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Regulus has dirt under his fingernails. Sirius notices at dinner, when he passes the pepper. There is thick, white bread, the glistening darkness of jam and caviar and heady, brown sugar lumps of molasses potatoes; the wine is cold and lemon-yellow, fish meaty, pink and oily, slathered with herbs. Narcissa is drinking chocolate from a porcelain glass, Bellatrix's hair is a thick, spiraling mass of dark-shining curls, she's wearing rubies in her ears. Sirius's collar is high and starched and smells like lye soap; the candlelight is buttery and perfect, crystal singing, the tablecloth pristine, the faint clink of silver, and Regulus has dirt under his fingernails.
"Sirius," says his Mother, eyes overlooking the place where Andromeda used to sit. "Your father and I have been considering Durmstrang."
"Fine, yes—fine institution," mumbles Sirius's father, coalscuttle voice, handsome face hidden in the shadows where the crystal doesn't reach.
"We have been considering Durmstrang," says his Mother, again. "Your behaviour, you know, is so reprehensible that they have been reluctant to even consider you. I am, however, persuasive. There is an interview with the Headmaster scheduled for you this Saturday."
"Why, you miserable cunt," says Sirius, dripping honey onto his plate with a twirl of his spoon. "You shouldn't have."
He is sent to his room for the rest of the night, expecting lashes; his fingers brush the back of Regulus's collar on the way out.
--
Three knocks, then four, and Sirius hears the soft scrape of an impatient shoe.
"Go away," he says, into the pillow.
"Shan't," says the voice on the other side of the door.
"Christ!" Sirius yells, and sits up enough to throw the heaviest thing he can find. "Go the fuck away!"
"I won't," says Regulus, and his shoe scrapes again, in the way he shifts from foot to foot when he's afraid or a little nervous. "Open it."
Sirius turns his head—his neck is sore, and protests—and blows hair from his face, still a little damp with sweat. "It is," he says, and props his chin on his wrists.
Regulus enters with shuffling steps, Sirius can hear every grate of his heel and the way the bones creak when Regulus moves, his wrist on the doorknob, his joints rubbing, knees a little stiff in the cold of Sirius's room. He sits on Sirius's bed, at the foot of it; Sirius feels the dip in the mattress, the tightening of the sheets under his stomach and thighs, the hiss in Regulus's throat when he sees.
"You," he says, and stops, swallow echoing.
"Shut up," says Sirius. "Christ."
"You could," says Regulus, and his hand brushes Sirius's ankle.
"I couldn't," says Sirius, rolling his eyes, blowing hair from his eyes again, studying the knots in the wood of his headboard. "You want I should've said something like you?"
"Don’t, that's not—"
"Fair? Oh, yes Mummy, please do, I'd be ever so glad to be subject to your fucking whims, oh yes. Christ, what a joke." He cranes his head a little; he can see the curve of Regulus's thighs, black suit, the cross of his ankles, perfect white stockings. "What," he says. "Would you rather I went?"
"No," says Regulus.
"Horseshite," snorts Sirius. "You'd beg to fucking go, too, wouldn't you?"
"Maybe," whispers Regulus. "Yes, maybe."
Sirius sighs, grunts when he sits up and silences Regulus's protest with a glare. "Course you would. You're such a fucking mess," he says, bracing his weight on his hands, ignoring the way he can feel the skin on his back split anew.
"You're bleeding," says Regulus.
"And you're not," snaps Sirius. "Fucking deal with it."
They are quiet. The air is muffled and tight, and cold. The tapestries stare back at them with thick heaviness, quilted ivy strangling the small figures inside—fairies and racing steeds, the cream-white skin of princes, magicians with charcoal robes, rust-red and faded royal blue, iron and gold and sepia flowers with petals like grasping metal fingers, gripping at the edges for a way out. The crest is centered, ore-black, painted like ink. There is no one in the portraits—they've been ordered to stay away.
"Mother's taken your owl into the kitchens," says Regulus. There is a clatter down the hall, and Narcissa's voice, sweet like a noose, calling for Ninsy.
"Good for her," Sirius grunts, reaching down for his shirt, shrugging into it with a wince and sees Regulus's wrists crossed in his lap, the soft little curve of the bone disappearing into the starched cuffs, the curve of his cheek, eyes dark like wine, averted.
"What's this?" says Sirius, and takes his hand. Regulus's palm is clammy, wrist cool and brittle-thin; Sirius can see the blue veins spider-webbing under the skin. Regulus is all translucent rice paper, pretty pureblood flush, perfect and delicate and deep, shadow-smudged lashes and night-black hair, haughty and small.
"Nothing," says Regulus, and scrapes a finger under his thumbnail, hiding the dirt.
--
"I saw you had a letter," says Regulus, watching him eat.
"Yeah?" Sirius wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve just to watch Regulus wince, and stirs his porridge, watching it congeal at the edges of the bowl. He is drinking tepid coffee and scraping oats from his bowl with the back of his spoon, finding it no more edible in the drafts of the lower kitchen than in the summer room, when it was him and Regulus, five and six, sharing a table and laughing when Narcissa threw a fit over her toast. He hated it then, but at least the company was tolerable, he thinks.
Now, Regulus is looking at him with liquid eyes, wrists arranged neatly on the rough wood of the table in front of his chest, like a doll, and it makes Sirius a little sick, a little too warm, a little too much like he wants to keep looking. He licks the curve of the spoon, glares at the bottom of his bowl.
"So?" he asks. "Who from?"
"I don't know," says Regulus, eager and proper. "But Mother took it when she locked Killer down here."
Killer gives a baleful hoot from his cage over the sink and Sirius does his best not to feel empathetic. Too cliché, he thinks, even if his back does hurt.
"I'll find it," says Sirius, and silences Regulus's protest with a flick of oatmeal over the table. "So don't worry."
--
Sirius goes in at dawn. His Mother's waiting room is cold—the fire isn't lit—and the tapestries are thin, portraits a study in restless, empty sleep. The light is gray, enormous French windows closed against the soft rain, curtains held open with gold cord, pooled on the carpet like a dead serpent.
He sifts through the drawers beside the daybed, kneeling by the window, finding brooches, the silver necklace with the liquid Celtic links, the stone ring with the crest, the one that never comes off, until the owner dies, wax seals, quills, thin parchment, dry as flaking skin, curling on the edges, a thick envelope tied with a piece of string with Sirius's name written on it in James's sprawling scrawl, and a nail-thin tear along the edge.
"The bitch," he whispers, grinning wickedly as he sits back on his heels, letter on his thighs and his eyes catching the edge of the window, the view outside, the gardens below, and Regulus kneeling by the nut trees.
The willow trees are bare and bent, like old men, trailing whiskers behind them, hiding dead roses, cold-blue branches of birch and oak, the carpet is moss, gray-green and sodden, sinking into earthy pits, peat smothering the places where the snapdragons grew in the colour of spices, once, cumin and curry and nutmeg, herbs down the stone path, parsley growing between the rocks. The lilies are asleep, trodden by the dogs and elves, Sirius imagines them a cold blue, beneath the soil.
And he watches, barely breathing, because Regulus is on his knees in front of the fruit and nut trees, hands in the earth, behind the house, in the dawn, and it's raining.
Sirius stays there until he hears Narcissa's voice upstairs, and then he forgets the letter on the floor, and is locked in his room again. He ignores the knocking, that night.
--
Sirius opens the door with his hand on the place that creaks, to hold it still. He doesn't knock. He stands with it open and tries not to feel the way his stomach curls into tiny, metal-hot Celtic curls, making his fingers shake. It's just him, he thinks, it's just him, you know him, you know the way this works, don't you?
He thinks maybe, though, that he doesn't anymore. When it's Regulus asleep and quiet, moonlight child, tiny prince, laid out in tangled sheets with his black hair curling on the pillows and his porcelain-bow mouth, slack. Sirius imagines he can see each breath escape, like the shining after-dust of a spell. He imagines this isn't any different from when Regulus was four, five, six – when Regulus was always a little peaked, a little flushed, sometimes confined to sweaty sheets and restless nights of frustrated tears into the pillow. And since nobody knew how, and the Doctors had fingernails that scratched and eyes that were a little too mad for Sirius's liking, Sirius would stroke his hair. It was enough, then, he thinks. It was enough to say I love you with a childish palm, when Regulus was deaf to most of it, anyway.
But this moment seems too fragile, he thinks. He could wake, thinks Sirius; I could wake. Here could be the place where hold him up or hold him down, and would he care either way. Sirius's fingers tighten; he feels the wood bite under his fingernails. Would he want it, says something at the base of his throat, making his heart do a skip, and that's enough to flee. Enough to grope blindly to his room, to lock the door with sweaty palms that smell of perversion and slump there, with his back to the stone and unzip his trousers.
He's hard enough; enough to, he thinks, and swallows hard, squeezing his eyes closed, and does. Wet and too tight and too fast, but it's all he needs, because he's not caring, at the moment, if it's anything but him, soft and proper and horrible at keeping secrets. He bites the inside of his cheek and imagines the slip of a crisp white shirt off of a shoulder, the slope of a flushed cheek, the earth-curve of a spine against his lips; he comes and tastes tissue-thin skin under his tongue.
--
"What're you doing?" asks Sirius.
Regulus turns, back rigid with surprise, fingers clenched in the dirt. "Nothing," he says.
"On your knees in the dirt," says Sirius, and leans against a cherry tree. He bends down. "What would Mother say?"
"Don’t tell," says Regulus, automatically, fingers restless on his trousers, brushing off the evidence there. The dawn makes him look like an unhappy flower. "Sirius, don't."
Sirius crouches, head tilted to the rising sun, somewhere over the chimneys. "Be too easy, wouldn't it? What're you doing?"
"Planting," says Regulus. "I'm planting."
"And what are you planting?" Sirius grins, rolling the words off his tongue with easy mockery, but he sees the sprout of a green shoot, something like the split tongue of a dragon, midnight purple at the tips, yellow at the root, where it plunges into the earth.
"Flowers," says Regulus. "Because she fired the gardener."
"That was six sodding years ago, you know," says Sirius, glaring. "No one fucking goes in here anymore, anyway."
"You used to," says Regulus. "We used to."
Ah, thinks Sirius. Is it that, then. He sits with his back to the gnarled trunk, squints up at the sky. "Yeah," he says. "I think we did, hm?"
"Yes," says Regulus, fingers patting at the soil, by Sirius's ankle.
"You're such a fucking mess," says Sirius, smiling at the bend of his head, the curve of his neck.
"I'm not," Regulus frowns. "I'm not the one who— "
"The one what."
"Nothing," whispers Regulus, and he turns his wrist over, to brush off the dirt, exposing the blue veins, like translucent roots. "It's nothing."
Sirius takes his hand, presses two fingers to the place where the veins split, feels the flutter of a pulse, like moth wings.
"I have to," he says. "I'll go mad, otherwise."
Regulus's fingers find his wrist, and they are overlapping, leaning into one another, Regulus's knees against his hip, Regulus's shoulder against his elbow, arm, Regulus's mouth against his jaw; he's cold, perfect, struggling for breath. Sirius grins.
"You are mad," says Regulus, desperate.
Sirius turns his head; their cheeks brush together. "I don't want this."
"I can make you happy," whispers Regulus, into his ear, and the world takes a shuddering breath with him.
And here is the place where the thread unravels, thinks Sirius. Too much, he thinks, and closes his eyes.
"I can," says Regulus, again, hoarse, mouth wet against his cheek.
"Shut up," whispers Sirius. Don't think. "Don't. Just, don't."
And if they stay still enough, Sirius realizes, they can feel the spread of starling's wings, feel the rich heat of the earth, the tilt of it turn; they can hear things struggling to grow, deep down.