They wear half of their hair up, the rest of curls falling not long enough to touch their shoulders; a white shirt open over a cropped shirt and short trousers, legs taking long steps through the children scattered across the grass. They also wear glasses (not that Regulus has remembered to take his before leaving the house).
Once he has set the language, Regulus can guess some of the words they are saying, and from their gestures to the kids he is sure they are telling some kind of children’s story. He loses track of time slightly, lingering by the grass like a marble statue, and he would be embarrassed if he wasn’t so focused on that person’s moves. He will think about this fixation in more depth later, once in the solitude of his room and the concealment of his bed, away from the sunlight and its way of shining bright on people’s secrets and shames.
The person crouches beside a kid that called for them and Regulus turns immediately around when they lift their head in his direction. He starts walking again, crossing the road and taking the way to the supermarket with his head looking straight forward. He does feel embarrassed now, at the idea that he got caught being completely weird and creepy too, being honest. After some minutes walking, the feeling drains away like water running through an open tub and Regulus is left with the image of brown eyes looking at him behind their glasses.
He enters the shop without paying attention to what he came there to do and grabs things as he slowly remembers what he needs. He can’t seem to be able to shake off the picture of that person, walking and gesturing while reading aloud to the kids, and the sound of their voice several metres away from him. Regulus wonders what story they were telling and why it was in a different language; he didn’t think the town was big enough to hold more than a maternity school and maybe primary classes, but it is summer and the course must already be over. It could be a summer course, or kids from a summer camp nearby visiting the town, in which case there is little chance that he will see them again, including their maybe-instructor.
A bottle of juice almost slips through his fingers and Regulus gaps, grabbing it quickly. He stares at the shopping cart and the juice in his hands; he already got one bottle. He forces himself to hide away any thought about the mysterious person and focus on what he is doing. He has felt enough embarrassment for the day and would rather not drop the groceries through the whole store.
He takes longer than he thought at the market, he didn’t account for the time it would take him to find what he wanted in an unknown store, and obviously asking the several assistants he saw walking down the aisles was not an option. Finally, he pays and puts the groceries in two cloth bags, dreading the long walk back home even if it was barely twenty minutes at regular pace.
From the distance, Regulus can already see the empty expanse of grass where the kids were seated less than an hour before. He can’t blame them for leaving, the sun is hitting stronger now, he feels the top of his head warm and dry, and suddenly swimming in the fresh waters in front of his house doesn’t sound so bad. Nevertheless, he knows he will change his mind by the time he makes it to his room.
The pair of brown eyes comes back to his mind as he walks past the park and Regulus lets them in, wondering how they might look if he had the chance to look closer. Again he excuses himself, this time on the heat piercing his head and the boredom of walking home down mostly empty streets. He sees a couple walking their dog by the tree lined street and an old man sitting beside the open door to his house peeling an orange. Not the first one, by the amount of peel on the floor by his feet. Regulus has bought oranges too, maybe he will eat some when he gets home. Maybe that person’s eyes have a glint of orange too, a honeyed colour instead of deep brown.
His door falls heavy against his shoulders when he opens it, which doesn’t fail to annoy him since he has to manoeuvre to get the bags and himself inside while the door fights to kick him out. He never closed the windows, a pleasant breeze running from one side of the house to the other, and while the sun is high in the sky, the sound of open water so close to him adds to the freshness of the atmosphere.
While arranging the groceries, Regulus miraculously remembers to put water on to boil to make himself lunch for later. He plans on eating early, tying up the place right after and grabbing all he needs to write to go somewhere else, hopefully somewhere calm close to the sea.
Regulus forces himself to follow that plan, he cooks and eats and then starts tidying his belongings, leaving his shoes by the door, a plastic bag with supplies in the bathroom and the suitcase with the rest of his clothes in his room. It is probably the hottest hours of the day, but the wind is cold enough to soothe the heat. He hangs and folds clothes to put them in the wardrobe, he doesn't have much, mostly because he doesn’t own many summer clothes. Back to the living room, he unpacks the bits of decorations he wanted to bring with him. His favourite piece is a polaroid of him and Sirius that his mother took of them at their old house, Sirius looking at him while they’re both seated on the bed eating ice-creams. He takes it with him to his bedroom and leaves it in front of the bunch of books he’s piled on the shelf. Then, he grabs one of the books and lies in the bed opening it. Reading counts as working since he is a writer, or at least he likes to tell himself so.
He takes the bookmark off and decides to resume the lecture a couple of pages before to get in the mood. His own notes help him remind himself that reading is, in fact, part of his work project, since he has annotations on the flow of the narration and the tone marks used for dialogues. It has been a while since he has read a book purely for the joy of it, but rather to harvest writing tools and vocabulary.
Time passes quickly and he is in the middle of annotating something when the warble of a bird too close to his window startles him, taking him out of the lecture. He tries to go back into it, but suddenly the room feels too small and his legs ache from the crouched position, so he leaves the book to the side and stretches himself out of bed.
He knows there are several hours left until sunset, but he still takes his notebook, a pencil and a bottle of water and leaves for the beach.
He has to take the same lane he takes to the town centre but in the opposite direction, parallel to the water, and walk past two other houses neighbouring his until he finds a stone staircase down to the beach. A wooden pathway helps him dodge the rock wall that separates it from the line of houses and it ends when the beach becomes a landscape of smaller stones and shells, the only fraction of the floor covered by sand being the couple of metres closest to the water.
Standing at the end of the pathway, Regulus looks in both directions of the beach and only finds what looks like a group of friends hanging out several tens of metres away from him, by the staircase that probably leads to the main road of the town. To the other side, a lone fisherman sits by the water, fishing rod tensed but motionless. He looks down to the land and walks over rocks that tingle under his shoes and pale seashells, but decides to go back to the staircase and sit in one of the first steps. He opens the notebook and, surprisingly, starts to write.
Regulus doesn’t like keeping a diary, mostly because he is bad at it. He always ends up over exaggerating his words for it not to sound boring, and by the time he’s been writing about his life for a couple of days, it starts to sound less and less like his own words, and more like one of his characters’. If he tries to stick with his own life, boring and tasteless, then he’ll find himself in a shallow mood within a few days, finding it difficult to consider anything fun or worth experiencing. He tried turning his diary entries into a writing project, some kind of mémoire, so that he had an excuse to make it literary and pretentious. He also failed at that, but he has some of the texts he came up with hidden among his books.
Now, however, he writes about his day and doesn’t find it too difficult, though he does use big words and over-expressive adjectives. He writes about the mix of emotions this town evocates on him, the feeling of being an intruder overlapped by the need of belonging that seems to come from the mere waters. He writes of how, despite his natural instinct that always pulls him away from other people, he still stopped to stare at that group in the park, and a part of him wondered if he would have enjoyed getting closer instead of running away.
Moved by the winds and the slowly-coming-to-view moon, the water sways in front of him. At some point, he had stopped writing to stare at the sea instead, the sky slowly caving in as the sun set in the opposite direction, casting a reddish light on the water. Bit by bit, both the sky and the sea are turning a darker shade of blue mixed with purple.
Suddenly, Regulus spots a lone figure walking by the water. More exactly, walking in the water, their bare feet bathing in the shore as the water covers their legs up to the knees. They carry their shoes in one hand and a walking stick in the other, swaying it in the air so the water doesn’t bite its foot. The fading sunset still reflects on their glasses, covering their eyes behind opaque crystals.
They seem to have come down the other staircase, the one that reaches directly into the city, and walked their way along the shore. Regulus looks to the side they’re walking towards and doesn’t see anything other than a couple of houses and the tower of the lighthouse. If the person wants to go up to any of the houses, they would have to use the stairs Regulus is sitting in, but they don’t seem too eager to follow the wooden pathway, instead, they keep walking right past it, on the way to the lighthouse.
Even if they’re not paying attention to their surroundings, Regulus is almost sure they must have seen him, but he doesn’t know why that would be relevant. He is definitely seeing them, watching even, staring maybe, the same way he did at the park. They don’t leave a tray of footprints behind them, since they’re walking too deep in the shore for that, but the small waves break into two after hitting their legs, seafoam reaching the sand.
The same way it happened in the park, suddenly and before Regulus can process a proper reaction, they turn their head in his direction and grab the cane with the same hand as their shoes to wave in his direction. Regulus keeps staring for the seconds they wave before he waves back.
After that, the person keeps walking calmly by the sea, and Regulus rushes his way up the stairs.
From the path to his house, Regulus can still see them walking until they reach the lighthouse and disappear to the other side of it. He starts walking towards his house, stealing glances back. By the time he makes it to his door, night has settled into the town, the moon finally visible above the water. He takes a few minutes with his door open, looking in the direction of the sea, to appreciate the sight.
He makes dinner in silence, his mind unusually calm, and eats while standing in the kitchen. He goes straight to bed after changing into his pyjamas. Quicker than he realises, he is already in bed and the crickets and birds welcome him through his window, but the sound he thinks of is the distant voice of that person in the park, how their tongue closed around every vowel and they stretched the end of some sentences waiting for the reactions of the children. The image that comes with that voice is that of their hands, even if he didn’t see them in detail, but Regulus can still picture their movements as they swayed the book over the kids’ head, and later as they waved in his direction from the shore. There is a connection to make there, Regulus thinks, on how the waters call him with a song of belonging and how he can’t help but tie it to this person’s hands now.
The last thing he pictures, although maybe it poured into his dreams with might enough for him to see them there too, is the image of the pair of brown eyes, light enough for him to know there are different shades of brown and probably orange. He tries hard, so hard to remember them in more detail, but he turned around too quickly, he couldn’t memorise the paint of them.
Maybe, if it is true that they live by the lighthouse and the whole scene at the beach was not a figment of his imagination, Regulus will see them again down town the next day. Only, they don’t have any reason to leave their house tomorrow, if not to go writing at the beach. With the last thread of consciousness before giving in to Morpheus, he decides that looking at that person’s eyes is reason enough, while also telling himself, in a more formal tone, that they should visit the local library and call it work as well.