Work Text:
1976
Sirius didn’t flinch from the cold. It was July, technically, the kind of London night that smelled like wet pavement and cigarette smoke, where the stars were swallowed by clouds and the city breathed heavy around him. But Sirius felt like he was walking through winter.
The air stung, but not enough for him to turn around. Not after the shouting, the slammed doors, the quiet threat of the Dark Mark etched in suggestion on his little brother’s forearm. Not after the way Mother looked at him like she’d always known he was a mistake, and worse, had never hesitated to say it out loud.
He had a rucksack slung over one shoulder. Not much in it, some Muggle clothes, a few galleons, his wand. And a photograph of him and his three friends at Hogwarts, back before everything started rotting beneath his feet.
He’d never packed a bag to leave before. Not seriously. Not like this. Not with the intention of never coming back.
He crossed a narrow iron bridge that spanned the canal near Grimmauld Place, a strange sort of boundary, neither here nor there. Magic ran thinner here. Muggle lamplight reflected in the water, and his footsteps echoed too loudly. The way forward was freedom. The way back was stone walls, cold dinners, silence, and Regulus’s eyes.
He didn’t look back. He wouldn’t. Because if he did, he might see Regulus.
And if he saw Regulus, he might stop.
But the voice came anyway.
“You’re really leaving,” Regulus said, breathless like he’d run to catch up.
Sirius stopped walking. For a moment, he imagined not turning around. Just walking into the night, letting his silence be the last word he ever gave his brother. But something in Regulus’s voice, something softer than anger, made him glance over his shoulder.
Regulus stood a few paces back, coat unbuttoned, arms crossed like armour. His face was pale, lips pressed in a line, eyes unreadable.
Sirius turned to face him fully. “You say that like I haven’t already.”
A silence stretched between them, long and taut. Regulus’s jaw tightened. “And you say it like it doesn’t matter. Like you’re the only one who’s suffocating.”
“You want it to matter now?” Sirius snapped. “You didn’t seem to care when I was choking in that house for sixteen years.”
Regulus exhaled through his nose. “You don’t know what I care about.”
“No,” Sirius said bitterly. “I don’t. Because every time I tried to talk to you, you were too busy memorizing pureblood family trees or pretending you weren’t scared of what they wanted from you.”
He saw something in Regulus’s expression. Wounded pride, maybe. Or just plain hurt.
“I was scared,” Regulus said, low and furious. “Still am.”
Sirius blinked. That wasn’t the answer he expected.
Regulus stepped forward. “You think I got everything I ever wanted. That I’m Mother’s golden boy, that I’m too much of a coward to do what you’re doing.”
Sirius doesn’t reply. Because yes. That was what he always thought.
“But you know what I wanted?” Regulus continued. “I wanted you to stay. Even when you hated them. Even when you hated me. Because you were the only person in that house who ever made me feel like I wasn’t a complete mistake.”
Sirius opened his mouth, then closed it.
“I thought if I stayed good, if I followed the rules, made them proud, maybe you’d stop looking at me like I’d already chosen a side,” Regulus said. “But it didn’t matter. You were always going to leave.”
Another silence settled between them, the kind that only came when both people wanted to say they were sorry but neither knew how, or for what, exactly. Because maybe it was everything.
Sirius swallowed hard. His voice came quietly. “You think I wanted this?”
Regulus looked at him. “Don’t you?”
Sirius wanted to say yes. That this was freedom. That he was finally done playing heir to a name that only brought ruin. But he remembered being eight years old, hiding under the kitchen table while their mother screamed upstairs. Remembered Regulus crawling in next to him with a book, pretending not to hear.
He remembered hoping they’d both get out.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Sirius said. “I just don’t know how to stay.”
Regulus looked down at his hands. There was ink smudged across his knuckles. He probably just came from his room, maybe from reading something Sirius wouldn’t care about. Maybe from writing another entry in whatever ordered version of life he built to survive the wreckage Sirius was leaving behind.
“You still don’t,” Regulus whispered.
They stood across from each other, the bridge stretching across a chasm of blood and name. Regulus, in a pressed black coat, still half-boy, half-man, caught in a world that rewarded loyalty with death. Sirius, fists clenched in the dark, hoping that leaving counted for something, anything.
“You could come with me,” Sirius offered. It was barely audible. “You don’t have to stay.”
Regulus shook his head, and it was like he was already mourning something.
“I don’t know how,” he said. “I don’t think I ever will.”
Sirius stepped back. The choice makes itself. “Then don’t follow me.”
And Regulus turned. Walked back the way he came, not with defiance, but with the slow, slumped posture of someone already grieving.
Sirius watched him disappear into the dark, past the edge of the bridge.
You got everything you wanted, he thought. And I was the only thing you ever let go of.
Regulus didn’t follow Sirius immediately. He told himself not to follow him at all. But his feet moved without asking. Some part of him, maybe the youngest, most forgotten part, still believed Sirius might turn around and say I’m not going without you.
But he didn’t. Of course not.
The bridge creaked beneath Regulus’s boots. Sirius stood at the other end, backlit by the city. All motion and defiance and chaos, the way he’s always been. Like a fire Regulus could never touch without being consumed.
“You’re really leaving,” he said.
Sirius looked at him like he was the one who had left first. That stung more than he expected.
They argued, not loudly, not violently. Just with the tiredness of two people who had fought this fight too many times, in too many rooms, with too many walls between them. Sirius said he couldn’t breathe. Regulus said Sirius never tried. Neither said what they meant.
I loved you. And you left anyway.
What Regulus hated most was that Sirius made it all look so simple. Like, escape was just a matter of will. Like it was bravery instead of destruction.
He thought of their parents’ faces. Of how Sirius used to laugh at the dinner table just to provoke a reaction. Of how quiet the house would be now, and how it would still be unbearable.
He said too much. He always did near Sirius. All his thoughts came out like confessions. He told him he wanted him to stay. That being the good son wasn’t about pride; it was about strategy. Desperation. Stay, and maybe Sirius would too.
But Sirius never wanted to stay. He wanted to fly, and Regulus was just another weight.
“Then don’t follow me,” Sirius said. And Regulus walked away.
He hadn’t come to stop him, hadn’t come to plead. Just to see if it would hurt as much as he thought it would.
(It did.)
Sirius always moved first, laughed first, fought first, left first. Regulus had tried to keep pace, but Sirius had always been a firework, and Regulus, the sky he escaped into.
And now Sirius was gone.
Regulus told himself Sirius had abandoned him. Told himself that again and again as he walked home, past a portrait that screamed his brother’s name like a curse, past Kreacher who wouldn’t meet his eyes, back into a room that still smelled faintly of ink and guilt.
He didn’t cry. Not really. Just sat on the edge of his bed and unlaced his shoes with trembling hands. And stared at his forearm, the one that would bear the Dark Mark in a few months, not out of conviction, but out of momentum.
There had been no hug, no goodbye. Just silence. And the ache of knowing that Sirius probably thought he was never worth the leaving.
You got everything you wanted, Regulus thought, and I’m still here, stuck in this house we both hated.
In the end, Sirius will believe Regulus chose a side, while Regulus will believe Sirius left him behind.
They’ll both be wrong.