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The common room had long since emptied.

By midnight, Gryffindor Tower had taken on that strange, conspiratorial hush it only ever wore after curfew—the kind stitched together out of muffled laughter, creaking floorboards, and the warm golden dimness of half-banked firelight. The portraits along the walls had mostly gone still. The staircases groaned occasionally like old bones. Outside the high windows, the castle was a black silhouette against a deeper black sky, moonlight spilling silver over the grounds and catching in the glass.

Inside the fifth-year boys’ dormitory, however, peace had very little say in the matter.

The room was chaos in the comfortable, well-loved way of teenagers who had colonised a space and made it theirs by force. Trunks sat half-open with shirts hanging out. Socks had been abandoned in places no sock had any right to be. Someone’s tie was hanging off the bedpost of James’s four-poster like it had died there. There were bottles nicked from somewhere—beer, something stronger in a squat amber bottle with no label, and a half-empty bottle of firewhisky Peter kept staring at like it contained the secrets of the universe. Chocolate wrappers littered the carpet. A deck of Exploding Snap lay scattered under Remus’s bed like the aftermath of a small but passionate war.

The group had expanded beyond the usual four by sheer momentum and the magnetic pull of secret late-night gatherings. James was sprawled at the end of his bed, one leg hanging off the side, bottle in hand, cheeks already pink from laughter. Sirius sat on the rug with his back against James’s mattress, one arm thrown across his bent knee, looking unfairly beautiful in the careless way he always did—dark hair falling into his eyes, sleeves rolled to his elbows, grin loose and bright and dangerous. Remus sat cross-legged near the window with a blanket around his shoulders like some kind of underage professor dragged into delinquency by fate. Peter was on the floor beside him, leaning against the bed frame, grinning at everything half a second too long.

Lily Evans had stolen James’s desk chair and turned it backwards to lean her arms over the backrest. Mary Macdonald was on the floor with Marlene McKinnon, both of them sharing a bottle and cackling with the easy rhythm of two people who considered volume a love language. Alice Fortescue sat tucked against Frank’s side on the rug, shoes off, knees drawn up, expression bright and soft. Frank himself was slouched comfortably beside her, solid and calm in that way that made everyone else seem a bit more sensible by proximity. Fabian and Gideon Prewett had somehow managed to occupy the same armchair at once, all long limbs and grins and elbows, like they’d been born specifically to turn every quiet room into a louder one.

It had started with cards.

Then someone dared someone else to drink.

Then James had tried to imitate Professor McGonagall after two swigs too many and nearly fallen off the bed.

And now, as often happened when the hour got late and the room got warm and everyone’s edges softened, they had slid into stories.

Childhood ones.

Embarrassing ones.

The kind usually locked away under pride and only dragged out under the influence of alcohol, affection, and the mutual understanding that blackmail was inevitable and therefore acceptable.

“Oh, no—absolutely not,” Remus said, already laughing as James straightened with a sudden spark of remembered evil in his eyes. “Whatever expression that is, stop it immediately.”

James pointed at him with the solemn gravity of a prophet receiving divine instruction. “You once cried over a snail.”

There was a beat of silence.

Marlene choked on her drink.

Mary slapped a hand over her mouth and wheezed. “No.”

“Yes,” James said triumphantly.

Remus closed his eyes. “I was four.”

“You cried,” Sirius echoed, delighted, “over a snail.”

“It was run over,” Remus snapped, opening one eye. “It was flattened on the path, and I thought that was deeply tragic at the time.”

“At the time,” Fabian repeated, scandalised. “As opposed to now, where you’ve become hard and cruel.”

“I am hard and cruel,” Remus said, deadpan.

“No, Moony,” Gideon said, leaning forward with a grin, “you’re a man who once held a funeral for invertebrate roadkill.”

The room broke apart.

Laughter cracked through the air so hard James nearly dropped his bottle. Peter wheezed into his hands. Lily bowed her head against the back of the chair, shoulders shaking. Frank snorted in a way that sounded suspiciously like he’d been trying very hard not to.

Remus pulled the blanket tighter around himself and took a long, suffering drink. “I hate all of you.”

“No, you don’t,” Sirius said cheerfully.

“No,” Remus admitted into the neck of the bottle, “I don’t.”

“Right,” Mary said, wiping tears from her face. “Fine. Fine. We’re doing this properly. Everyone has to tell one. One childhood story. And if you don’t, we’ll make something up and spread it around the school.”

“That sounds illegal,” Peter said.

“That’s because you’re boring,” Marlene told him.

“I can do one!” Peter said quickly, sitting up straighter.

“Of course you can,” James said warmly. “That’s the spirit, Wormtail.”

Peter flushed, grinning. “Right. Okay. When I was six, I got my head stuck in the banister at home because I thought I could squeeze through.”

Fabian barked a laugh. “Why?”

Peter frowned like the answer was obvious. “Because I wanted to know if I could.”

“You couldn’t,” Lily said.

“I could not.”

“How long?”

Peter stared into the middle distance. “About two hours.”

The room erupted again.

“Two hours?”

“Did no one help you?”

“My mum tried butter.”

“Peter,” Alice gasped, horrified and delighted all at once. “Not butter.”

“It got in my hair.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Marlene muttered.

“That’s actually incredible,” James said, wiping his eyes. “That’s art, Pete.”

“That is not art,” Remus said.

“It is to me.”

“One of mine,” Lily said, lifting a hand before anyone could pivot. “Before you animals make me regret existing. My sister convinced me when I was seven that if I dug deep enough in the garden, I would eventually hit Australia.”

There was a reverent pause.

Then Sirius turned to stare at her with something close to admiration. “Evans.”

“I know.”

“How deep did you get?”

Lily took a sip, expression blank. “Past reasonable.”

Mary made a noise like a dying bird. “Oh my God.”

“I had a little spade. I was out there for an hour and a half. Mum found me filthy, crying, and insisting the earth was too big and I’d never make it to the koalas.”

James folded over laughing. “Koalas?”

“I was under the impression there would be koalas at some point, yes.”

“That is the best thing I’ve ever heard,” Sirius declared.

Lily pointed at him. “I know for a fact you’ve done worse.”

Sirius pressed a hand to his chest. “How dare you. I was an elegant child.”

“Bullshit,” James said instantly.

“Absolute bullshit,” Remus agreed.

“Catastrophic bullshit,” Marlene added.

Sirius grinned at all of them, entirely unbothered. “Jealousy is ugly on you all.”

He was in a bright mood tonight.

That much had been clear from the moment he’d drifted into the room with that particular loose-limbed restlessness that meant he needed noise, company, distraction. He had been laughing easily. Talking more than usual. Letting the conversation carry him rather than driving it. James had clocked it early, the way James always did, but had wisely chosen not to press. Sirius hated being handled. He preferred being surrounded.

So they had surrounded him.

And now he tilted his bottle idly and said, “I once cut my own hair because I wanted to look like a pirate.”

That got a fresh wave of laughter.

“You?”

“At eight,” Sirius said. “With embroidery scissors.”

“No,” Lily whispered.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“My mother happened,” Sirius said dryly, and rolled his eyes as the room snorted. “Apparently I looked like I’d been attacked by an angry hedge.”

“Probably an improvement,” James said.

Sirius kicked him in the shin without looking.

“Oi—”

“Worth it.”

“Mary,” Alice said, grinning. “Your turn.”

Mary groaned theatrically. “Fine. Fine. When I was nine, I got caught trying to kiss one of the neighbour girls behind the bins because I’d seen it in a film and thought I was being very suave.”

Marlene nearly inhaled her drink. “Behind the bins?”

Mary spread her arms. “I was nine. Romance had limited venues.”

“Did it work?” Gideon asked, fascinated.

“No,” Mary said. “Her brother saw us, called me disgusting, and pushed me into a puddle.”

Lily winced. “Rude.”

“I know. Tragic. I rose from the mud like a Victorian heroine and told him he had no appreciation for art.”

Fabian was openly crying with laughter now. “Marry me.”

“You couldn’t handle me,” Mary shot back.

“Oh, I know.”

The room pulsed with warmth.

Story rolled into story. Fabian confessed to breaking his arm trying to leap from a shed with a blanket tied around his neck like a superhero cape. Gideon admitted he and Fabian had once accidentally set their aunt’s curtains on fire while attempting to invent “portable sunlight.” Alice shyly revealed that as a child she used to make tiny pastries out of mud and flowers and try to sell them to neighbours as “garden cakes.” Frank, after much coercion, admitted he had once swallowed a marble because someone told him it would make his voice sound interesting.

“That’s not even remotely how bodies work,” Lily said, staring at him.

“I know that now,” Frank replied.

“Did you at the time?”

“Evidently not.”

Marlene told a story about punching a boy in primary school for telling her girls couldn’t climb trees. Remus admitted to spending a full winter convinced the moon was following him for personal reasons. James, flushed with drink and pride, recounted at great length how he had tried to impress a group of older kids by jumping from a low wall, misjudged spectacularly, and landed face-first in a hedge.

“I still maintain,” he said, with the gravity of a man defending his thesis, “that the landing was elegant.”

“You had leaves in your eyebrows,” Sirius reminded him.

“Stylish leaves.”

“Prick.”

The laughter came easy.

It had the softness of belonging to it, the lovely unguarded shape of a night where no one had to be anything cleverer or harder than they were. Firelight flickered gold over faces and hair and bottles. Their shadows stretched long across the floorboards and tangled together. From somewhere lower in the tower came a faint burst of laughter from students not nearly as asleep as they ought to have been. The whole castle seemed to lean in around them—old stone, old magic, old quiet.

Eventually the stories blurred into photographs.

It was Fabian who started it, digging through his trunk with exaggerated secrecy and then triumphantly producing a bent, weathered stack tied with string.

“No,” Gideon said immediately, reaching.

“Oh, yes.”

“No.”

“Oh, absolutely yes.”

Fabian sprang backward across the bed with a laugh as Gideon lunged for him. “Look at this one. Look at him.”

He held up a picture of two identical redheaded boys, maybe six or seven, covered head to toe in mud. One of them was holding a frog above his head like a holy relic. The other was trying to climb onto a fence that was visibly about to collapse.

Alice made a small fond noise. “You were feral.”

“We were inventive,” Fabian corrected.

“You were one bad idea in duplicate,” Frank said.

“Thank you.”

Lily showed one of herself around age ten on a seaside holiday, all skinny elbows and windblown hair and a glare aimed at the camera because, as she explained flatly, Petunia had thrown sand at her two seconds before the photo was taken. Mary had one with her sisters, all of them crammed on a sofa and shrieking with laughter as the photograph moved. Marlene produced a blurry Muggle photo of herself in overalls perched halfway up an apple tree with a split lip and a grin like trouble incarnate.

James, after some dramatic rummaging, found one of himself at five wearing his glasses crookedly and a crown clearly made of tinfoil.

Lily stared at it for a long moment. “Somehow this is exactly what I expected.”

James took the photo back and sighed dreamily at his own tiny face. “A king from birth.”

“A menace from birth,” Remus corrected.

“Same thing.”

Sirius had been half-listening, half-smiling, head tipped back against the bed.

Then James nudged him with his foot.

“What about you?”

Sirius blinked, dragged back into the room. “Hm?”

“Photos,” James said. “You’ve got any?”

There was a flicker there.

Small.

So brief most of the room probably would have missed it.

A tightening around the mouth. A momentary pause in the loose ease of his shoulders. His gaze dipped, then shifted somewhere beyond the room for the length of a breath. The Blacks, James knew, were not a subject handled casually. Most things tied to Sirius’s family were made of sharp edges and old bruises.

James was halfway to telling him to forget it when Sirius snorted softly and set his bottle down.

“Yeah,” he said. “Actually… yeah. I do.”

He stood and crossed to his trunk.

The room quieted a little without meaning to.

Not because anyone was alarmed, exactly. Just because Sirius Black did not usually offer pieces of home. Not willingly. Not like this.

He knelt by the trunk and dug deep, moving books, a pair of gloves, a rolled-up Quidditch magazine, old parchment, and a scarf. When he sat back on his heels again, he was holding an envelope.

It was worn at the corners. A little creased. Handled often, probably, despite itself.

He looked at it for a second.

Then he came back to the rug and dropped down where he’d been before, crossing his legs and spilling the contents into his lap.

Photographs.

Muggle ones. Wizarding ones. A mix.

The top one showed two small boys in a garden.

The room stilled properly then.

Sirius in the photo couldn’t have been older than seven. His hair was shorter than it was now, his grin already wild and bright. Beside him was a smaller child with dark curls and enormous grey eyes, maybe five or six, clinging to Sirius’s arm with both hands and bouncing on the balls of his feet hard enough that the photograph had caught him mid-movement. He was laughing at something outside the frame, head tipped back, face open with uncomplicated joy.

James’s breath snagged in his chest.

Regulus.

Little Regulus.

It was so obviously him that it hurt.

Not because he looked the same—though there was enough there. The eyes. The mouth. The shape of his face. But because he also didn’t. The boy in the photograph was incandescent with life. Bright. Uncontained. A child overflowing himself. There was none of the cool stillness James associated with Regulus now, none of the blade-sharp restraint, none of the carefully shuttered expression he wore like armour.

Just a little boy laughing so hard he could barely stay upright.

Mary put a hand over her mouth. “Oh.”

“He was adorable,” Alice whispered.

“He was chaos,” Sirius said, and there was something in his voice James rarely heard when Regulus’s name came up. Something soft. Fond enough to bruise. “Absolute nightmare. He’d follow me everywhere. Wouldn’t let go of my hand half the time. If I tried to leave him behind, he’d scream the place down.”

“He’s tiny,” Peter said, leaning in.

“He bit people,” Sirius said, grinning now. “Not often. Just when the mood took him.”

Fabian laughed. “Respect.”

“That one,” Sirius said, tapping the photograph, “was after he’d decided he wanted to climb the fountain in the back garden because I told him mermaids lived in it.”

Lily turned to stare at him. “Why would you tell him that?”

Sirius looked offended. “Because it was funny.”

“Was it?”

“He believed me for six months.”

James barked a laugh.

Sirius found another photo and held it up. In this one, he looked around five, stretched lanky but still all elbows and mischief. Regulus sat on his shoulders, arms thrown wide, shrieking with laughter as Sirius spun in circles on a stretch of lawn. The image moved with dizzy joy. Regulus nearly toppled sideways. Sirius caught his legs tighter and kept going. Behind them, a younger Walburga Black stood on the terrace looking distinctly unimpressed.

“That was the day he threw up on Mother’s shoes,” Sirius said with great satisfaction.

The room lost it.

“No!”

“He what?”

“Was it deliberate?”

“Oh, completely,” Sirius said. “He was four and furious she wouldn’t let him come outside in the rain. So he waited. Calculated. Then leaned over my shoulder and—”

“Stop,” Remus said, laughing too hard to sound stern.

James was staring at the photo.

At Regulus’s face.

At the easy intimacy of it, the casual certainty with which he held on to Sirius, trusting utterly that he would never be dropped.

James had known Sirius loved his brother. Of course he had. He’d seen it in every fight with Snape that went too far, every flinch of attention whenever Regulus appeared in the same room, every muttered curse and protective glare and sudden, ugly flashes of rage when other Slytherins closed ranks around him too tightly. Sirius spoke about Regulus rarely, and usually with the kind of brittle anger that came from caring too much and having nowhere safe to put it.

But this—

This was different.

This was love with the mask peeled off.

Sirius handed around another photograph. Regulus sat at a kitchen table in a too-big jumper, curls sleep-mussed, face smeared with what looked like jam. He was trying very seriously to stack biscuits into a tower while Sirius in the background was clearly coaching him very badly.

“He had this obsession with building things,” Sirius said. “Anything. Towers, forts, ridiculous little traps for Kreacher that never worked because he was four and had the stealth of a marching band.”

“Look at his face,” Mary said, almost helplessly. “He’s so pleased with himself.”

“He usually was,” Sirius said.

There was laughter in his voice, but not much.

James noticed it then—the careful way Sirius handled each photograph. The way his thumb brushed the edges. The way he kept glancing at Regulus’s tiny moving face as if checking it was still there.

Another one. Regulus wrapped in a blanket on a window seat with a book nearly as big as his torso, staring down the camera as if personally offended by the interruption. Another of the two brothers in matching black coats at some formal event, Regulus hiding half behind Sirius’s leg and peering out suspiciously. Another of Regulus on a broom toy in the nursery, bouncing so hard the whole image shook.

“He liked sweets?” Alice asked softly, looking at one where Regulus held what appeared to be half a treacle tart in both hands like treasure.

“He loved them,” Sirius said. “Obsessed. Honeydukes was basically his religion the first time I took him.”

“You took him?” Frank asked.

Sirius shrugged one shoulder. “When I could. Sneaking him out was easier when he was little. Less moody. Less likely to hex me.”

“He hexes you now?”

“He tries,” Sirius said. “Has for years.”

“That means he loves you,” James said before he could stop himself.

Sirius glanced at him.

Just for a second.

A look James couldn’t quite read.

Then he snorted and looked back at the photos. “Sure. That’s exactly what attempted bodily harm means.”

“It might, in your family,” Lily said dryly.

“Fair.”

There was another photograph beneath the rest, and when Sirius picked it up, something in his face changed.

It was subtle.

His smile dimmed first.

Then vanished.

James went still.

The room noticed, one by one, conversation tapering off in uneven pieces until the air seemed to tighten around the sound of the fire crackling. Sirius looked down at the photograph in his hands for longer than he had at any of the others.

“What one’s that?” Peter asked, quieter than usual.

Sirius seemed to return from far away.

He lifted the photograph.

Regulus was perhaps six in this one, maybe a little older. He stood in the middle of a room James didn’t recognise, holding a toy dragon with one wing bent sideways. Sirius was kneeling beside him, one hand on the back of Regulus’s neck, both of them turned toward something off-frame. Sirius looked maybe seven. Protective even then. Regulus was smiling, but the smile looked different from the earlier ones—smaller, hesitant, as if unsure of its own welcome.

No one said anything for a moment.

Then Gideon, who had had more to drink than was strictly helpful and whose mouth often outran the rest of him on the best of days, squinted at the photograph and huffed a laugh.

“Merlin,” he said, taking a swig. “What happened, then? How’d he go from that to the cold, apathetic bitch glaring holes through everyone in the corridors now?”

It happened all at once and in fragments.

The words hung there.

The room froze.

Mary’s head snapped round so hard it nearly cracked. Alice went visibly blank with horror. Fabian swore under his breath. Gideon himself seemed to realise, in the same instant he finished speaking, that he had just stepped squarely on a landmine and then tap-danced.

Sirius stopped breathing.

James knew him well enough to recognise the danger in stillness.

It was never the shouting that came first with Sirius. It was the silence. Sudden, absolute, awful. The split second where all the warmth fell out of him and something far sharper took its place.

He lowered the photograph very, very carefully into his lap.

Then he looked up.

The expression on his face made Peter flinch.

“Don’t,” Sirius said.

His voice was quiet.

That made it worse.

Gideon sat up straighter in the chair, colour draining from his face. “I—”

“Don’t,” Sirius repeated, harder now, his stare locked on him with a fury so cold it burned. “Ever. Say shit like that about him again.”

James pushed himself upright on the bed, pulse thudding once, hard. He had seen Sirius furious before—wild, reckless, explosive. This was not that. This was stripped down. Controlled. Far more dangerous.

Gideon held up both hands. “I didn’t—I was joking—”

“Well, don’t.” Sirius’s words landed like stones. “Don’t joke about things you don’t know a fucking thing about.”

The room went soundless.

Even the fire seemed quieter.

Lily’s fingers tightened around the neck of her bottle. Remus’s blanket had slipped from one shoulder and he hadn’t noticed. Fabian stared at his brother like he was debating whether to kick him himself. Frank went very still beside Alice, all his easy softness gone taut with alarm.

James watched Sirius’s jaw work.

Watched him look down at the photograph again.

And then, in a voice roughened into something strange, Sirius said, “He wasn’t born like this.”

No one moved.

No one interrupted.

Sirius swallowed once. Hard.

“When Reg was little,” he said, staring not at them now but at the picture in his lap, “he was… he was everything, alright? Loud and bright and impossible. He laughed at fucking everything. Couldn’t sit still to save his life. He used to run everywhere, bounce off walls, ask questions so fast you couldn’t answer half of them before he’d moved on to five more. He loved stupid little things. Sugared violets. Toy soldiers. That ridiculous stuffed kneazle he dragged around until it lost an eye. He—”

His voice caught.

Very slightly.

James felt something twist in his chest.

Sirius dragged a hand through his hair. “He was sweet. Stupidly sweet. Trusted everyone. Wanted to help all the time. If someone cried, he’d cry. If I scraped my knee, he’d follow me around with bandages. He used to climb into my bed when he had nightmares and steal all the blankets, little bastard.” His mouth twitched for half a second at the memory. Then flattened again. “That was him.”

No one laughed.

Not this time.

“He’s not…” Sirius exhaled through his nose. “He’s not my biological brother.”

A few of them blinked.

James had known the Black family was a knot of complicated, vicious things, but this—this he had not known.

Sirius kept going before anyone could say anything. “Reg was adopted. His biological father was a pureblood. Black enough for my family’s standards, apparently, even if nothing else about him was. He was in prison for most of Reg’s life when Reg was little. Armed robbery. Violent shit. My parents took Reg in when he was a baby, and that was that. He was ours. Mine.” Sirius’s fingers tightened around the edge of the photograph. “Mine.”

His voice on that word was fierce enough to cut.

“Did Reg know?” Alice asked softly, almost afraid to break the silence.

Sirius laughed once, without humour. “Eventually. Not at first. When he was little he just knew there were strange rules around certain letters, certain conversations, certain days when my mother would disappear into a room with Father and come out looking like she wanted to skin the world alive.”

He looked toward the fire.

“When Reg was six,” he said, “his biological father got out.”

James felt Lily go rigid in her chair.

Sirius’s gaze was somewhere else now, somewhere years away.

“He’d been writing to Reg before that. Not often. But enough. Through solicitors, through legal channels, through whatever twisted bullshit the adults were trying to sort out behind closed doors. Reg was too young to understand what any of it meant. He just knew there was a man who wrote to him sometimes and called him son.” Sirius’s mouth curled in something ugly. “And Reg, because he was six and because he was still soft then, wanted to believe it meant something.”

The room was dead silent.

Even Marlene, who usually treated silence like a personal enemy, had gone pale and still.

Sirius stared at nothing.

“He took him,” he said.

The words dropped into the centre of the room and seemed to hollow it out.

James felt his stomach drop.

“What?” Peter whispered.

Sirius’s eyes shut briefly, then opened again. They looked too bright in the firelight.

“He took him,” he said again. “During a supervised visit. Supposed to be monitored. Supposed to be safe. There were adults, Ministry people, Muggle police involved because of the non-magical charges, all that shit. And still he took him. Walked out with him and a gun and a fake passport and whatever else he’d lined up, and by the time anyone realised what had happened, they were gone.”

Mary made a broken sound.

“No,” Lily whispered.

“Yes.”

James had gone cold all over.

He looked down at the photograph of the little boy with the toy dragon and thought, absurdly, of Regulus now in the corridors—quiet-faced and razor-eyed and distant as winter moonlight, every word chosen before it left his mouth, every expression held on a leash so tight it might choke.

“He was gone for days,” Sirius said.

His voice was steady now in the way of someone who had forced himself into steadiness because the alternative was shattering in front of witnesses.

“Five,” he said. “Five days. Long enough for every paper in Britain to get hold of it. Long enough for my mother to stop sleeping and my father to stop pretending he wasn’t terrified. Long enough for me to hear adults whispering ransom and custody and fugitive and murder like I wasn’t in the room.”

James swallowed.

“Murder?” Frank said quietly.

Sirius nodded once.

“His father was trying to get out of the country. Needed money. Needed transport. Needed people not to get in his way.” Sirius’s stare had gone flat with horror so old it had calcified. “Three people did.”

No one breathed.

“Reg saw it,” Sirius said.

Lily had one hand over her mouth now.

“He saw all of it. Every fucking bit.”

The fire cracked softly in the grate.

Somewhere, far below them, a door shut in the tower. The sound felt impossibly distant.

Sirius looked down at his own hands as if surprised to find them shaking.

“When they finally found them,” he said, and James had to concentrate to keep his own breathing even, “the police cornered them near the coast. Muggle police. Aurors. Everyone. Reg was there the whole time. His father had him in front of him with the gun to his head.”

Alice actually gasped.

Peter went white.

Gideon had stopped looking remotely drunk. He looked sick.

Sirius kept speaking.

The words had the terrible inevitability of a wound finally opening after years of being pressed shut.

“Reg was six. Six.” Sirius’s voice cracked on the second one and came back rougher. “He had a gun at his throat while adults shouted and aimed weapons and tried not to spook a man already halfway out of his mind. He was crying so hard he could barely stand. And that man—his father, technically—was telling him it would be alright. Telling him he loved him. Telling him if anyone came closer he’d shoot.”

James’s hand had closed so hard around the bottle he could feel the glass press into his palm.

Remus, usually pale, looked bloodless.

“He used him,” Sirius said flatly. “As a shield. As a hostage. As a bargaining chip. His own child.”

The room had gone beyond shock into something heavier. Denser. The kind of silence that seemed to throb.

“What happened?” Mary asked in a whisper.

Sirius laughed again.

It was a horrible sound.

“What do you think happened?”

No one answered.

“They got Reg away eventually. One of the officers moved at the right second. Reg got yanked out of the line of fire.” His jaw tightened violently. “And his father—”

He stopped.

James saw his throat move.

When Sirius spoke again, his voice was almost toneless.

“He forced it. Made them shoot. Suicide by police. Right there. Right in front of Reg.”

Lily made a low, strangled noise like she’d been hit.

Alice started crying quietly at once, tears slipping down her cheeks before she could stop them. Frank put an arm around her shoulders automatically, but his face looked wrecked too, eyes fixed on Sirius with mute horror.

Peter whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

Fabian swore, heartfelt and vicious, into the silence.

Gideon looked like he might throw up.

James couldn’t seem to unclench his hand.

In his mind he could see it too clearly despite never having been there: a tiny child, hysterical and terrified, being ripped from the arms of a man who had just spent days turning love into terror; the crack of gunfire; shouting; the smell of smoke and salt air and panic; a six-year-old watching death happen with no way to understand any of it except that he had been wanted and then used and then left.

Sirius rubbed at his face roughly with one hand.

“When they brought him back,” he said, “he wouldn’t speak. Not properly. For weeks, hardly at all. Wouldn’t let people touch him unless it was me. Screamed if strangers came too close. Slept with the lights on. Flinched at doors opening. Panicked if he couldn’t see an exit. Had nightmares so bad he’d make himself sick. He stopped laughing.” Sirius’s voice thinned. “That’s what I remember most. He stopped laughing.”

No one in the room was okay anymore.

Marlene had gone from loud and restless to perfectly still, hands clasped between her knees like she was holding herself together by force. Mary’s eyes were shining wet. Lily had tears sitting bright on her lashes, furious and unashamed. Remus’s expression had that awful soft, hollowed-out gentleness of someone hearing a pain he knew he couldn’t fix.

“That’s why he’s the way he is,” Sirius said.

His eyes lifted at last and swept over all of them, hard and bright and furious in equal measure.

“He’s not cold because he wants to be. He’s not apathetic. He’s not some fucking bitch because it’s fashionable. He’s quiet because half the time he’s still braced for the world to go wrong. He notices everything because he had to. He doesn’t trust people because someone who was supposed to love him put a weapon to his head. He hates being cornered. He hates loud footsteps behind him. He hates people grabbing him without warning. He always sits where he can see the room. He always knows where the exits are. He watches hands. He watches faces. He panics when people fight too hard around him and pretends he doesn’t. He’s…”

Sirius broke off and looked down.

When he looked up again, his voice was softer. Raw enough to make James feel like an intruder just hearing it.

“He’s still that little boy,” Sirius said. “He just had everything ripped out of him.”

The silence afterward was enormous.

James looked at the photographs spread across Sirius’s lap like a second life.

Little Regulus laughing in the garden.

Little Regulus sticky with jam.

Little Regulus on Sirius’s shoulders, fearless because Sirius had him.

A child before and after, separated by a line no one should ever have to cross.

“Oh my God,” Mary whispered.

“That’s why,” Sirius said. “That’s why I care. That’s why I’m on him all the time, why I watch him, why I lose my mind when people fuck with him. He acts like he doesn’t need me, and maybe he doesn’t, not the way he used to, but he’s my brother. He’s my little brother. He went through hell before he even knew what hell was. So if any of you ever say anything like that again—about him being cold or cruel or broken like it’s his fault—I swear to God—”

His voice sharpened, all the softness burning off into something dangerous and blinding.

“—I will make you regret it.”

No one doubted him.

Not for a second.

Gideon swallowed hard. “Sirius, I—”

“Don’t apologise to me.”

The words cracked like a whip.

Sirius’s stare pinned him where he sat. “You’re lucky he’s not here to hear you say it.”

Gideon’s face crumpled into genuine horror. “I know.”

“Do you?” Sirius shot back. “Do you actually?”

“Yes,” Gideon said, voice rough now. “Yeah. I do. I was being a prick. I know.”

Fabian elbowed him hard enough to make the chair rock. “You colossal idiot.”

“I know that too.”

Lily scrubbed angrily at her eyes and stood up so abruptly the chair legs scraped the floor. “That poor kid.”

James looked at her.

There was murder in her face.

Not the metaphorical kind. The very specific kind Lily Evans reserved for people who hurt the vulnerable and did not have the decency to die regretting it enough.

“He was six,” she said, as if the number itself were an obscenity. “Six. He was a baby.”

“He still is,” Sirius muttered, though Regulus was only a year younger than them.

No one laughed.

Alice leaned into Frank and pressed her fingers against her mouth. “I had no idea.”

“None of us did,” Frank said quietly.

Mary shook her head, appalled. “And people just… talk about him. They say he’s snobby, or icy, or stuck-up, and—Merlin. That’s not—”

“No,” Remus said softly. “It isn’t.”

Peter looked devastated. “He always looks so calm.”

“That’s the point,” Sirius snapped. Then, a second later, some of the edge went out of him and he exhaled shakily. “That’s the point. He works at it. All the time. You think that comes naturally? It doesn’t. It’s effort. It’s survival. He hates people seeing too much.”

James knew that.

Not the specifics. Not the reasons. But he knew the shape of it.

He’d seen Regulus in corridors, in classrooms, at Quidditch matches, at dinners, moving through the world like someone who had learned that feeling visibly was dangerous. He had always thought of Regulus as self-contained in a way James could never quite parse. Aloof, yes, but not shallow. Controlled, but with strain under it. The kind of person who seemed held together by a thousand tiny acts of discipline no one else noticed.

Now—

Now James thought of a six-year-old child forced to learn that the world could become unbearable with no warning at all.

Now he thought of Regulus’s eyes always flicking to doorways.

Of the way his shoulders stiffened when voices rose.

Of how, once, after being jostled in a crowd outside the Great Hall, Regulus had gone so still James had thought he might hex someone, only to realise a moment later that he looked faintly sick.

Of Sirius stepping between Regulus and other people without even seeming to know he was doing it.

James set his bottle down carefully before he crushed it.

“Sirius,” he said.

Sirius looked at him.

For once, James did not try for levity. There was nowhere for it to go.

“I didn’t know,” James said simply.

“I know.”

The answer was immediate. Not cruel. Just tired.

James nodded once.

He didn’t know what to do with the sudden furious ache in his ribs. He wanted, with a kind of useless violence, to go back in time and drag that child out of danger with his bare hands. He wanted to find the ghost of a dead man and kill him again. He wanted to stand outside the Slytherin dormitories and punch anyone who’d ever looked at Regulus wrong without understanding they were looking at scar tissue.

Instead he said, rougher than usual, “No one says shit like that again.”

Lily pointed sharply at the room as a whole. “Not one word.”

Marlene, who had been silent too long and therefore looked ready to explode, said, “Anyone does, I’ll break their nose. I’m serious.”

Mary wiped under one eye with the heel of her hand. “I’ll help.”

“Queue,” Fabian muttered darkly.

Gideon sat there looking miserable and ashamed. “I know I don’t deserve to say this right now,” he said, voice low, “but I really am sorry. That was foul. I didn’t know.”

Sirius’s mouth tightened.

Then he looked away, down at the photos again, and some of the murderous brightness dulled into exhaustion.

“Yeah,” he said. “Well. Now you do.”

That landed heavier than any shout could have.

The room shifted around it.

Alice got up from the rug and crossed the short distance to sit beside Sirius on the floor. She did it slowly enough to give him room to object. When he didn’t, she leaned her shoulder very lightly against his.

“Thank you for telling us,” she said softly.

He huffed, almost a laugh, but it broke halfway through. “Didn’t exactly plan to.”

“No,” Alice said, eyes on the photos in his lap. “Still.”

Frank moved next, sitting down on Sirius’s other side, solid and quiet. Not crowding. Just there. Fabian and Gideon disentangled themselves from the chair and came to sit on the carpet too, Gideon looking particularly like a condemned man at his own sentencing. Remus set aside his blanket and joined them by the fire. Mary and Marlene slid down off the floorboards near the bed to sit cross-legged close by. Lily dragged James’s desk chair nearer and sat again, elbows on knees, gaze fixed and intent.

James stayed where he was only long enough to reach down and collect one of the fallen photographs before dropping from the bed to the floor with the rest of them.

They formed a ring around Sirius without comment.

Not trapping him.

Holding him.

The firelight gilded the edges of everyone’s faces. The room felt smaller now, close and dim and intimate in a different way than before. The alcohol had worn off into something sharper. Soberer. Every laugh from earlier seemed to belong to a different lifetime.

Sirius looked down at the circle of them and gave a short, incredulous shake of his head. “What are you all doing?”

“Being here,” Remus said.

“You look like someone just shot your dog,” Marlene added bluntly, because tact had never once applied to her.

“That is…” Sirius rubbed at his eyes. “An awful image.”

“But accurate,” Mary said.

James handed him back the photo he’d picked up. It showed Regulus no older than three, wearing oversized Wellington boots and a jumper slipping off one shoulder, trying furiously to chase a goose twice his confidence level.

“He used to laugh like that all the time?” James asked quietly.

Sirius looked at the picture.

Something shifted in his face.

“Yeah,” he said, just as quietly. “All the time.”

“What did it sound like?” Peter asked.

Everyone looked at him.

Peter flushed bright red but didn’t back down this time. “I just—I mean. He doesn’t really laugh much now. Not properly. So. What did it sound like?”

For a second, Sirius looked like that question might break him open.

Then he smiled.

Small. Crooked. Sad enough to make the room ache.

“Like he couldn’t help it,” he said. “Like it surprised him every time. Head back, whole body in it. Proper little gremlin giggle. Once he started, you couldn’t stop him. I used to set him off on purpose.”

James swallowed hard.

Lily looked down at her hands.

“Does he still…” Alice hesitated. “I mean. Does he ever?”

Sirius was quiet for a long moment.

“Sometimes,” he said finally. “When he forgets himself.”

That hurt worst of all.

Not because of what it meant now, but because it implied there had been something to forget.

James leaned his forearms on his knees and stared into the fire.

“Then we make sure he gets to,” he said.

Sirius looked at him sharply.

James met his gaze.

“What?”

James shrugged one shoulder, jaw tight. “You heard me.”

Lily nodded immediately. “Yeah.”

Mary straightened. “Absolutely, yeah.”

Marlene jabbed a finger at the floor. “New rule. Anyone gives Regulus shit in front of me, they answer to God.”

“Or Marlene,” Fabian said.

“Worse.”

Frank gave a faint smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “He shouldn’t have to explain himself to anyone.”

“He wouldn’t,” Sirius said at once. “He’d hate that. He’d rather die than have people looking at him like he’s fragile.”

“We won’t,” Remus said. “That’s not what this is.”

Sirius stared at him.

And because Remus was Remus—gentle and horrifyingly perceptive all at once—he added, “Knowing why someone built walls doesn’t mean you have to treat them like they’re made of glass. It just means you stop mocking the bricks.”

The room went quiet again.

Mary breathed out. “That was disgustingly profound.”

Remus sighed. “I know. I hate when that happens.”

A tiny sound escaped Sirius then.

Not a laugh. Not exactly.

But close enough to soften the room by a fraction.

Gideon looked at him miserably. “Can I apologise to him?”

“No,” Sirius said immediately.

Gideon blinked. “No?”

“No,” Sirius repeated. “Because then he’ll know I told you, and then he’ll skin me alive and wear my remains as a political statement.”

Fabian snorted.

“That is,” James said, “alarmingly believable.”

“He’ll be furious,” Sirius said. “Humiliated, probably. Reg hates being discussed.”

The words were protective, but there was affection in them too. Respect.

“So we say nothing,” Lily said.

Sirius nodded once. “Yeah. You say nothing.”

“But,” Mary said slowly, “we can still… be better.”

Sirius looked at her, wary.

“We can stop being idiots,” she clarified. “Stop talking about him like he’s just being difficult for fun. Stop rising to it every time he glares. Stop assuming.”

Marlene folded her arms. “I’m still going to call him a dramatic little shit if he deserves it.”

“That,” Sirius said dryly, “he can handle.”

“He usually deserves it,” James muttered.

Sirius shot him a look.

James held up his hands. “What? He does.”

That, somehow, finally tugged a real laugh out of Sirius. Small and brief, but real enough that the tension in the room eased by a notch.

“There he is,” Fabian said softly.

Sirius rolled his eyes. “Don’t.”

“Too late.”

Alice reached for one of the photographs still spread over Sirius’s lap. It showed Regulus in a paper crown, seated cross-legged under a table draped with blankets while Sirius crouched beside him holding what looked like a torch under his chin to tell a ghost story. Little Regulus’s eyes were huge with delighted terror.

“He adored you,” she said.

Sirius went very still.

Then he looked at the image and his expression gentled into something almost unbearably tender.

“Yeah,” he said.

It was not simple, that yeah.

It held too much history. Too much love curdled by circumstance, too much guilt, too many years of trying to protect someone who didn’t always want protecting and often had every reason not to trust the world around him. But beneath all of it, stubborn as bedrock, was the fact of it:

He loved Regulus.

He had always loved Regulus.

James thought, suddenly and with painful clarity, of Sirius at seven, raging against adults and rules and the injustice of a world that had hurt his brother. Of Sirius standing helpless while other people made decisions and failed to keep a six-year-old safe. Of the kind of fury that would grow in a boy like that and never entirely leave.

Of course he was protective.

Of course.

There was no universe in which he wouldn’t have been.

The room sat with that for a while.

No one rushed to fill it.

The fire burned lower. The light shifted deeper amber. Outside, wind moved against the tower windows with a soft hush. Somewhere a clock chimed the quarter hour, thin and distant.

Eventually Peter, who had been blinking at the photographs with red-rimmed eyes, said in a small voice, “Can I ask something?”

Sirius glanced at him. “Depends.”

“Does Reg know,” Peter said carefully, “that you talk about him like this?”

The corner of Sirius’s mouth twitched.

“Christ, no.”

That got the faintest ripple of sound around the room.

“He thinks I’m unbearable,” Sirius added.

“You are,” James said.

“Shut up.”

Peter smiled weakly. “No, I mean… does he know you remember all of it?”

For a second Sirius didn’t answer.

Then he looked down at the pictures in his lap again, fingers brushing once over little Regulus’s moving face.

“I think,” he said slowly, “sometimes he forgets that anyone else remembers who he was before.”

The words settled over them all.

Lily drew in a shaky breath. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Welcome to the House of Black,” Sirius said with a bitter half-smile.

James leaned back on his hands and looked at Sirius properly.

At the exhaustion around his eyes.

At the stubborn set of his mouth.

At the way he held those photographs like relics.

“You should keep showing these,” James said.

Sirius looked at him like he’d gone mad. “Why?”

“Because that’s still him.”

A pause.

Then Sirius’s expression changed, barely.

Not disbelief.

Something softer.

More shaken by the sentence than he probably wanted to be.

Remus nodded. “James is right.”

“Unfortunately,” Lily said.

James clicked his tongue. “You adore me.”

“Against my will.”

Fabian pointed at one of the photos. “What’s this one?”

Sirius snorted and lifted it. In the photograph, tiny Regulus was standing in the middle of what had once perhaps been a respectable sitting room and was now definitely a war zone of feathers. Pillow stuffing floated through the air like snow. Sirius, maybe six, stood beside him with a look of holy delight. Regulus clapped his hands and bounced.

The room, already raw and frayed and overfull with feeling, broke into startled laughter.

“Oh my God.”

“What did you do?”

Sirius looked almost smug. “Found a loose seam in one of Mother’s decorative cushions.”

“Both of you are evil,” Lily informed him.

“Were evil,” Sirius corrected.

“No,” Remus said. “Still are.”

“That one was my fault,” Sirius admitted. “Reg just escalated beautifully.”

James laughed, helpless relief cutting through some of the heaviness in his chest. “He looked like that after causing chaos?”

“Always,” Sirius said. “He’d get this look—like he’d discovered the secret joke of the universe and the rest of us were too slow to keep up.”

Mary smiled despite the tears still drying on her face. “I want to meet that version of him.”

Sirius looked at the picture for a long moment.

Then, very quietly, “Me too.”

No one knew what to say to that.

So no one tried.

Instead, one by one, they kept looking through the photographs.

Not to pry.

Not to gawp.

To witness.

To let Sirius tell the stories if he wanted. To let him place back into the world, for a little while, the shape of the little brother he carried around in memory even when the real one had learned to hide behind colder edges. And Sirius did tell them. More than James expected. Maybe more than Sirius expected too.

He told them about Regulus insisting on sleeping in dragon-patterned pyjamas until he was eight and then swearing Sirius to secrecy on pain of death. About the time he tried to teach Regulus how to whistle and Regulus got so frustrated he bit Sirius’s fingers. About Regulus crying over an injured bird and then naming it Augustus and refusing to release it for three weeks because “it likes it better here.” About the way Regulus used to get hiccups whenever he laughed too long. About him falling asleep on library rugs with books open on his chest. About him insisting, at age five, that Sirius could not possibly be clever enough to tie a tie correctly and attempting to do it himself.

Each story laid another thread down.

Each one made the room fuller.

By the time the stack of photographs had thinned and the fire had collapsed into glowing red, everyone looked wrung out in one way or another. Softened. Changed.

The night had turned.

What began as mischief and drink and stupid stories had become something else entirely: a quiet pact, maybe. A line drawn without ceremony.

Regulus Black would not know any of it had happened.

He would still walk the corridors tomorrow with that same composed face. He would still sneer when irritated and cut with his words when cornered and look, to anyone who hadn’t been in this room tonight, as though he were made of winter and arrogance and things too sharp to touch.

But here, now, in the hush after midnight, eleven Gryffindors sat in a half-circle of dying firelight and knew better.

They knew about the bright child before the silence.

They knew about the terror.

They knew about the wall and the wound beneath it.

And because they knew, something in the air had altered.

Not pity.

Never that.

Something more dangerous.

Something protective.

The kind of loyalty that formed quietly and all at once.

At some point James looked around the room and realised they were all wearing it.

In Lily’s furious mouth.

In Marlene’s clenched jaw.

In Mary’s wet-eyed determination.

In Frank’s calm, iron stillness.

In Alice’s grief-struck gentleness.

In Fabian’s dark glare.

Even in Gideon’s shame.

And at the centre of it, Sirius, who had finally gone quiet, photographs gathered into his lap, eyes fixed on the fire as though watching years burn there.

James nudged his shoulder.

Sirius glanced at him.

James didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then, because it felt like the truest thing available, he said, “He’s got us too, you know.”

Sirius stared at him.

At first James thought he might snap back something mocking. Deflect. Laugh it off. Tell him not to be sentimental.

Instead Sirius looked around the room.

At all of them.

At the stupid, loud, infuriating people gathered in his dorm after curfew with contraband alcohol and too many feelings.

His throat moved.

Then he looked down at the photographs and said, in a voice so quiet James barely caught it, “Yeah.”

It was not much.

It was everything.

The fire crackled softly.

No one moved to leave.

And somewhere below all the ache, all the anger, all the horror of what had been done to a child too small to survive it cleanly, something steadier took root in the warm dim centre of the room.

A promise, perhaps.

Wordless, but no less real for that.

No more careless cruelty.

No more easy assumptions.

No more throwing stones at walls without wondering what they had been built to keep out.

Up in Gryffindor Tower, long after curfew, with the castle sleeping around them and the moon white against the glass, they sat in the golden dark and held the shape of Regulus Black’s lost laughter between them like something sacred.