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The first time it happened was in first year. Remus was in second.
Regulus’s brain wouldn’t stop thinking. He couldn’t sleep, and all he knew was that the bed in Hogwarts wasn’t his, that his parents weren’t there to read him bedtime stories of their ancestors, to tell him he was a star, and he didn’t feel on top of the world like they’d told him he would at school, because school wasn’t home.
It wasn’t home. It didn’t have huge, arched windows from which he could gaze endlessly at the whole of space, stretched out before him as if it were his own private showcase, pin-pricked with the stars that wrote the names of his family across the midnight black sky, join them together as they connected dots and connected hands and held up constellations that tangled their fingers together, forever.
But not forever, because now Regulus was in the Slytherin dungeons. Underwater, with only one window looking up at the dingy Black Lake.
So he slipped out of the common room that wasn’t home, crept the corridors, searching for the feeling he was missing.
He found similar windows at the height of the Astronomy Tower. He also found his brother’s friend, Remus Lupin.
His brother was a star. They could shine together, forever, except Sirius made sure that Regulus always missed him. It contributed to this feeling Regulus was missing, he thought. Home, with the stars and his family, but now he couldn’t talk to them. If Remus was close to Sirius, then maybe he’d find home in Remus. Vicariously.
Remus had his palms curled around the metal railing, head tilted towards the sky as the moonlight cut across his face, striking the angles of his jaw in an eerie pallor. In the daylight, he was brown, skin glowing vibrant in the sun, but here, under the shade of night, he looked like a ghost. Regulus wanted to put colour in his cheeks. He also didn’t know if he should be there.
Still at the entrance, he watched Remus’s eyes close, lashes sweeping into hollows, blue and black and purple like a bruise. As if he’d never slept for a moment in his life.
Then he opened them, turned around, grip twisted on the railing, “You can come in if you like. Regulus.”
Nodding briefly, Regulus went to the other side of the railing. Looked at the sky, and this was home.
- - -
It kept happening. Twice, thrice, four and more until Regulus lost count, because he instead began counting the freckles on Remus’s face.
- - -
“You’re staring,” Remus smiled suddenly. He was in third year now.
Regulus looked away. “You’re glaring at the moon.”
Remus’s smile fell. He glanced at him, “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “I know. You’re never here on fulls. When you are, you look at it like you want it to disintegrate into dust.”
“How… long?”
“First time I met you. You sensed I was at the entrance although you hadn’t seen me. And you called me Regulus, as if it wasn’t even a surprise to see Sirius’s little brother.”
“You never said anything,” Remus muttered, looking at the tiles and kicking his foot against the railing.
Regulus turned his body to face him completely. “It wasn’t important to me.”
“Regulus,” Remus sighed heavily. “I’m…”
“A werewolf.”
He inhaled sharply, “I— Sorry.”
Regulus hummed. “Why’re you apologising, if you think it’s the moon’s fault?”
“...What?”
“You glare at it, don’t you?”
“I just wish…”
Regulus waited. Remus didn’t look like he was going to finish.
“It’s a myth,” he spoke up abruptly. “The fact that… wolves specifically howl at the moon. It’s a myth.”
“I… guess that’s true.” Remus sighed, “Whenever the moon’s full though, I’ll still always turn.”
“Into an animal.”
Remus tensed.
“Remus,” Regulus murmured, wanting to reach out, hold his wrist or something. “You’re as animal as I am.”
“I’m—”
“A human and a wolf. Full animal. I’m a human. Full animal.”
“Regulus,” his tone was pleading, wanting, and Regulus wanted to give him all of it, except, what was it?
Throat dry, he swallowed past that, strung letters across the necklace of a story he remembered from his childhood, “There’s… no reason for it to be on the full moon. You can howl at anything you want to. I mean, you can still choose what you want, even when you’re a wolf.” What do you want? He wanted to ask; that was all Regulus wanted, to know Remus’s request and grant it, because wishing on stars was more real than wolves howling at the moon.
Regulus was a star. Wish on him.
A trembling smile softened Remus’s face, “I can’t have anything I want.”
Scoffing, Regulus debunked that notion, “Animals can have whatever they want. Go wherever. There’s no fixed rule for it. The whole sky is yours. You don’t have to look at the moon if you don’t want it. All the stars will be yours. Howl for them, and they’ll shine for you.”
“Is that… is that what you do, then? Come here, look at the stars?”
Regulus side-eyed him, deadpanned, “I’m howling for them, wolf-boy. Internally, because I’m much more mysterious than you.”
Remus chuckled.
By howling, Regulus meant, tearing himself out and opening his heart up, pouring it all into space where it sparked and collided and held him up, the pain of longing and yearning, howling. And the stars would howl in return. Burn and collapse, let gravity pull them back. Didn’t Remus know that? Everyone howled, long and profound, resonating sound that thrummed wherever there was a medium to carry it, pulsating between particles that made each other loud, the round tolling of a bell, in the core of a star that exploded. Even if no one could hear it in the vacuum that divided, it was still howling. Still wanting.
Would they ever get it?
In the end. Everything happened in the end. Then it would happen all over again. Since everything to ever exist had always existed, since none of it could be created, since none of it could be destroyed. It would change, move, with the knowledge to fulfil every wish already woven into the very fabric of the universe that made all of the wishes exist in the first place.
“Wolves howl for stars,” Remus muttered, shaking his head in amusement.
Regulus glanced at him. Whispered, “You can if you want to.” I’d answer.
- - -
It still kept happening, but now they spoke to each other. Slowly, Regulus was uncovering what it was Remus craved the most. In the way that Remus’s eyes crinkled at the corners when he tipped his head back and laughed at something Regulus had said, or when they simply smiled at each other with space stretching stars out between them, this burning desire ripping howls from the cavities of their chests.
They filled it with jokes, and with philosophies, the whys and hows of the world, in their humble opinions. Their lives, the reason they thought that they thought how they thought.
Each night, more light returned to Remus’s eyes, and he glowed again, warm brown like how he was in the sun. The sun was as much of a star as Regulus was.
- - -
Lifting his hand off the railing, Remus pointed at the sky. He was in fourth year.
Even if it was a star bigger than the sun, the pinprick in the sky was still smaller than the flat tips of Remus’s fingers, long and rough, ungainly and knobbly. Covered in calluses and patches of pink, hardened like bone and raw like flesh, and still a hand that Regulus wanted to pore over, trail a thumb across it to memorise every ridge. It would feel solid, digging into the troughs between fingers until they could go no further than being laced together.
“Regulus,” Remus said.
He looked where Remus was pointing and smiled.
- - -
Then in Regulus’s own fourth year, he swallowed invisible courage and pointed at the sky. He hadn’t swallowed enough though, because his mouth was still too parched to actually elaborate.
But Remus knew what to say. “Sirius.” So quietly, a little paper cut in the universe, breathing and bleeding the name of a brother.
“Do you…?”
Regulus waited for what Remus was going to ask. He thought he was prepared for it, but he didn’t expect this: “Do you trust me?”
The answer came immediately. “Yes.” Regulus hadn’t prepared that either.
Nodding, Remus backed away, his footsteps muffled down the stairs. In the ten minutes that he waited, Regulus stared at Sirius.
And then Sirius was there. Two of them. Home.
“...Reg?”
Regulus reached out and grasped his brother’s hand. A constellation threaded through the lines of their palms.
There was silence for a moment, before Sirius squeezed his hand. Sorry. Then he squeezed it three times. I love you.
That made Regulus’s brain completely freeze for a moment too. He looked at Sirius, eyes open.
“I do,” he muttered reluctantly, so much like the Sirius that Regulus had missed all the way since first year.
“Shouldn’t have stopped talking to me,” Regulus groused.
“I— Sod off, actually. I was being a kid. And you were… being a son.”
Regulus raised their hands, pointed at the stars, “I still like them.”
“They don’t like me.”
“They call you the brightest star,” Regulus mused.
“Still?”
“Always.”
“I still don’t forgive them.”
Regulus squeezed his hand. That’s okay.
“Do you, Reggie?”
He would need forever to think about that. Their parents had made them stars, taught them to love the way they glowed, to let themselves shine, but also. The stories of their past, the tales of creation, the ones Regulus had relayed to Remus to feel connected by their wishes, but also. The way to own their lives, but also, stars burned. Broken, dying, giving up. Expanding until pressure built, reached a point where everything went blinding white before turning coal black and charred, pressed until they were used and moulded to fit someone else’s dreams. People wished on stars, but never gave stars their own wishes. So was Regulus’s life a lie?
And how could his parents make him feel that way?
They took him and told him he was a star, who could live his own life, but it was all written in the sky by their hand. That was why Sirius stopped holding it. They were only stars when they were brainwashed. As soon as they broke out of it, they were falling, as if they needed their parents to catch them and redirect them, ‘Do this, my star. Don’t speak like that, you sound like a half-breed centaur. Stars are graceful.’
No, they weren’t. They were chaotic collisions, random and incessant.
‘To be connected with us, you must recognise how the blood of this family is as pure as the light of galaxies. No one else could achieve it.’
But Regulus was as much of an animal as anyone else.
“I— I forgive them.”
There was a but. Sirius sensed it, raised an eyebrow.
“But I don’t want to carry on perpetuating the tradition. I forgive them because they’re brainwashed, but how long can that be an excuse for?”
Sirius grinned at him. “Run away with me.”
- - -
Although Regulus officially lived with the Potters, he spent most of the time at the Lupin’s.
Remus’s bedroom was him. The room version of Remus.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” he looked up at Regulus suddenly.
He rolled his eyes, “I do what I want.”
“Did you howl for it?” Remus teased.
“I did, in fact.”
Remus looked back at the book in his lap, pressed his thumb to his lower lip and worried at a hangnail. “Oh.”
“Do you have what you wanted yet?”
“I think wolves howl for everything.”
“Then I’ll help you find everything.”
- - -
When he was in fifth year, Remus was in sixth, and came up to the tower drunk out of his mind.
Giggling, “Reggie! I had to come find you immediately, to tell you— hic,” he hiccuped, then burst into hysterical laughter. “It reminded me of you, never have I ever, when Sirius went, ‘Woah?!’ and I told him, ‘Regulus is woah!’”
Regulus blinked at him slowly, lips twitching upwards. “You’re pretty ‘woah’ too, Lupin.”
“I know, babe,” Remus winked horribly, cackling, before sobering up and looking at Regulus sincerely. “I missed you.”
“You saw me last night?”
“But I wanted to see you this night, but there was a Marauders’ party, but you weren’t there, so it wasn’t really a party, and everything reminded me of you, so I came to see you now, even though I said I wasn’t free tonight…” he kept rambling, and all Regulus could do was look at him fondly, not even keeping track of his words, just saving his lively hand gestures to memory, the rapid movement of his lips.
“Reggie!” Remus waved a hand in front of his face, breaking him out of his stare.
“Remmy!” Regulus matched the tone, but rolled his eyes in order to maintain his dignity.
“I choose you.”
“I choose you too.”
“No, I mean, as a wolf,” Remus clarified as if it was obvious. “You’re my star.”
“Your star?”
“I howl for you.” Remus grinned, before leaning into Regulus’s face and whispering, “Internally.”
“Howl aloud,” Regulus dared, to see how this may pan out.
Remus put his tongue in his cheek, before smirking and drawing in a huge breath, “I’m a woooooooooooolf,” and Regulus was laughing, laughing, and this was what happened when wolves howled for stars.