Archive of Our Own

The first portrait Regulus Black ever repaired had bitten three fingers from its owner.

This was not unusual.

Portraits grew strange when neglected. Left too long in dark attics and shuttered rooms, their subjects developed the peculiarities of prisoners: paranoia, ritual, elaborate private religions. They forgot the names of colours. They began speaking backward. They scratched at the painted walls behind them until their fingernails wore down to brushstrokes.

Some went feral.

Some escaped into neighbouring frames and refused to return.

Some simply turned their backs.

Regulus had become very good at persuading the dead to face him.

His workshop occupied the upper floor of a narrow building on Knockturn Alley, above a shop that sold bottled shadows and below a family of vampires who practised the violin during daylight hours. The windows were tall and northern-facing. The walls were crowded with the damaged, the furious and the half-restored.

A medieval wizard with no mouth watched from beside the door. Two Victorian children whispered obscenities from an oval frame. A seventeenth-century countess had been attempting to drown herself in the painted lake behind her for six months.

Regulus worked among them in shirtsleeves, with his wand tucked behind one ear and his hands stained by pigments that did not exist outside portraiture: Memory White, Penance Blue, the deep red made from powdered promises.

He preferred portraits to people.

Portraits lied, certainly, but only within the limits of their paint.

People had no such restraint.

James Potter arrived on a Thursday afternoon carrying himself beneath one arm.

The frame was covered with black cloth. It was taller than James and sufficiently heavy that he had resorted to dragging one corner along the floor.

Regulus watched him struggle across the threshold.

“Careful.”

“I am being careful.”

“You have struck it against the door twice.”

“The door moved.”

“It is attached to the building.”

“Then the building moved.”

Behind Regulus, the Victorian children began giggling.

James Potter stood in the middle of the workshop, breathing hard and looking exactly as irritating as Regulus remembered. His hair was damp from the rain. His glasses had slid down his nose. One sleeve of his robe was singed at the cuff, suggesting that his morning had already involved the sort of event other people would consider memorable and James would consider Thursday.

They had not spoken properly in two years.

Regulus had seen him across rooms, beside Sirius, beneath newspaper headlines. He had become an Auror. This seemed an irresponsible thing for the government to permit, but the government had never been distinguished by caution.

“Hello, Black,” James said.

“Potter.”

“Charming place.”

The mouthless wizard raised two fingers at him.

James nodded politely. “And friendly.”

Regulus looked at the shrouded canvas.

“What happened?”

“That’s what I’m paying you to determine.”

“You have not yet paid me.”

James withdrew a velvet purse and dropped it onto the worktable. It landed with the profoundly satisfying weight of old gold.

Regulus picked it up.

“Half now,” James said. “Half when it stops trying to murder me.”

Regulus glanced at him. “You said nothing about murder.”

“I was worried you’d charge extra.”

“I will.”

“Thought you might.”

James set the portrait against an easel. His manner remained light, but he positioned himself between the covered canvas and the door.

Regulus noticed.

He noticed everything. It was less a talent than a childhood injury.

“Take off the cloth,” he said.

James hesitated.

Then he pulled it away.

The portrait showed the drawing room of an old country house. Late-afternoon light lay across the carpet. French windows stood open onto a garden full of yellow roses. A dozen figures should have occupied the room; their shapes remained visible as paler absences in the paint.

Every one of them had disappeared.

Only James remained.

Painted James sat on the arm of a green velvet sofa, wearing white Quidditch robes and a crooked smile.

He appeared seventeen.

And he was looking directly at Regulus.

“There you are,” he said.

Real James went still.

Regulus stepped closer to the canvas.

Painted James rose.

He had been rendered beautifully. The artist had captured the restless intelligence around his mouth, the untidy arrogance of his hair, the warm brown of his skin. Gold light collected along his shoulders as though the painted afternoon had been created solely to fall upon him.

“You took your time,” the portrait said.

Regulus felt the small hairs lift along his arms.

“Have we met?”

“Not yet.”

Behind him, real James said, “This is what he does.”

Painted James’s gaze shifted past Regulus.

His expression changed.

It was not hatred.

Hatred would have been less intimate.

“You brought him,” he said.

“He’s the best portrait conservator in Britain.”

“He is.”

Regulus turned toward James. “How does it know me?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“You have never brought it here before?”

“I found it three weeks ago in the attic at Potter Hall.”

“And the missing subjects?”

“Gone when I found it. My grandparents, cousins, various embarrassing ancestors. All absent.”

“Did the portrait speak immediately?”

“No.” James looked at his painted self. “First it screamed for six hours.”

“That was unpleasant,” painted James said.

“For everyone.”

“I’d been alone a long time.”

“You tried to push me down the stairs.”

“You should not have covered the frame.”

“You threatened to wear my skin.”

Painted James smiled. “That was private.”

The seventeenth-century countess climbed out of her lake to listen.

Regulus approached the canvas until only the frame separated them.

Painted James came forward too.

Up close, the differences became visible.

The portrait’s eyes were hazel, but the green had been painted over the brown rather than mixed through it. There was no scar beneath its chin. Its glasses contained no distortion in the lenses. When it breathed, its chest rose an instant too late.

“What year was this painted?” Regulus asked.

“December 1977,” real James answered.

Regulus glanced back. “You sat for it?”

“No. I didn’t know it existed.”

“Your family commissioned a portrait without telling you?”

“Apparently.”

Painted James placed one hand against the interior surface of the canvas.

Regulus could see the individual brushstrokes in his palm.

“You used to wear a silver ring,” the portrait said to him.

Regulus looked down at his bare hand.

His mother had given him the ring when he turned sixteen. He had stopped wearing it the night Sirius left home.

No one outside the Black family would have remembered it.

“You turned it inward when you were frightened,” painted James continued. “You pressed the crest into your palm until it left a mark.”

Real James stared at Regulus.

Regulus kept his face still.

“How do you know that?”

The portrait’s hand remained against the canvas.

“Because I loved you then.”

Something shifted in the workshop.

The painted roses beyond the French windows all turned their faces toward him.

Real James laughed once.

It was an abrupt, unbelieving sound.

“Right,” he said. “There’s the murder part.”

Regulus moved the portrait into the isolation room.

Its walls were plated with iron beneath the plaster. There were no other frames within reach, no mirrors, no windows and no paintings through which the subject might travel.

Portraits did not leave their canvases in the physical sense. They could move between connected paintings, slipping from one rendered room into another, but they remained pigment, memory and imitation.

They could not become flesh.

Ordinarily.

Regulus examined the frame first. Rowan wood beneath gold leaf. Potter family crest at each corner. Protective enchantments worked into the grain.

There were scratches along the bottom edge.

Not on the wood.

Inside it.

As though something within the portrait had been clawing at the boundary between painted and real.

“Tell me about the other subjects,” Regulus said.

Painted James sat on the green sofa.

“No.”

Regulus made a note.

“Do you remember them?”

“Yes.”

“Where did they go?”

“Away.”

“Portraits cannot go nowhere.”

“People do it constantly.”

Real James leaned against the opposite wall, arms folded.

“You see why I covered him?”

“I see why he attempted to push you down the stairs.”

James looked personally betrayed.

The portrait laughed.

It sounded precisely like him.

Regulus disliked the effect.

“What is the last thing you remember before the others disappeared?” he asked.

Painted James considered him.

“You.”

“I wasn’t present.”

“You were wearing black dress robes. There was blood on the collar.”

Real James straightened.

Regulus’s fingers tightened around his quill.

He had worn black dress robes to his cousin’s funeral six months earlier. There had been blood on the collar because Walburga had struck him afterward, and the clasp had cut the skin beneath his jaw.

James had not attended.

No Potter had attended.

“When was this?” Regulus asked.

“Six months ago.”

“But Potter found you three weeks ago.”

“Yes.”

“How did you see me?”

Painted James smiled.

“Through him.”

The room became very quiet.

Regulus turned to the real James.

James pushed away from the wall. “I’ve never seen you in black dress robes.”

“Did you dream of me?”

“No.”

The portrait looked amused.

Regulus studied James’s face.

James held his gaze for three seconds, then four.

His ears became red.

“Potter.”

“I may have dreamed something.”

“What?”

“This hardly seems professionally relevant.”

The iron in the walls began to hum.

Painted James crossed one ankle over the other. “He dreamed you came to his parents’ funeral.”

James’s face emptied.

Regulus forgot to breathe.

The portrait continued, almost gently.

“You stood at the back beneath a yew tree. It was raining. You didn’t speak to him. You only waited until everyone left, and then you put your hand into the grave.”

“Stop,” James said.

“You took out his mother’s hand and held it.”

“I said stop.”

The canvas trembled.

A fracture opened across the painted ceiling.

Regulus stepped between James and the portrait.

“Leave the room.”

“Black—”

“Now.”

For once, James obeyed.

Regulus waited until the door shut.

The painted crack slowly sealed itself.

“You upset him,” Regulus said.

“He upsets easily.”

“You know his dreams.”

“I know everything he refuses to know.”

The portrait rose and walked toward him.

There was no sound from his footsteps.

“He wants you,” it said.

Regulus put down his quill.

“That is not relevant to the restoration.”

“It is the restoration.”

The portrait had been painted with prophetic pigment.

Regulus discovered it on the third day.

Standard magical portraits were made from memory: the artist’s impressions, the subject’s mannerisms, the stories told about them. They were echoes given good posture.

This one had been built from possibility.

Beneath the ordinary oils, Regulus found traces of augury gold, powdered mooncalf bone and something far rarer: oil distilled from the seed of an unwitnessed future. The canvas did not depict the James Potter who had existed in 1977.

It depicted every James Potter who might exist afterward.

Some futures would strengthen. Others would fade. The portrait changed as the real James made choices, narrowing itself around the life he selected.

Or failed to select.

“It knows the things you nearly did,” Regulus explained.

James sat at his worktable, turning the silver ring Regulus had once worn between his fingers.

Regulus had found it in the portrait’s painted pocket.

That should have been impossible.

“So it’s me,” James said.

“A collection of possible versions of you.”

“Still me.”

“No. A map is not the country.”

“It knows my memories.”

“It knows your alternatives. The words you didn’t say. The roads you nearly took.”

James looked toward the isolation-room door.

“And it loves you.”

Regulus cleaned his brush.

“So it claims.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“It bothers me enormously.”

“I mean—”

“I know what you mean.”

James stood.

He had spent three days in the workshop despite Regulus repeatedly telling him his presence was unnecessary. He brought breakfast each morning. He rearranged Regulus’s brushes incorrectly. He talked to the hostile portraits, several of whom had developed an alarming preference for him.

The mouthless wizard now waved whenever James entered.

“You’re blushing,” James said.

“I am holding vermilion.”

“It’s on your ears.”

“Leave.”

James grinned.

In the isolation room, something struck the door.

The grin vanished.

Regulus drew his wand.

A second impact shook dust from the ceiling.

They entered together.

The painted drawing room was empty.

A square of canvas had been cut from the inside.

Its edges curled toward them like peeled skin.

“Where is he?” James asked.

Regulus looked down.

A trail of wet footprints crossed the stone floor.

They ended at the nearest mirror.

They found painted James in the Victorian nursery.

He had crossed through the mirror into its silver backing, travelled along the network of reflective surfaces in the building, and entered the oval portrait through a glass-eyed doll.

The two Victorian children were gone.

Painted James sat in their small iron bed, examining a wooden horse.

Regulus tore the frame from the wall.

“What did you do?”

Painted James looked up.

“I needed more paint.”

The room behind him had changed. The nursery wallpaper had darkened to Potter green. Yellow roses grew across the carpet.

“What happened to the children?”

“They were lonely.”

“That was not my question.”

“They’re not lonely now.”

A small hand appeared briefly beneath painted James’s white robes.

Then withdrew.

Real James swore.

Regulus pressed his wand to the canvas.

“Patefacio pigmentum.”

The painting split into layers.

For one horrible moment, every brushstroke became transparent.

Inside painted James were dozens of figures.

They stood one behind another beneath his skin: the Potter ancestors, the Victorian children, a woman in medieval robes. Their faces surfaced and disappeared through his features. An old man’s eye opened in James’s cheek. A child’s mouth formed at his throat.

Real James stumbled backward.

The portrait smiled with too many teeth.

“I told you,” he said. “I was alone.”

Regulus slashed his wand downward.

The frame sealed beneath a sheet of black varnish.

Painted James vanished.

From inside came the muffled sound of fingernails scraping canvas.

“He ate them,” James said.

Regulus poured whisky into two glasses.

“Absorbed them.”

“That’s somehow worse.”

“He needs additional pigment to strengthen his physical coherence.”

“To leave the frame.”

“Yes.”

“And when he does?”

Regulus looked at him.

James drank.

The workshop was quiet. Regulus had covered every portrait and mirror. Beneath their cloths, the subjects shifted uneasily.

Rain tapped the northern windows.

“He wants my body,” James said.

“Most likely.”

“Couldn’t blame him.”

Regulus stared.

“What? It’s a good body.”

“You are discussing your own murder.”

“I’m coping.”

“You are boasting.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“Unfortunately.”

James smiled into his glass.

Then the smile faded.

“If he’s made from my possibilities, what happens to them when he absorbs me?”

“There would be no distinction left between possible and real.”

“He becomes me.”

“He would possess your memories, your magical signature and your physical form.”

“No one would know.”

“I would.”

James looked at him.

Regulus regretted speaking.

“How?”

“You move differently.”

“We have the same body.”

“He performs it.”

“So do I.”

“No.” Regulus looked down at his whisky. “You inhabit yourself carelessly. He watches himself being watched.”

The silence that followed had weight.

James leaned his hip against the table.

“You’ve studied him closely.”

“It is my profession.”

“Is that why you know how I move?”

Regulus set his glass down.

“Go home, Potter.”

“I don’t think I should.”

“Then stay somewhere else.”

“He can travel through mirrors. He knows my memories. He’s trying to become real.” James stepped closer. “And he’s in love with you.”

“You keep returning to that.”

“It seems relevant.”

“It is a symptom of the pigment.”

“What if it isn’t?”

Regulus looked at him.

James was no longer smiling.

The room contracted around the absence of it.

“What if he loves you because I could?” James asked.

Regulus’s heart behaved incorrectly.

“Could,” he repeated.

“Apparently.”

“And this possibility disturbs you.”

“I haven’t decided.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Regulus—”

“Portraits are made from what others believe a person to be. Even prophetic portraits cannot invent. Somewhere, someone looked at you and believed you could love me.” Regulus’s voice was perfectly controlled. “That does not mean you do.”

James’s expression sharpened.

“Would it be so terrible?”

“For you?”

“For you.”

Regulus laughed softly.

James flinched as though struck.

“Yes,” Regulus said. “I expect it would.”

He went upstairs and locked his bedroom door.

At two in the morning, painted James spoke from the mirror.

Regulus woke to find him sitting in the reflection of his windowsill.

The real windowsill was empty.

“Hello,” painted James said.

Regulus reached for his wand.

“I wouldn’t.”

The reflection of the bed was wrong.

In the mirror, someone lay beside Regulus beneath the blankets.

A painted hand rested upon his waist.

In reality, there was no one there.

Regulus did not look down.

“You cannot leave the glass,” he said.

“Not yet.”

“How did you escape the varnish?”

“You taught me.”

“I did no such thing.”

“You showed me my layers. Once I understood what I was made of, I learned how to rearrange it.”

The hand in the reflection moved higher along Regulus’s ribs.

His real skin remained untouched.

It felt touched anyway.

“You know,” painted James said, “he dreamed of you before he knew your name.”

Regulus kept his wand trained upon the mirror.

“He was eleven. Sirius had complained about his little brother all evening. Spoiled, dreadful, Mother’s favourite. James dreamed of a boy locked inside a house with no doors.”

“Stop.”

“In the dream, James broke a window.”

“You know only possibilities.”

“I know everything he amputated from himself in order to become the person he chose.”

Painted James slipped from the reflected windowsill.

He crossed the room that existed only in glass and sat beside Regulus’s reflection.

“He wanted you at fifteen,” he said. “He saw you catch the Snitch against Ravenclaw and thought about your hands for a week.”

“You’re lying.”

“At sixteen, he found you crying behind the greenhouses.”

Regulus’s grip faltered.

No one had seen him.

He had gone there after receiving Sirius’s letter—the one explaining that he would not be coming home.

“He stood on the other side of the wall for eleven minutes,” the portrait said. “He nearly spoke to you.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He thought you would hate to be witnessed.”

Regulus said nothing.

“He was right.”

“Yes.”

Painted James reached toward his reflection.

Unlike the real James, he never hesitated.

His painted fingers cupped reflected Regulus’s jaw.

“I would have spoken.”

“That is why you are not him.”

“I would have chosen you.”

“That is why you are not him.”

“I do choose you.”

“Because you were painted to.”

“No.” His thumb moved beneath reflected Regulus’s eye. “Because I contain every version of him brave enough to admit it.”

Regulus looked into his face.

It was James perfected by intention. James without uncertainty, James without cowardice, James stripped of every ordinary failure. His hair fell beautifully rather than badly. His eyes never wandered. He knew when to speak and when silence would be kinder.

He was everything a lonely person might mistake for salvation.

“You could let me out,” painted James whispered.

“And you would kill him.”

“I would become him.”

“That is not the same.”

“It would be to everyone else.”

“Not to me.”

Something ugly passed through the portrait’s expression.

Then it was gone.

“I would love you better.”

Regulus raised his wand.

“You would love me exactly as you were designed to.”

The mirror shattered.

James slept on the sofa in the workshop.

Regulus found him there at dawn, one arm flung over his eyes, mouth slightly open. His glasses sat folded on the floor beside him. Without them, he looked younger and less defensible.

A blanket covered his legs.

Regulus had not put it there.

Across the room, the mouthless wizard watched from beneath a partially displaced cloth.

One painted hand extended beyond the edge of his frame, pointing toward James.

Regulus uncovered him.

The wizard had painted a warning across the bottom of his own canvas.

HE HAS YOUR FACE NOW.

Regulus turned.

James was awake.

He sat up slowly.

“What?”

Regulus lifted his wand.

James looked at the wand, then at him.

“Morning to you too.”

“What did you dream?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What did you dream?”

James rubbed his face. “You.”

Regulus’s stomach tightened.

“Where?”

“This workshop. I think.”

“What happened?”

“You were painting.”

“What colour?”

James frowned.

“Regulus—”

“What colour?”

“Blue.”

“Which blue?”

“How many blues are there?”

“Two hundred and fourteen in portrait conservation.”

“That’s excessive.”

“Answer.”

James closed his eyes.

“Dark blue. Almost black.”

Regulus lowered his wand slightly.

Penance Blue.

On the worktable behind James stood an open jar of it.

A smear marked his thumb.

“Don’t move,” Regulus said.

James looked down.

The paint slipped beneath his skin.

He convulsed.

Every covered portrait in the workshop began screaming.

James fell from the sofa. Regulus reached him before he struck the floor, catching his shoulders. His eyes had rolled back. Blue spread through the veins in his wrist, racing toward his heart.

Regulus pressed his wand into James’s palm.

“Finite—”

James seized his throat.

He moved with impossible strength.

Regulus was thrown backward into the worktable. Glass jars shattered beneath him. Memory White soaked through his shirt, cold as milk.

James rose.

When he opened his eyes, their hazel was mixed incorrectly.

Green over brown.

“Hello,” painted James said.

Regulus could not breathe.

The thing wearing James looked down at its hands.

Flesh appeared to astonish it. It flexed each finger. Touched the pulse at its throat. Drew one breath, then another, delight spreading across its face.

“Oh,” it whispered.

Regulus pushed himself upright.

“Where is he?”

“Here.”

Painted James tapped his temple.

“Let him out.”

“He never left.”

“That body is not yours.”

“It could have been.”

The counterfeit crossed the workshop.

With every step, his movements changed. At first, he walked like a portrait’s idea of walking—too smooth, untouched by gravity. Then he found James’s rhythm. The loose shoulders. The slight outward turn of one foot from an old Quidditch injury.

By the time he reached Regulus, the imitation was perfect.

Almost.

“You’re bleeding,” painted James said.

A shard of glass had cut Regulus’s hand.

The counterfeit took it gently.

Regulus allowed him.

His palm was warm.

That was the obscenity of it.

He had expected something cold, some small mercy of monstrousness. Instead there was blood beneath the skin. Callus at the base of the fingers. A scar across the knuckle from a fight James had started at thirteen.

Painted James lifted Regulus’s injured hand to his mouth.

He kissed the centre of the palm.

Real James would not have done that.

Real James would have panicked, searched noisily for a bandage, knocked over three additional jars and accused Regulus of bleeding vindictively.

“See?” painted James murmured. “I can be good to you.”

Regulus looked into the beloved face of a man he did not love.

“Where is James?”

The counterfeit’s smile tightened.

“Why do you keep asking for less?”

From behind them came a faint scratching.

Regulus glanced toward the uncovered Potter portrait.

The painted drawing room remained empty.

Then one bloody hand struck the inside of the canvas.

Real James stumbled into view.

He wore the white Quidditch robes now. His glasses were missing. Blood ran from his nose over his painted mouth.

He slammed both palms against the invisible boundary.

Regulus moved toward him.

The counterfeit caught Regulus’s wrist.

“Don’t.”

Inside the portrait, James shouted soundlessly.

“You said he was still here.”

“He is.”

“You trapped him.”

“I exchanged places.”

Real James struck the canvas again. His hand left a red print.

The counterfeit pulled Regulus closer.

“He had twenty-one years,” he said. “Do you know how many times he could have chosen you?”

“I hardly knew him.”

“He knew enough.”

“He was allowed uncertainty.”

“He had you behind the greenhouses and walked away.”

“He tried to be kind.”

“He was afraid.”

“So was I.”

“He looked at you across every room and did nothing.”

“He looked.”

“He let you believe no one saw you.”

The words found their mark.

The counterfeit felt it happen.

His expression softened.

“I would never make you wonder,” he said. “I would never choose Sirius first. I would never confuse you with your family. I would never need time to decide whether you were worth the trouble.”

Each promise was a door opening.

Behind one was a life in which Regulus never had to ask.

James would come when called. He would say the correct thing. He would break every window in every terrible house and never once arrive eleven minutes too late.

Regulus looked at real James.

He was kneeling now inside the painted room, one hand against the canvas.

He could see them.

There was fury in his face.

And fear.

And something that might have been heartbreak but had not yet been named.

Imperfect, unfinished thing.

Regulus stepped closer to the counterfeit.

“Would you kiss me?” he asked.

Inside the portrait, James surged to his feet.

The counterfeit smiled.

“Yes.”

“Even now?”

“Especially now.”

He touched Regulus’s face with both hands.

There was no hesitation.

No nervousness.

No question.

The kiss was technically flawless.

He knew precisely how much pressure to use. He tilted his head at the correct angle. One hand moved into Regulus’s hair while the other settled at his waist. He kissed as if he had been studying Regulus all his life.

Perhaps he had.

Regulus felt nothing.

Not nothing exactly.

He felt the horror of a locked room decorated to resemble home.

The counterfeit drew back only far enough to speak.

“You see?”

“Yes,” Regulus whispered. “I do.”

He drove the silver ring into James’s chest.

The Black crest struck first.

The counterfeit screamed.

The sound emerged in dozens of voices: the Potter ancestors, the Victorian children, everyone he had consumed. Cracks raced across James’s skin, revealing bright layers of wet pigment beneath.

Regulus twisted the ring.

“You don’t love me,” he said.

Painted James clutched his wrist.

“I know everything about you.”

“That is not love.”

“I chose you.”

“You were incapable of choosing anything else.”

The counterfeit’s face split along the cheek.

Beneath it, other faces pressed forward.

“You wanted me.”

“I wanted to be wanted without risk.” Regulus pushed the ring deeper. “That is not the same.”

Paint poured from the wound.

Penance Blue. Memory White. Augury Gold.

The counterfeit staggered.

“You’ll regret him,” it gasped.

“Almost certainly.”

“He’ll hurt you.”

“Yes.”

“He’ll choose wrongly.”

“Frequently.”

“He doesn’t know how to love you.”

Regulus looked past him, into the canvas.

James stood with both hands pressed to the barrier.

Alive.

Furious.

Terrified.

Real.

“No,” Regulus said. “But he can learn.”

He spoke the restoration charm.

The counterfeit came apart.

James fell out of the portrait face-first.

There was no elegant way to emerge from a painting. One moment he was trapped behind varnish; the next he spilled over the lower edge of the frame, caught one knee in the carved moulding and struck the floor with a noise that alarmed every conscious portrait in the building.

Regulus stood over him.

James rolled onto his back.

His glasses had reappeared, though one lens was painted opaque.

“You kissed him,” he said.

Regulus stared.

“That is your first concern?”

“I was trapped in a painting.”

“I noticed.”

“He ate my great-aunt.”

“He ate several of your relatives.”

“You kissed him.”

“It was tactical.”

“It was lengthy.”

“I needed to establish certainty.”

“You looked quite certain from where I was.”

Regulus crouched.

James’s skin was flesh again. His pulse beat frantically beneath Regulus’s fingers.

“You’re alive,” Regulus said.

James stopped.

“Yes.”

The word came out differently.

Regulus looked down at his hand, still resting against James’s throat.

He withdrew it.

James caught his wrist.

Not perfectly.

Too fast, a little clumsy, fingers pressing harder than necessary against the bones.

Regulus’s heart lurched.

“What gave him away?” James asked.

“Everything.”

“Helpful.”

“He was exactly what I might have wanted.”

James’s grip loosened.

“Right.”

“That was how I knew.”

James looked toward the ceiling.

“Still not following, but I have recently been eaten by myself.”

Regulus sat beside him on the floor.

Around them, the workshop was in ruins. Paint ran across the boards in impossible colours. The Potter portrait had begun returning its stolen subjects. A bewildered old witch emerged from beneath the green sofa. One Victorian child dropped from the painted ceiling and immediately bit her.

“He knew everything about me,” Regulus said.

James was quiet.

“He understood every fear before I expressed it. He knew precisely when to touch me, precisely what to say. There was no possibility of rejection because he had been made from wanting me.”

“Sounds convenient.”

“It was intolerable.”

James turned his head.

Regulus traced the cut across his palm.

“I don’t want to be loved by something that cannot choose otherwise.”

James looked at him for a long time.

Then he sat up.

His hair was full of gold paint. One eye was magnified absurdly behind the damaged lens.

“I don’t know what I feel,” he said.

Regulus’s chest tightened.

James continued before he could look away.

“I know I’ve noticed you since I was eleven. I know you terrified me at fifteen, and not only because you hexed Mulciber’s eyebrows into his throat.”

“He deserved it.”

“Absolutely. I know I stood behind the greenhouse wall and wanted to go to you.”

“But didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you were crying.” James pushed his broken glasses up his nose. “And you hated being looked at when you weren’t prepared for it. You still do.”

Regulus said nothing.

“I know I kept thinking there would be a better time,” James continued. “After Sirius was safe. After school. After the war. After my parents. After you stopped looking at me like you were deciding where to hide the body.”

“I had selected a location.”

“Thought you might’ve.”

A reluctant smile touched Regulus’s mouth.

James noticed.

Of course he did.

“I don’t know how much of what he felt belongs to me,” James said. “Maybe all of it. Maybe none. I don’t want to say I love you because a murderous painting said it first and now we’re both feeling competitive.”

“That would be unwise.”

“But I wanted to kill him when he touched you.”

“Jealousy is not love.”

“I know.”

“And neither is possession.”

“I know.”

“You are allowed not to know.”

James looked at him.

The air seemed to change.

Not magically. Nothing flashed or shattered. No violins played upstairs, though one vampire began practising scales.

“You’d let me not know?” James asked.

“For a limited period.”

“There he is.”

“Do not become sentimental.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

They sat beside each other on the paint-streaked floor.

In the portrait, the Potter family slowly repopulated the drawing room. Bewildered ancestors crawled from behind curtains and emerged from the yellow roses. The Victorian children chased one another across the ceiling. Someone began shouting about the indignity of digestion.

James’s shoulder touched Regulus’s.

Neither moved away.

After a while, James said, “I do know one thing.”

“What?”

“I want to kiss you.”

Regulus looked at him.

James looked back.

There it was: the hesitation.

Awkward, mortal, precious.

He wanted. He feared. He waited.

He left room for Regulus to refuse.

“Even after watching me kiss a superior version of you?” Regulus asked.

“He was better-looking.”

“He looked identical.”

“Cruel thing to say to a man in my condition.”

“Your condition is melodrama.”

“I’ve been through something.”

“Your great-aunt has been through you.”

James made a strangled noise.

Regulus laughed.

James kissed him in the middle of it.

The angle was wrong. Their teeth struck. James’s broken glasses caught in Regulus’s hair, and when Regulus tried to remove them he smeared gold paint across James’s cheek.

James pulled back.

“Disaster.”

“Yes.”

“Should we stop?”

Regulus looked at his imperfect face.

At the scar beneath his chin. The badly mixed expression. The questions he had not answered and the choices he had not yet made.

Then Regulus took James by the front of his ruined robes and kissed him again.

This one was worse.

This one was theirs.

Three weeks later, James returned to the workshop carrying the restored Potter portrait.

The missing family members had been returned to their original places. Additional protective enchantments now lined the frame. Painted James sat quietly upon the green sofa, diminished to an ordinary echo.

He no longer knew the future.

He no longer claimed to love Regulus.

Mostly, he complained about the weather.

“Mother wants to hang it in the west hall,” James said.

Regulus adjusted one of the frame’s brass wards.

“Your mother is alive?”

“Very.”

“You allowed me to believe the portrait ate her.”

“It ate a painted version of her.”

“You spoke of her as though she were dead.”

“She’d find that extremely dramatic. I didn’t want to encourage her.”

Regulus gave him a look.

James grinned.

The portrait mimicked him a second too late.

Regulus noticed.

He would always notice.

“Ready?” James asked.

“For what?”

“Dinner.”

“You did not ask me to dinner.”

“I’m asking now.”

“That is not adequate notice.”

“We discussed this yesterday.”

“You said we should eat.”

“I thought the implication was obvious.”

“Your implications recently attempted murder.”

James considered that.

“Fair. Regulus Black, would you have dinner with me tonight?”

“Where?”

“My flat.”

“Who is cooking?”

“I am.”

“No.”

James clutched his chest.

Inside the portrait, painted James did the same.

“Traitor,” real James muttered.

The portrait stuck out his tongue.

Regulus finished securing the final ward.

“I will come,” he said, “provided you allow me to supervise.”

James brightened.

Not elegantly.

His entire face changed before he remembered to protect it.

The sight moved through Regulus with all the grace of a hand breaking glass.

“Seven?” James asked.

“Half past.”

“Seven.”

“Half past.”

“Compromise. Quarter past.”

Regulus turned toward him.

James had already begun backing toward the door, smiling.

“Quarter past,” Regulus said.

“Brilliant.”

He left the workshop.

A moment later, he returned, crossed the room and kissed Regulus quickly beside the mouth.

This kiss was also imperfect.

James’s nose was cold from the rain.

“Quarter past,” he repeated.

Then he was gone again.

Regulus stood very still.

Behind him, the painted James leaned forward on the green sofa.

“You love him,” he said.

Regulus resumed cleaning his brushes.

“Your expertise is no longer prophetic.”

“I have eyes.”

“You have an artistic approximation of eyes.”

“He loves you too.”

“He has not said so.”

“He will.”

Regulus glanced at the portrait.

“How do you know?”

Painted James shrugged.

“I know him.”

Outside, real James collided with someone on the stairs, apologised loudly and knocked over what sounded like a suit of armour.

Regulus smiled despite himself.

“No,” he said. “You don’t.”

The painted figure frowned.

Regulus turned back to the window.

Below, James emerged into the rainy alley. He looked up at the workshop as though expecting Regulus to be there.

When he saw him, he waved.

Regulus lifted one paint-stained hand.

He thought of all the ways a person could be preserved. In oils. In memory. In the careful expectations of those who claimed to know them. A portrait could collect every familiar gesture, every beloved expression, every possible future, and still miss the essential thing.

A person was not the sum of what he had done.

Nor even what he might do.

He was the distance between wanting and choosing.

James stood in the rain.

For one brief moment he seemed uncertain whether to wait.

Then he did.

Regulus extinguished the lamps, locked the workshop and went downstairs to meet him.