Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Regulus looked at his back in the wavering light of a candle, waiting for the power to turn back on, and the music. The pendant on the gold chain he always wore was sticking to the back of his neck, and the gold cross gleamed in the fragile light and emphasized the silence in a way that felt unendurable. Do you really believe in God? Regulus didn’t ask him, he looked at the emaciated figure of Christ glowing between his tan shoulders while James drunkenly buried his face in the rumpled pillows all over his bed, and pretended they were other people, living somewhere else. People with less mistrust tangled up between them. 

Thunder shook the house. Regulus looked at the frozen ceiling fan wavering in the candlelight. The rain was pounding relentlessly on the window beside him, and in the candlelight he could hardly make out the drops pouring down the face of the window like tears, like the emaciation in miniature on the back of a man who had never stopped feeling like a stranger, no matter how long he knew him. 

“Why did you come here?”

“You don’t like storms,” James replied. His voice was muffled in the pillow. His voice was thick. 

Regulus turned toward him, laying on his side. James didn’t lift his head from the pillow. 

“Are you…?” He’d never been good at this. James didn’t move. “Are you alright?”

James said nothing. He turned toward him, his face shadowed and inscrutable. 

“James?” 

“Can we listen to the rain a little longer before you ruin everything a second time?” 

That might have hurt someone that wasn’t Regulus, instead, amusement threatened to twist his mouth. James watched him, wary, like a beaten dog. Bite me again, Regulus thought. I missed your teeth. I missed the nettle-sting of you. My fire flickering on the horizon. The absence of cold. 

It had been a long winter without him. Winter even in July. The thistledown pooled around his front porch made the encroaching end of summer clear enough, but James was something else. Blown in with the bad weather, like some kind of omen. 

Regulus lit a cigarette. “Whatever. I was trying to be nice to you, but on you that’s pretty well wasted, isn’t it? You never liked me kind. You liked something else in me.” The cherry glowed in the dark. Regulus let the smoke sit in his mouth and let James suffer in the silence. James was still scared of him, he could feel it. He’d thrown Regulus away like garbage, and for some reason Regulus still let him in. He was this weak for no one else alive. Kindnesses were foreign to him, but Regulus knew his niceties and manners well enough to know what he ought to do most of the time to seem like a real person on the inside. This, though? This was like navigating the open ocean on a cloudy night. Would the right thing to do have been to leave him out in the cold? What are you supposed to do when your ex boyfriend drives drunk and winds up at your place staggering on the porch looking like a wilted angel? 

“I’m sorry,” James finally whispered. 

“Are you ever not sorry?” He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which made him look strangely vulnerable, more vulnerable than the glassiness in his eyes alone. His sharp words hit the mark, as always. James looked at the cigarette. Another ethical question: Do I have to split smokes with a boy who called me a monster to my face and spent a year pretending not to know me? “It was a stupid question anyway, you wouldn’t be here if you were alright.” 

“I guess I missed you or something. I don’t know.” 

It would have been kinder to leave him in the cold.

Chapter Text

“Pretty boy

Consumed by death

With the holes in his sneakers

And his eyes all over me”

–Dust Bowl, Ethel Cain

When it came to not fucking talking about it, James was an expert. 

It’s important not to think too much. That’s the first step. The most important one, blazing in neon: KEEP MOVING. (don’t think)

When he woke up in Regulus’ bed with a pounding head and no memory of how he got there, he didn’t lay there thinking about any of it, he got up and started looking for his clothes. 

Regulus looked deceptively peaceful when he was asleep. His face in sleep was one of the worst things James remembered about him. He’d stood over him once, on a really bad day, after a really bad fight, with a knife in his hand thinking, It would be easy, It would finally be over, Just like a buck with a shot in it, It would be so easy, but Regulus looked so young and sweet when he was asleep he couldn’t make himself do it. On bad days now, days when the rage at what Regulus did to him was blue-hot instead of smouldering, James looked back and regretted not sticking the knife in him when he had the chance at nineteen, and then he felt awful about it, like somehow someone was listening to him think about all of this shit. Thoughts didn’t matter, thoughts don’t make you who you are. He knows that, but he has to remind himself sometimes that it wasn’t just a thought. He picked up the knife. He walked to his bedside. He looked at his pulse thrumming in his throat and pressed his own fingertip into the tip of the knife until he drew blood before he could make himself walk away. 

It wasn’t just a thought. 

But what he didn’t do mattered more than what he did do. He didn’t kill him. James did the thing he knew he should. He hid the knife in the box of tampons Regulus kept under the sink at the back of the spider-filled cupboard in the bathroom (even though the only girl Regulus knew, when James knew him best, was Pandora–a count of one). That box of tampons was a million fucking years old. 

It was probably still there… that knife. A folding and very practical hunting knife. A knife just like the one James’ dad gave him when he was barely tall enough to see over a kitchen counter. It was a good idea to keep a knife like that around, when dating a boy like Regulus. 

One of Regulus’ ten million once-stray cats wrapped itself around his ankle, a silver tabby with one eye put out. The worst part of him wondered if Regulus was the one who took its goddamn eye out. Fox bones were being reassembled on wire on his worktable by the back door, the newest piece of his eternal quest to take dead things and make them seem alive. A taxidermist with rabbit traps in his yard. There was one 4-point antler mounted above the door to his bedroom that James couldn’t look at without a swarm of hornets waking up behind his ribs. 

Regulus wasn’t scared of death or abjection. 

James used to like that about him. 

Regulus and his creepy crawlies; the kind of boy to let a house centipede bite him just to watch it crawl up his arm, the kind of boy to bleach the skull of a songbird his cat left at his door and sneak it into James’ coat pocket like a love note. 

Now, James looked into a pair of glass eyes above the door between the living room and the dining room and felt nothing but the pain behind his own eyes–headache, hangover, heartbreak, homesickness? Answer: (don’t think)

Better Question: What the fuck am I doing here? 

He shouldn’t drink so much, but to follow his own rules sometimes he needed a little chemical assistance. If it was between swallowing every pill in the house or buying a bottle of something vicious and sitting with the devil he knew over the death he didn’t, he picked the devil every time. It was practical, really. Like, minimizing the damage. It was kind, really. He was being so kind to himself.

James stole four darts out of the pack of cigarettes on Regulus’ nightstand and crammed two in the pocket of his reacquired jeans, lit one, and put the third behind his ear. There were candles all over the place, why? James didn’t fucking know. The air smelled wet. It was so hot if he couldn’t find his shirt James knew he could step out of this place without one on and no one would spare him a second look for it. The sun was out, and boiling all the rain off of the trees. James could smell it. He could taste it, even through the too-familiar Salem menthol in his mouth. 

Had he even been wearing a shirt? His head was killing him. His mouth sort of tasted like bile under the cigarette smoke. He wanted to bury himself here, under that bed, and sink into gravedirt right where Regulus rested his head. I hope I haunt you, motherfucker. He wanted to get the fuck out of here before Regulus woke up. This was a mistake. Coming here was a mistake. An awful, horrible–

“Come to your senses, have you?” 

“If I ever had any, I found them.” 

“Ha,” Regulus said flatly. There were wine coloured bruises up and down his arms. James swallowed the insane impulse to grab his wrist and press his thumb into one, Where did this one come from? What hurt you? How do I kill it? 

What was that saying about old habits? James was a collection of bad old habits rambling around in skin pretending to be a man. 

“Did we…?” James didn’t even want to say it out loud. What did I do? He remembered a blurry impression of his dark hair, and his eyes, the crosshatched spider-web scars wrapped around his ankles, rolling around on his living room carpet, skin on his tongue, and nothing that stopped him from thinking, did I… did we…?

“I can’t read your mind.” Regulus was looking at him like he wanted to dissect him. “If you want answers you have to finish your questions.” After a year without seeing him face to face for more than a few minutes at a time in passing around town, like a ghost of a wisp of a memory, James felt unsettled at the sight of him this close. It was like stepping into an old photograph. “It’s not raining. The sun is up. If you don’t want to talk, you should leave.” 

“You’re kicking me out?” 

“Looks like it.” Regulus smiled at him peaceably and walked toward the door, like he was corralling him. 

“Wait. Hold up, give me a second.” James kept his back to the door. “I don’t remember anything from last night.”

“I’m aware.” He smirked like a goddamn devil, if James had ever seen a devil it was on this face right in front of him now. Lucifer wrapped in skin. Lucifer, at twenty-one, with his eyes colder than winter, sending pins and needles up and down James’ spine with nothing more than pointed looks. “You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself driving here.” 

“What did I do?” 

“We should treat this like an exchange. Twenty questions, eighth grade again, it’ll be fair that way. You answer me, then I’ll answer you.” Regulus bent to pick up the cat that had been winding itself around James’ ankle, and cradled the mangy little thing as nice and gentle as you’d hold a bird, like it had hollow bones. It looked at James with one milky eye. “Deal?”

“Or you could just tell me.” James tried to tell himself he didn’t miss this, but even in his own head it wasn’t convincing. Regulus was nothing like anyone else he’d ever met. Life was easier without him. It was peaceful. It was… boring. It was miserable. “Like a normal person. I don’t know why everything always has to be a game with you.” 

“I don’t understand plenty of things about you. I don’t understand why you showed up on my porch soaked through to your skin and cried in my bed like I’m not a stranger. You told me you never want to see me again the last time we talked. You can’t talk about not understanding me, not to complain. Your right to it has been revoked. Don’t try to explain yourself either, I don’t care.” Evil eyes, halfmoons. “Question, and answer. Answer, and you shall receive an answer in return. First hit is free, Angel.” 

“Did we fuck?” 

“You were so drunk you could hardly stand up straight, and you think I slept with you?” Yes, as if you wouldn’t, you asshole. James sucked on his cigarette and didn’t say the worst part out loud. He was good at that… sometimes. “Aw.” Regulus smirked. “Would it really be that easy?” James had a sudden overwhelming desire to dress in black from head to toe and walk down the centerline of the highway after dark. Turning into a fine red mist might be preferable to this. “You really can’t handle shit your own, can you?” 

“What did I tell you last night?” 

“Ah. So impatient.” Regulus was utterly pitiless. A familiar violence coiled in James’ stomach. “My turn, remember?” 

“Alright, yeah, ask. Fine.” James crossed his arms over his chest and wished for a scrap more clothing than the jeans he’d found splayed like something dead. When he caught sight of them on Regulus’ bedroom floor again he felt like he should outline them in chalk to keep a record of his crimes. 

“If you came here that drunk, in that kind of storm, you must have thought of me. You must have thought of me a lot.”

“I was drunk.” 

“Do you miss me, James?” His eyes gleamed like a knife catching a blade of sunlight. “How much do you miss me?” 

“Fuck this, whatever, I don’t care what I said, obviously it was bullshit. I shouldn’t be here.” James was getting ash all over his carpet like an asshole. Maliciously, he flicked more of it toward his couch. Fuck you. He stubbed his filched cigarette out in an empty glass. 

“Do you want coffee?” 

“You were just about to kick me out, and now you’re offering me coffee?” James was less used to him than he had been before, when this was his day to day existence. He felt rusty. A plague of locusts had nothing on Regulus when it came to pestilence. He was sick in the head. Regulus, and his puppet strings, and his stupid merciless eyes that made James cold all over, like a dead thing walking. 

“You still drink coffee, right?” His cat squirmed and hopped out of his arms and perched on his couch with another four of them, where the sun seemed hottest. Regulus liked to nap in the sun like that, like a cat. James figured he liked him best and least when he was sleeping. 

“Part of me thought maybe you changed a bit, grew up a little.” His skin was crawling. “You’re still all spider.” 

“I’m sorry.” Those words never seemed to fit in Regulus’ mouth quite right.  

“Yeah.” Another choking game. “For what?” 

“It’s just… I don’t know. You didn’t say much.” His reddened fingertips tangled together. James couldn’t make himself look at his eyes. “You remembered I was scared of the rain.” 

Just like that, he was seventeen again, watching Regulus take one of his father’s guns off of the wall and put James in the sights without making sure it wasn’t loaded. Flicking the safety off. Don’t move. 

…now, look at me, son. this is important. you should never point your gun at anything you don’t mean to shoot…

James spun on his heel and stalked out of the house. 

The screen door clattered shut behind him, hot metal and hot sun in his eyes–a match made in hell. Lucky me. This was already one hell of a day and he hadn’t been awake anywhere near an hour. 

James left so fast he almost walked into the porch rail and stumbled over a rabbit trap, kicked it, swearing, then started up his truck. He’d parked like a blind man. He took off down the gravel, too wet with rain to kick up dust, and threw loose cigarettes on his dashboard and turned the music up loud so his thoughts would get a little quieter, then he drove for a long time down a road that had once been a hell of a lot more familiar, and he swore he could taste blood in his mouth, even though Regulus hadn’t thrown a punch since that first time, when Regulus was just fifteen and already had the devil in him. 

–𓆱–

“Sorry, it’s getting everywhere. Jesus Christ.” 

“You’re apologizing for bleeding?”

Regulus’ split knuckles on his split lip.

His fingers forcing his mouth open.

His tongue probing the split in his lip the way James had himself probed it, as if James’ mouth was his mouth. 

“If I knocked out one of your teeth,” his nails in skin, warm ease in his voice instead of ice, “I’d swallow it, and you’d be inside me forever. Part of you. It’d be like we’re one person.”

Blood on his jaw, blood on his hand, bloody fingers pressed into Regulus’ mouth.

The devil James knows.

“What does it taste like?” 

Shark-black eyes, the pale irises reduced to nothing more than the ring of light around an eclipse. “You’re playing a dangerous game.” Regulus had a sunburn like a fever. 

“Tell me.”

“You must think I’m a vampire.”

“My vampire.” 

“Mosquito.”

“My mosquito.”

“Yours,” Regulus whispered. “It tastes like you’re mine. For now. Alone, here.” A devotional refrain. “An Angel, all mine.”

…mine, mine, mine…

–𓆱–

Regulus looked too small and slight at fifteen to handle the kickback from the gun in his hands. James watched him with narrowed eyes and a blade of grass spinning between his fingers, and when Regulus shut one of his eyes and stared down the fancy scope on Fleamont’s 300 Win, James kicked his ankle. The bullet didn’t even hit paper. 

“Damn you! I had it.” 

“No. You didn’t. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you to keep both your eyes open. I swear that’s half the reason you’re such a terrible shot.” Regulus pulled the bolt back with more violence than he ought to. The gun spat gleaming shells out beside him. “They only shut an eye to shoot in the movies. Are we in a movie, Jesse James?” 

Regulus shot him a sour look. James beamed at him, which earned him even more haughty disdain. 

Regulus looked funny in his church clothes and starched slacks with his shiny black shoes buried in the dirt, and shell casing scattered all around him like morbid confetti. Raven hair falling in his eyes and fairer than the white bellies of the wildflowers in the tall grass beside them. Regulus kept both his eyes open for once but still missed the target completely. He glared at the gun, like the gun was the problem, then turned to James and threw the rifle at him. James caught it against his chest.

“Christ, did you even safe it out?” Regulus rolled his eyes.

“Don’t be a fucking girl. Show me again, since you’re so much better than me.”

“I don’t see how watching me shoot would help you any.” James did it anyway, and pretended not to see Regulus stealthily rubbing his own shoulder beside him, where the gun liked to kick. It must hurt like a bitch if you’re as scrawny as Regulus. James didn’t blame him for hiding it, he would’ve hidden any scraps of pain from himself too, if he was Regulus. Regulus was all skin and bones, and he was small for his age. He had to fight more to get treated like a man. He didn’t look much like Sirius. He looked like if Sirius was a bit less everywhere it mattered. Smaller, meaner, angrier. A hell of a lot weirder. No wonder he didn’t want James to see him nursing his bruises. James shoved his earmuff off one ear with his shoulder and handed Regulus the gun, making a dramatic, slow point of making sure the safety was on before he handed it over. “Here, try it again.” 

Regulus glared at the bullseyes on the target. James hit exactly where he aimed, without exception. 

“You’ve got glasses, I don’t see how you’re better at this than me.” 

“Have you considered the idea you might need to get some glasses?” 

“Fuck off.” 

“I didn’t have to drag you out here to the middle of nowhere to teach you how to use a gun, y’know. If Sirius found out we were doing this he’d lose his shit—”

“Shh!” Regulus snapped. 

“What? You need to really focus on missing your next shot?” 

“No,” he whispered harshly. “Shut up, look. Look.” 

It was impossible. All their shooting should’ve scared off anything living for miles, but somehow a deer was mincing through the field beside them. All wheat, hidden to the neck as if in open ocean not 60 yards away.

“It’s beautiful,” James whispered. He ducked below the ocean of wheat too, keeping just his eyes above the waves like an alligator. 

“Must be deaf.” 

“Has to be.” 

“He’s all alone,” Regulus said softly beside him. 

“They usually are, this time of year. How many points do you think he’s got?” 

“He looks young.” 

“Can’t be too young, look at the rack on him. I bet you could see a hell of a lot better with the scope.” 

Regulus raised the gun, and the deer looked up. 

A gunshot made James jump half a foot. He was so close to him he could smell the gunpowder. 

“What the fuck?” The deer reared but didn’t fall over, then took off into the field. James frantically fumbled for his bag. 

“My finger slipped.” 

“Give me the gun. Now.” Regulus handed it over. James pressed a buck knife into his hand in exchange. “Finish what you started.” 

“What do you mean?” James slung the gun on his back and took off in the direction the deer went in, and Regulus stuck to his heels. 

“You see that blood?” James crouched and pointed it out, along with the frantic hoofprints all over. “Now we have to put the thing out of its misery. That was a cruel thing you just did. That’s fucked up. You only take a shot when you know you can kill it, or at least knock it off its legs. Those animals who pump a deer full of six or seven bullets before they actually take it down are sick. You have to be attentive about when you’re holding a weapon like this. It isn’t a toy.” 

“I thought I’d miss.” 

“You don’t aim a gun at something unless you want to shoot it,” James glared right into his eyes. “And you wait until you can hit a living thing right in the heart before you pull the trigger. We can’t even get his meat back home without getting in shit. This is such a waste of a life.” 

“I can’t get these clothes dirty. She’ll kill me. You don’t understand.” 

“You’re going to kill that deer you shot, or I’m going to tell your mother and your brother exactly where you were today. Got it?” Regulus stared at him with bated breath. James jolted away to keep up after the deer. “I can give you something to wear, I have some spare shit in my truck.” 

“No offense, but if I show up home in clothes like yours my mother will be—”

James shrugged off his jacket and threw it over Regulus’ shoulders. “If that doesn’t keep the blood off you, you’re on your own.” 

“Blood?” There was something unreadable in Regulus’ voice. Not trepidation. 

“Can you hear it?” 

There was something in the tall grass nearby, near enough James could hear grass breaking around it. 

“I can hear it.” Regulus was looking at him, not the violent rustle of grass, or the blood under his church shoes. The deer was limping and half keeled over, the grass was too tall to make it out at a distance. James raised his rifle in case Regulus didn’t have enough nerve to kill it. 

“Now you can see it too, get it over with. It’s only mercy.” 

“8-point,” Regulus whispered. 

“Kill the fuckin’ thing.” 

“They’re smaller than I thought they’d be, a buck up close.” 

“We’re gonna have to just leave it here. My dad would have my hide over this, so I don’t want to know what the hell your parents would do to you. I know you’re nervous to kill it, but you have to kill it, and if you can’t do it you better tell me, I’ll do it myself.” 

“You’ve done it before?” James didn’t look at him, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the deer thrashing in the grass like a fish out of water. Deer don’t die well. They fight it off the whole way. Every time James saw it he had nightmares for days. “Killed one?” 

“A few. Do it now. If I have to shoot this fucking thing I’m telling your brother what you did, I don’t care what that’ll mean for you.” 

“I can do it. I’ve just…” Regulus’ voice was small. “I’ve never killed anything so beautiful.” 

He strode through the grass and bent, he stroked the neck of the deer almost tenderly, as if trying to feel its pulse or breath, then slid the blade across its throat. A waterfall of blood gushed out of the slit he’d made in him, and the deer’s eyes rolled wildly while it twitched and kicked feebly, and began to die, badly. Regulus was frozen, staring at the red all over the animal and his knife. His hands were thick with it. Blood was turning the gold of young wheat crimson. 

The thing that had been a deer laid still, and turned into meat. 

“You alright?” 

“We can’t take the flesh off it, we’d never be able to keep it a secret. But it doesn’t have to be a total waste of a life.” Regulus stroked one of the antlers with a crimson hand. “You’ve done this before, right?” 

“With my dad.” 

“Would you show me how? I want to keep them, him. He’s so beautiful. Look at him… He’s still warm. How long do they stay warm?” 

“Longer than you’d think.” James took the knife from him. “Watch, and do what I tell you.” 

In the truck when the sky opened up and the rain washed the blood off of the grass, Regulus cradled the antlers against his borrowed jacket like they were holy relics of a religion all his own. 

He watched the sky like it would take a bite out of them if he didn’t keep it in his sights. Wild eyed with something near fear. James didn’t get it. Regulus never seemed to be scared of much of anything. He was watching the sky with more trepidation than he’d had when he watched that deer twitch to death.

When James dropped him off at Crouch’s place, the place Regulus told his mother he’d be, Regulus kept his jacket. I’ll get it back to you, I swear. He held his bloody hands in the rain as if to scrub them clean, and smeared red all over the camouflage James had lent him, and smiled for all the world like he hadn’t killed anything, like the sun was shining, and James felt something open up in him that had no bottom, and no light, an alien sort of fascination that felt like sharpish pain. Stinging nettles. Fire. 

It wasn’t until he was in his own driveway that James was in his own body instead of his brain enough to realize Regulus had left the other antler on his passenger side. 

–𓆱–

“It’s just a dream. Just a bad dream.”

Tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, swearing at the moon. Wiping tears off of his cheeks. 

“You’re safe. I promise. Nothing’s ever gonna hurt you while I’m here.”

“In my dreams,” James whispered into cold skin, “you’re always burning.”

“Come here. I love you, come here, look at me. I’m not burning. I’m right here.”

“Why do you smoke?”

A sleepy, dazed pause. “I guess I’ve never been scared of dying.”

“I wish you were scared of dying. I wish you were careful with yourself.”

“I’m not a very careful person.”

“I wish you were carefuller. I need you.” James’ voice growing smaller, meaner. “You’ve never needed anybody.”

“Nobody but you, Angel.”

A glare like the fire in his dreams was lingering in his eyes.

“I’m tired.”

“So sleep.” 

“In the fire?” They stared into the cold dark, and no matter how many kisses Regulus pressed into his hair, he couldn’t chase the light and shadow out of his skull.

–𓆱–

Regulus knew he didn’t feel as much as other people feel, as much as James feels if he means to be specific. James, who seems to live life with his sensitivity turned up to eleven. James of the quick angry words. James of slamming cupboards and sullen silences. James of laughter like a gale and thunder and buildings falling down. James of want so hungry he might as well be burning alive. He’d grown so used to being alone he’d almost forgotten the extent of his own distortions, or perhaps lack of distortions. This was like a day of rain after 365 days of drought. James felt more than he did, always, but in his wake Regulus felt more than he did for anyone or anything else. Watching the same red-and-white pick up peel out of his driveway was more bitter than sweet, but there was sweetness in it. 

The sweetness was in the look James gave him before he turned to bolt out the door. 

A flash of softness in his eyes, then hatred, then a flicker of the thing that had been love once. Then gone. 

A boy full of stormclouds and a boy without any of his own weather. 

They were doomed from the start.

Regulus kissed the new bruises on his own wrist, every bruise a love letter, and cleaned up some of the mess they’d made the night before. James left his shirt where he’d taken it off, on his couch, when he pulled Regulus into his lap like no time had passed at all since the last time he was there, drunkenly kissing, come on, baby, into the side of his neck. Regulus let him, and when James reached over his shoulder and tugged off his shirt with one familiar movement, Regulus let him. The cross around his neck gleamed like it was mocking him. James pressed his lips to his collarbones, and then one of his hot hands slid up the side of his body, clumsy with drink, his eyes closed, his tongue–cigarettes, whiskey, James–a fistful of his hair in Regulus’ hands, soft and filthy, filthier than the sickness he could taste in James’ mouth. When James fumbled with his jeans, Regulus let him, and when James pressed his forehead into his stomach and whispered, God, I forgot what it feels like, to want someone, Regulus’ dick twitched like he hadn’t spent a year making do with whatever he could find around town instead of this. 

“You’re going to regret this,” he tried to say, when James let him get enough air to speak. James laughed into his mouth. 

“I regret every fucking thing I do. Things I don’t do. I just wanna have fun. I’m having fun.” 

“You’ll be upset tomorrow if we don’t stop.” 

“I don’t wanna stop. I wanna kiss you.” 

“James, please think about this a little. I don’t think you…”

“…just want,” he said, with his teeth, “to fuck you.” 

“James, this is a bad idea–”

“If it’s because you think I’m drunk, or whatever stupid thing, I’m fine. Stop babying me.” 

“We can’t fuck.” 

“Do you have a boyfriend or something?” The sudden wrath in his voice was maddening. Who does he think he is? 

“So what if I do? I’m trying to tell you no.” 

“No,” James repeated. He pressed a soft, slow kiss to the curve of Regulus’ wrist. His eyes were so big and dark and soft sometimes Regulus wished they’d swallow him so he could live in there, trapped in amber. “Do you still feel it like I do?” 

“Of course I feel it. I’ve always felt it.” Regulus held his face in both hands, and slid down his body to look at him eye to eye. “That’s why I’m saying no.” 

Regulus stroked his cheek with a touch like touching spun sugar with wet hands. Careful, careful, careful. 

“How the hell did you get more beautiful?” 

“Don’t do this to me.” James broke so easily, like a paper man. He hid his head in his arms like a child, he put distance between them. “Not now.” 

“Tell you no?”

“Look at me like you’re not a corpse. Don’t be kind to me. I don’t want mercy. I want you to hurt me. I want you to kill me. Please. It would be so much easier not to come back again if you hurt me.” 

Regulus stroked his hair. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to come back, part of you, at least.” 

“I just want to fuck you. That’s why I’m here.” 

“So leave.” 

“It’s raining.” 

“So stay.” 

James looked at him, and leaned into his hand like a puppy. Regulus wanted to crawl inside his chest and chew around his heart, hollow him out and curl up in every piece of him like a centipede. Instead, he pressed a kiss between his eyebrows. James watched him carefully. 

“You want to have fun? We can still have fun.” 

They played music to drown out the rain, and by the third song–not the genre James liked, Regulus broke every single one his goddamn folk records when he left in a fit of rage, all he had was his own music, they were listening to Bauhaus, The Cure, Joy Division–James was laughing half-deliriously, rolling around on the carpet with one of Regulus’ neatly rolled joints in the glass ashtray beside him. Regulus stretched out on the floor next to him and blew hideous smoke at the ceiling. One of his cats walked over James and James giggled like a little kid. He started cooing at the thing, and stroked its ears, asking for a name. 

“Ophelia.”

The song started sounding better, reverberated in him more completely, all the way to his toes, Regulus lit himself a cigarette then he passed the joint back to James, chasing the delicious almost-dizziness of tobacco and pot mixing up in his skull. James was hungry for escape, his eyes growing glassy and hazy, smiling at Regulus so softly while the record spun them around again. James kissed him lazily, like he had the right to kiss him slow and soft, like he loved him still, pressing Regulus into the carpet and pressing his body into his. 

“James?” 

“You want another drink? What else will you let me fill you with, baby?” James kissed the edge of his jaw, then fumbled down his body and kissed the denim between his legs, eyes big and wide and evil while his lips parted, and his hot spit sank through the fabric of his jeans. Regulus shoved him away, hard instantly, and James laughed, then rummaged through his cupboards looking for something to drink, and pressed the bottle to Regulus’ lips, and they both fell back into the well with no bottom, fingertips touching but not hand in hand. 

Worse. James had gotten worse in the time he’d been away from Regulus. Wilder, more destructive, meaner. His eyes gleamed mean when he laughed now, far more than they ever had before. Hatred was mixed up in him when he looked at Regulus, the way it had been when they were together, but it was less tame. He wasn’t a dog anymore. He seemed wolfish. Hungry for something raw and full of blood.

Regulus made himself coffee, and rooted around in his fridge to see what he had to eat (not much). He threw venison he’d ground up with pork in a pan and put a potato in the oven to bake and ate both so hot he burned his tongue. His coffee was strong and black. His phone rang while he was washing the dishes. 

“Hello, Black residence, Regulus speaking.” 

“Yeah, you don’t have to say it’s you, you’re the only person who lives in that fucking house.” 

“One day you’ll grow up, Barty, and I’ll call you and you’ll pick up the phone and say ‘Crouch residence’ instead of ‘What’s up? How are ya?’ like a seventeen year old.” 

“Whatever, are you busy right now?” 

“No.” A pause. “Will I be busy today?” 

“Count on it, man. Pandora’s on her way over there right now, she should actually be there in like, a minute, because she’s probably speeding.”

“Why, exactly, is Pandora speeding to my house right now?” 

“You know how we’re renovating that upstairs bedroom? I accidentally walled Evan into the closet we were adding when I sealed up the door on Luna’s side of the wall, and we hadn’t cut another opening for the new door yet, so–”

“You Cask of Amontillado-ed Evan?” 

“Listen, it sounds worse than it is, the only real problem is that we have to get him out before he has to take a piss, and you’re not busy, so I’d appreciate it if you gave our dear and beloved friend a scrap of your attention before he withers away–”

“Is he okay?” 

“I mean, it’s Evan. He’s been scratching at the walls making noises like he’s being torn apart, but I’m about ninety percent sure he’s just trying to fuck with me.” 

“Well, I’ve gotta get dressed and all, so I’m gonna hang up, but I’ll be there with Pandora.” 

“Awesome! Great. Thanks. Bring your skill saw, man.” 

Regulus got dressed quick, he always pretty much dressed in black from head to toe but with this many cats and no time to get the fur off himself he put on a sturdy pair of jeans and put James’ dirty t-shirt on his pillow to curl up with when he got home–weak, this weak for no one else alive–and dressed himself in an old t-shirt with a snake winding over it, and stuffed his wallet and a switchblade in his pocket, then went out to the shed to look for his stupid fucking skill saw. He kept most of his guns and bigger knives in his shed, and very nearly let himself get distracted by them when he ran a hand over one of them, cold and heavy, and still felt the thrill he’d felt the first time he ever touched a gun. 

Holding a gun is like driving a car. You get used to having death in your hands eventually, but the awareness is always in you. If I jerk this wheel… if I look down the muzzle, at its teeth…

It made him feel like God, that bolt-action hunting rifle the first time. James raising his hands, his body so close Regulus could feel the heat radiating off of him even in summer, the smell of his sweat and the smell of dry dust, cinnamon chewing gum. Good. His breath on the back of his neck. Now pull the trigger.

“I thought you’d be out back.” If Regulus was anyone else he might’ve jumped. He looked at Pandora and reminded himself to smile. Thinly. “I let myself in the house but it was empty.” 

Regulus had never met anyone else who looked like Pandora. Her hair, pale golden blonde, looked wilder and brighter somehow in the sun. Regulus was all in shadow, and she seemed sort of angelic, coming in with the daylight like her hair was a halo around her dark face. Her eyes were as dark as her skin. She always looked a bit ghostly in her long white dresses with her long white hair. 

“Are you ready to go? We’re kind of on a time crunch here.” 

“I was just looking for my skill saw, Barty asked me to bring it.” 

“For two very clever people it’s astonishing how stupid they can be when it’s the two of them together. It’s like their brains just get fried. But separate them, and they become reasonably clever again. It’s mystifying.” 

“Yeah, well, on the bright side it was only one of them that wound up sealed inside the walls. If it was both of them in there we never would’ve found out.” 

“Small mercies.” Pandora held up the circular saw he’d been rummaging around for. “Is this it?” 

Regulus took it off her. “Thanks, yeah.” 

“I’ll drive us both over, save you on some gas.” She winked at him. 

Pandora drove like a demon down the dirt roads, blasting music loud with every window down. Her little green beetle was better on the dirt roads than someone from the city might think. When they were forced to move here when Regulus was a kid and he saw all the dirt and gravel in every direction he was convinced their little sedan wouldn’t survive, but his parents never did get any sort of truck, and they don’t have one now. Their little black car can slink to town from their big old house, and that’s all his parents need. It’s not like they ever bother visiting him. Nor Sirius, who lived outside of town too but way the hell on the other side of it, with James. Regulus avoided both of them. The Black family had splintered into a dozen pieces and scattered on the wind. 

For a time, Regulus permitted himself closeness with Sirius. While he was sneaking into James’ bed after the sun went down, while James swore up and down to God and the devil that he wasn’t a queer, even with his lips wrapped around the head of a cock sucking on it like hard candy. Yeah, Sirius, I’ll come over and have a couple drinks, Yeah, Sirius, I’ll spend the night, so nice to be closer again, almost like real brothers, watching James while he bent over the pool table at one of the few bars in town, watching James walk through the living room shirtless in his jeans without any underwear on, watching James stretch out on the couch with one strong leg kicked up on the back of it, thinking: he could kill me, and I’d be happy to die. Taking him apart in quiet places and putting him back together again. Dark eyes finding him in every room, while Regulus burned. Regulus had spent half of his life burning for the same boy. Hellfire licked with one mouth, and he liked the heat of it. He liked pressing his nails under the scars James left on him on the inside, pressing a nail into, I don’t want to go to Hell, I hate you, I hate what you’ve done to me, like pressing a nail into a bruise, or picking at a cat scratch until it’s bloody again and seething hot. 

“Thank god you’re here!” Barty was on the front porch of the big ass house Evan, Barty, Pandora, Xenophilius, and little Luna all lived in together with hands clasped and eyes dark with mischief. His blond hair was wild, like his hands had been in it, and his black clothes were white with drywall dust. “You have the saw, right?” 

“Of course I do.” There was another car in the driveway. A familiar station wagon. “Who else is here?” 

“Oh, I called Severus to see what he could come up with. He’s here with Lily.” Great. 

There were two other people on the face of the earth who knew about everything that was tangled up between him and James. For all the years they’d spent together, they only got themselves caught once. 

Lily walked into James’ bedroom while he was all over him, when James was hers more than James had ever been his. 

“Can you believe these two?” Lily had Luna on her hip. She somehow looked prettier than she already had been the last time Regulus set eyes on her. Her long hair was in thick braids, loose and wild like she slept in them. Severus was with Barty and Pandora tapping on the wall, getting loud thumps in return. Severus said something to Barty about morse code that made him laugh so hard he almost fell over. “I’ve never heard of anyone doing a thing like this before in my entire life.” 

“EVAN!” Pandora shouted loud enough to crack glass. “I’M BACK, I HAVE A POWER TOOL! STAY AWAY FROM THIS WALL SO HELP ME GOD!”

Pandora plugged in the saw and just the sound made Regulus think of bones, smell the earthy, animal, clinging scent of skin curing into leather in a cold basement. A smell that stuck to your clothes, almost rancid, like a smell of rot. Clinging and hungry to return to life however it may–even only as a smell on living skin. 

But the smell was hot drywall in the summer. 

“Uh…” Pandora called over her shoulder. “Regulus, how do you use this goddamn thing?”

“It’s not hard.” Regulus took it from her and started reopening the clear line on the wall where the doorway had been with the saw. Drywall is lot easier to cut through than meat. “Just keep your fingers out of the way, or it’ll eat ‘em.”  

“I like having fingers.” 

“Most people do. I did read this article somewhere about this guy who amputated all his own fingers, just because he felt like he wasn’t supposed to have them, then his whole hand, then an arm. Said he’d be happier that way.” 

“Was he happier?” 

“Yeah.” Regulus smiled at her too wide. He liked getting away with lying. “Much happier. Said he felt like himself for the first time in his life. Is there a window we could open in here? It’s so hot in this house I swear a demon would sweat.” 

“I can get you a lemonade, sweetheart,” said Barty, batting his eyelashes. 

“You should be getting everyone here a lemonade. You’re the one who sealed Evan up in the wall. You alive in there, Rosier?” 

A faint: yeah, came weakly through the wall. 

“Lucky you.” 

Regulus got halfway up through the doorframe before he got too hot and sticky to keep his shirt on. Barty brought him a can of beer instead of a lemonade and Regulus pressed it to the back of his neck while he stepped back to look at how much more he had to carve through to get Evan out. He balled up his shirt and used it to wipe sweat off of his forehead. 

“Damn, who’s clawing you up?” 

“Mind your own fucking business,” Regulus snapped at Barty instantly. 

Clawing me up? 

“Are you dating a leech?” Barty was laughing to himself. It felt strange that Evan wasn’t adding to the chorus of amusement at his shoulder, like a pair of hyenas. 

“I’m not dating anybody. It’s none of your business anyway, I don’t see why you care.” 

“Is it anyone I know?” Regulus shot Barty as sour a look as he could muster and Barty just smiled wider, an alligator with human teeth. 

“It was no one. Nothing.” This obsession everyone always had with other people’s sex lives was mystifying to him. He didn’t care who was fucking who around town. He only cared who he was fucking, and who James was fucking. “Leave it alone, seriously.” 

“Is this the same girl you were sneaking around with when we were in high school?” asked Pandora. 

Regulus rolled his eyes and opened his beer and drank too much of it and didn’t say anything. 

He turned on the saw again and let it hum on air, keep fucking talking, I dare you, before he stuck it back into the wall. 

“My knight in shining armour.” Evan looked disheveled and shiny with sweat when the wall was finally open again.  “You saved my life, Barty tried to kill me.” 

“I have this incredible cask of amontillado in my basement over at my place,” said Regulus flatly. “You should come over and try it, Fortunato.” 

“Hilarious,” Evan said, with a smile like a razorblade and not a scrap of amusement. “You’re a riot. So funny. I need something cold to drink, it was like an oven in there.” Evan looked him up and down as if realizing the state of him for the first time. “You’re all dusty, do you wanna steal one of Barty’s shirts?”

“Nah, I’m alright.” Regulus lit himself a cigarette and sat on the windowsill, leaning over the open air and closing his eyes toward the sun. The wind–eternal prairie wind, windless days here were as rare as rainstorms–felt like a kiss. When he was younger he was ashamed of himself, and shy about his body. His paleness, and his bones, he’d been scrawny when he was a teenager, but he’d filled out since then. He didn’t look sickly anymore. In his blue jeans and his combat boots he felt half like a real man. Only took twenty-one years to get there. He looked at Lily, and Lily looked at him. There was something heavy and unreadable in her expression, the curve of her lip and the set of her brows. Evan and Barty had gone off to the kitchen with Pandora and Luna in tow. Only Regulus, Severus, and Lily were in the room listening to the wind, the smell of dust and beer and cigarettes was cloying the way florals are cloying in a garden. 

He smoked Salems to keep cold in the summer. James rolled his own cigarettes.  The mint of them clung to his hair and the tips of his fingers, a sweeter tobacco than the rough, red burn that he’d tasted last night for the first time in what felt like a life, a death. 

“I’m going to ask you a question, and you don’t have to say anything, or reply but If I don’t ask it it’ll eat me up inside.” 

“Best not,” Regulus said to Lily. He flicked his cigarette out the window and pulled his shirt back on. “Keep it to yourself, it’s only charitable.” 

“Is it him?” 

“Him?” Regulus turned to her, all her red hair full of light and her bright eyes full of shadows. “I don’t know who you mean.” 

She lowered her voice and moved closer. “Don’t play dumb with me.”

Regulus’ eyes flicked to Severus against his will. “Does he know?”

“Know what?” asked Severus. How a creature like that could be with a girl like Lily was beyond him, but, Regulus thought, really if anyone saw him with James they would’ve thought the same thing.

“Is he playing dumb?” Regulus glared at Lily. “Did you open your mouth?” 

“He’s my boyfriend. Do you keep secrets from your boyfriend?” All the blood drained from his face instantly. Lily turned white. “Sorry, I don’t–”

“What difference does it make to you, whether or not it was James?” Meanness shone in him and reared up taller than common sense and logic and all good and beautiful things on this earth. “Has he shown up at your doorstep yet?” Regulus narrowed his eyes. Lily flushed redder. 

“No, I don’t–”

“When he shows up there, drunk how he gets and hungry for some way to hurt himself a little better, do you let him in?” Lily’s lips pressed together in a tight line, she didn’t move. Her breath seemed stilted and small. “Of course it was him. Who else could it be?” He couldn’t keep his anger small. “I’m not like you. There aren't any other people for me in this town. I take what I can get and I’m grateful. I suppose you wouldn’t know what that’s like, would you?”

“I’m sorry.” 

“Everyone wants to know everything about me, until I say any part of it out loud, then it’s all apologies. You’re sorry? You asked me because the question was eating you up. What’s eating you now?” Regulus glared at Severus. “Open your mouth about this, I’ll kill you and mount your head on my wall. Believe that. It wouldn’t eat me up to kill you, it would eat me up to let you keep walking the face of the earth. I swear to almighty God.” 

“James… Potter…?” Severus looked like a corpse of himself. “You–you and—”

“Sort of ironic he called you a faggot all the time in high school, isn’t it?” Regulus was out the door and down in the kitchen before he decided to leave. “Pandora. I’m going home now.” 

“Home?” 

“Home.” 

“Well, alright.” Pandora drove him there, windows down but music low, blonde hair blowing into her warm eyes. “You okay?” 

“Fine.” He sank his chin into his collar and watched nothing roll by in every single godforsaken stupid fucking direction. “I just hate this town.” 

–𓆱–

Blood splatter, blonde hair, a perfect scream.

James angelic in the blue light of the drive in, then washed in red and flinching into Regulus’ shoulder. A hand in his squeezing til it hurt. Eyes closed.

“Tell me when it’s over.”

A girl dying badly, like a deer. Breath on the side of his neck. Two layers of fabric between skin. The brutality of desire.

“Open your eyes.”

“Is it over?”

“Open them.”

Her intestines hanging out of half of her. Tears cutting through blood.

“You’re scared of this?” Dark eyes, honey and amber, a wavering mouth. “You’re a hunter and you’re scared of the viscera in some movie? It’s just corn syrup. Sweet and red. You don’t have to be scared of this. This is blood you can eat. I’ll show you how. There’s nothing to be scared of.”

Another town, one where no one knew their names or faces. Laughter under fluorescent midnight light. A long drive to nowhere. Nightwashed and endless dark in every direction. The camo jacket James liked to wear spread under them like a blanket. Stars like bullet holes in the dark, no moon to see them sinning in the back of his pick up. Licking mosquito bites on brown skin.

“How did it taste?”

Lips turned red by a cherry slushie, a straw, hollow cheeks, a cold, sweet tongue in his mouth. 

The bitterness of sin in his mouth, dripping back on his dick, slipping down his throat. Sin inside him.

“What?” Red with need, dazed and hungry. Hands guiding his mouth open again, a thumb pressing on a crooked canine. “Fuck. Look at you.”

“Corn syrup.” Tongue curled around his head. A lingering, lazy kiss. “Red. The blood you were so afraid of. How did it taste, James?”

“Like summer.” James, swiping a thumb over his bottom lip to smear the sin around. Laughing brown eyes. Tongue touching teeth. “How do I taste?”

“Like summer,” Regulus whispered. 

Like heaven, he thought.

–𓆱–

The house Regulus was about to burn down was nothing to no one, and had been nothing for a very long time. It was going to stay nothing forever if he didn’t give it a new life and purpose.

Arsonist’s matches fit neatly in his hands. He’d struck them enough times already to know the routine. Transfixed by fire, he’d started many over the years, always in fields far away from home, walking miles and miles on foot to put distance between himself and the small world, then he welcomed the embrace of the flames, the abatement of the nothingness inside of him. It was almost as good as cutting himself. Fire was like blood. Both borne of destruction. Pain in them. Sometimes he held his fingertips over open flame. Candle. Match. Lighter. He liked matches the best. He liked burning himself almost as much as he liked burning dead mice and watching their bones turn into crumbling ash and blowing away in the wind. A person would probably take a lot longer to burn than a mouse, or a rabbit, or that coyote he found with maggots for eyes. Once, he turned on the oven and watched the coil turn red and pressed his wrist into it on purpose just to feel it burn. He held it there for a long time, but didn’t see his bones. He couldn’t remember how old he was when he did it. Thirteen? There was still a scar there. A blister that swelled, and popped, and then turned pale violet forever. The line of it was raised a little higher than the spidery scars his knives kissed into him. 

Regulus carved: Idle hands are the devil’s playthings into the wall with his hunting knife. 

He ripped pages out of the book he’d chosen to sacrifice to start the fire and set them in a neat pile in the attic near the place where a window had once been that now yawned open to the countryside. It was one of his mother’s books, from the mouldering family library in the old house they’d moved into when Regulus was ten, and Sirius was eleven. His memories of living in a city were flimsy, but he remembered the townhouse they’d grown up in in shadowy little vignettes. Opulent, narrow halls. Dark wallpaper, a maid that was scared of him. Now they lived with his Uncle Cygnus and his daughters in the oldest house in town, giant and falling apart more and more by the day. Drafty in every season, whistling with the wind, an overgrown garden that lead to way too much land in every direction. The ceiling leaked every time it rained. There were no maids to do the washing. They didn’t even have a machine to dry it, so it hung in the yard in the sun, and on strings and pins in the hallways when it rained. There was nothing opulent about their meagre suppers, but his mother insisted on spending enormous sums of money on their clothes, on their colognes. Every spare penny vanished into a tube of lipstick, a bottle of perfume, a new pair of shoes, a jacket made of real wool and lined with lush fur. 

Before they went to school each day, she brushed their hair neat and made sure their shoes were shiny and new-looking. She tapped her fingertips under their chins to make them stand straight. She patiently smoothed any drag out of their voice, and soothed away any of the ugly Nebraskan rural idiosyncrasies, misfolded words that should be five blending into one, (whatsittoya?) their Uncle Cygnus accidentally handed down to them when he gave them his old suit jackets. Tenderness from his mother’s hands made Regulus preen and Sirius turn into a tin-man, stiff as stone. 

“Make me proud.” For Regulus, sacred soul-saving instruction. For Sirius, an order that made all his skin itch with violence. 

Regulus did what his mother told him to do when he was little. Without exception. He was obedient, the way the bible said to be obedient. Honour thy father and mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. 

But it was hard. He got urges to do things he knows he shouldn't do all the time, to himself, and to other people too. Regulus grew up knowing the voice of the devil inside him was louder than the voice of God would ever be. He always had viciousness right under the surface of him, his face nothing more than still water hiding the open mouth of an alligator poised to snap, and rip, and tear. Usually in childhood his volatility led to brawls with Sirius over practically nothing. Snarling and snapping at each other like a pair of mean dogs, nursing twin black eyes and then twin red hands from their mother’s switch. Regulus was left-handed, that should have been the first sign he’d never satisfy her entirely, for reasons beyond his control or making. 

He was no good inside. But if he let it out sometimes, where it was safe, all the awfulness inside him like floodwater abated a little for a while. He could keep the mask in place. He could be obedient, and good, and make his mother proud. 

So he struck the match. 

He held it to a piece of paper, unreadable and wavy with water and mold, and watched it start to smoke and curl.

“What the fuck are you doing?” 

Regulus closed the match and fire in his hand and spun around, hardly feeling the burn over the shock. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” This was an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, and James Potter was standing in it with his beloved-child slouch and his hands in his pockets. James was the best of friends with Sirius, they were inseparable, but he didn’t bother with Regulus ever, at all. Regulus could count the amount of times they’d spoken in the five years they’d known of each other on one hand.

“You do realize you’re on my land?” 

“Your land?” 

“You crawled over barbed wire to get here. You must’ve read the No Trespassing signs my dad covered every inch of that fence with. What are you doing here?” 

“Nothing.” The burn in his hand was starting to bite a little, but Regulus didn’t show it. “I thought you lived in town.” 

“You thought wrong. I live out here. Our house is about a mile from here. These fields are all ours, this house came with the land. You’re bound to get yourself shot doing shit like this, why the hell are you… what were you doing?” 

James bent and picked up a page off of the floor. 

“As I Lay Dying?” He looked up at the wall and his expression flickered, and shuttered. “Regulus, open your hand.” 

“Why?” Regulus stuffed his hand in his pocket and made for the stairs down from the attic without pause. “I’ll get off your land, sorry.” 

“No, wait.” James was after him. “You don’t have to run off, you’re not in trouble or anything. I…” Regulus didn’t stop to listen. He kept walking, quick, down brittle stairs on brittle floors. “Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings?” 

“Sorry,” Regulus muttered stiffly, sounding almost absentminded. 

“You’re not in trouble, I’m just trying to understand. I’m trying to— God, won’t you stop for one second?” James grabbed his wrist. “Hey.” 

He wasn’t gentle. Regulus’ hand was out of his pocket, and the match in it fell on the floor with the paper. The burn was hot and red, like a stigmata in the middle of his palm. James looked from the match, to his palm, to his face, and Regulus didn’t back down this time, or try to shy away, or run. He glared right at him. 

“You were going to burn this house to the ground.” 

“Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings,” Regulus repeated coldly, and then he was gone. 

–𓆱–

At school the next day Regulus was in his proper clothes and his freshly polished shoes with his hair neat saying his yes ma’am’s and no sir’s like always, but he swore he felt eyes on him every time he wasn’t in a classroom. Hallway, cafeteria, hiding with Pandora in the library at lunch while Evan and Barty snuck under the bleachers by the soccer field to smoke weed. Eyes on him. He pretended not to feel it. 

“Do you get this assignment at all?” Hamlet was killing Pandora the same way physics killed Regulus. He tried not to judge her. 

“Here, pass it over. I’ll do it for you.” That was preferable to actually trying to sit there and make her understand the purpose of the only ghost in a play about murder, which seemed so obvious to him it would have made him lose respect for her if he had to sit there expounding on it, and watch her uncomprehending eyes glaze over. Regulus scrawled a lazy essay he knew would get her top marks. “You owe me a paper for science now, Einstein,” he told her under his breath. 

“Always a transaction. Do you even love me?” 

“I don’t think that question merits answering.” Regulus stood. Pandora frowned at him. “I’m going to smoke before class, wanna come?” 

“I’m going to read this over and rewrite it to sound less… eloquent. McGonagall would never believe I’m the one who wrote this.” 

Regulus shrugged. “Suit yourself.” 

He wandered behind the school and lit himself a smoke, and stood there smoking and digging his finger into the burn in his palm again for not more than a minute before James Potter was walking up to him with his name on his lips. Regulus spun on his heel and walked away at the mere sight of him, and James kept up with him. Regulus walked quicker.

“You can’t just run away from me forever. I’ll turn up at your house. I know where you live.” 

“My mother would never let anyone in our house. Least of all you.” Regulus stopped walking and sucked on his Salem hard and blew a breath of smoke right in James’ eyes on purpose. James waved it out of his face, irritated. 

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you those things’ll kill you?” 

“You know, I think I might have heard that somewhere before.” James narrowed his eyes. He stepped out of the way of the smoke on the wind, like he didn’t even want to breathe it in secondhand.

“What were you doing, trying to burn down that house?” 

Regulus stared at him flatly and said not a word. 

“You didn’t want me to know, so badly you fucked up your hand. Why were you trying to start a fire? Have you been starting fires… like, have you done that before?” 

“Fucked up my hand?” Regulus raised his palm, and James looked at the burn in it like it pained him just to see it. Regulus was so full of rage so quickly it was almost dizzying. He took his cigarette and pressed it into the skin of his unburnt palm to put it out, symmetry, then flicked it at James on pure, violent impulse, the pain so sharp and hot it almost felt cold. He had to bite back a laugh. “I won’t go on your property again, so fuck off. Leave me alone.” 

“Were you trying to burn it down with you inside?” James blurted out, turning red. “Were you going to use that knife to—”

“Suicide is a sin. For cowards.” 

When he walked away he couldn’t stop himself from looking back, and caught James staring, as if transfixed, at his half-smoked cigarette. Regulus turned his attention to the ash smudged on the burn in his hand. 

“Fuck,” he hissed under his breath. “Why the fuck did I do that. Jesus Christ.” He went into the bathroom and held his hand in a sink under cold water, and stared at his reflection. His face didn’t feel like his face. It felt like a thing he wore from room to room. A shell he would one day break out of, and reveal his true face, his real self. What self might that be? Where was he? When would he start feeling everything for real, the way other people seemed to feel things? Nothing touched him as profoundly as it should, nothing but rage, and he worried all the time that it was a sign there was something wrong with his soul. Devil-touched. Cursed. 

Maybe it’s in my blood. Regulus looked at his own eyes. His mother’s eyes. He wanted to gouge them out. He hated himself so much all the time the loathing was like a religion of its own, his devotions to the fire and the blade were at their heart a devotion to this. Looking into his own eyes and feeling nothing close to recognition. He was born less human than other people, more animal, like a wolf. A wolf without a pack of other wolves, a wolf wearing the face of a human boy. Regulus closed himself in a bathroom stall and lit himself another cigarette even though he knew he shouldn’t, and stared at his shoes with smoke between his teeth. 

“Were you trying to burn it down with you inside?” Now there’s an idea. The world would be better off without him in it. Regulus, however, had never cared much about the state of the world or the people in it beyond his people. He wanted to burn it down to watch fire eat something dead. He wanted to watch for hours while it burned in the daylight, then burned in the night, and collapsed floor by floor until it was nothing more than dust on the wind. Ashes. 

He flicked the ashes off of his smoke onto his polished black shoes. His hand was so angry with him it was trembling around his cigarette. 

Mother Mary, please be a mother to me now…

–𓆱–

His feet punched the pavement but like always when he was running he felt less like he was moving like a person and more like he was growing wings. He wasn’t the quickest person on the team, but he lost himself in distance, zipping past some of the seniors in the rhythmic loops that kept him moving like a record—circles, circles, circles, circling the drain. Regulus ran quicker to make his head quieter, sprinting so hard his mouth tasted like blood, his lungs burned, his head spun, and he kept sprinting, trying to remember to keep his form right, keep his back up, watching the trees wheel past quick but feeling slow as hell. 

He joined track and field because his mother said a boy his age should be on some sort of sports team, and track seemed like the one he’d have to deal with people the least. There were things he’d learned to enjoy about it over the years, but he really wasn’t much of an athlete at heart. He didn’t eat enough, so he was more scrawny than wiry, and he got tired too quick, and he smoked too much to make the time his coach wanted him to make. She always gave him shit for smoking, but Regulus didn’t care much. He just wanted to be left alone.  

When practice was over he kept running, and as much as Miss Stefansson yelled at him to rest he saw the satisfied little smile playing around her mouth at the idea he was showing dedication. Dedication, yeah, he was dedicated alright. Dedicated to the burning in his lungs and his spinning head. 

The sky was still hot when he staggered, coughing his smoker’s cough that always came with running now, to find his water at the bench, head spinning so much from his shallow breath he very nearly didn’t notice James sitting on the bench beside his school bag. Regulus ignored him, hardly looked at him at all, swallowing water and trying not to cough on it. 

“Not knowing what the hell you were doing in that house is driving me crazy.” 

“I told you to leave me alone.” Regulus was tired and hot with sweat and didn’t want to deal with his brother’s stupid friend. James was well-liked, and popular enough he could make Severus Snape’s life hell without a scrap of consequence, an eternally happy, untroubled boy with a mean streak and a mouth shaped like a smile even when he was sitting doing nothing at all. James was nothing like him at all. There was nothing in his head but Lily Evans, and football, and drinking with his buddies, and smearing freaks, and getting the biggest laugh in a classroom full of moronic squares. He was as soulless as Regulus but in the way that got you venerated instead of avoided at parties. “You’re like a fucking stalker. Where’s your pack of hyenas?” That rat-faced Pettigrew boy giggled every time James opened his mouth so easily Regulus didn’t doubt if James shoved him on his knees and told him to open up and spit on it Pettigrew would do it gratefully. 

“Hyenas?” 

“You know. Your dogs, that laugh every time you open your mouth. If you’re here to earn some kind of confidence from me or something you should know I’d be happier to tell Severus a word of what I was doing in that house than I would be telling you.” 

“You know that was my land, and if you don’t tell me I could tell your mother that you snuck onto our property—”

“Could you?” Now he had Regulus’ undivided attention. A glare that could curdle bone marrow. James wilted under it immediately. Regulus wiped sweat off of his forehead with the bottom of his shirt then bent to look James in the eye, half doubled over to meet the height of him and the bench, hands on his knees. “If I tell you, you’ll leave me alone?” 

“Probably.” James was wide-eyed. The bridge of his nose was red, so were the tops of his cheekbones, like he had a sunburn. 

“I was setting it on fire because I like watching things burn, and if I destroy things on purpose when I can control it, it’s easier for me to stop myself from doing impulsive, stupid things.” Regulus smiled thinly. “Like putting cigarettes out on my hands, for example. It wasn’t anything you should worry about. Satisfied?” 

“Why would you need to destroy things? Or hurt yourself?” Regulus grabbed his bag from beside James, getting close enough he could see bits of honey in his dark eyes in the sun, and watched James’ face turn the duskiest of pinks, warm colour under the tawny coppery brown of his skin. 

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Why?” He shouldered his bag. “If you figure it out, let me know.” 

“Wait. Does it have to be destructive, like fire?” James was on his feet, following him, always following him. Regulus didn’t look at him. “Or does it just have to feel… I don’t know—”

“Violent.” Regulus had as much honey in his voice as James had in his eyes. 

“Shooting feels violent. Why don’t you just go out shooting for a bit, break some glass? It might make you feel better.” 

“I don’t have a gun.” 

“I have plenty. I could—” James chewed on his lip. “If it’ll keep you from doing what you know you shouldn’t, I could teach you how.”

“I think I’d rather light myself on fire than spend a second more than I have to around you.” Regulus cut through the mostly-empty parking lot to get to the bike rack. Sirius had a license, but Regulus would not get on his shitbox motorcycle to ride double to school. He liked the time alone with his thoughts on his bicycle anyway. 

“You could still burn down that house if you want to,” James ventured softly, like he didn’t mean to say it. Regulus went stiff and looked at him properly. James looked smaller than Regulus had ever seen him. “I didn’t mean to stop you, really. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t going to hurt yourself.” 

“Why would you care whether or not I hurt myself?” Regulus dropped his bag on the ground and leaned against the bike rack behind him, staring James down, trying to solve him. James was proving to be a more complicated puzzle than Regulus ever assumed he’d be. He wouldn’t go away. Most people would’ve been scared off by any number of the hideous things he’d shown him so far, but somehow, James was still here in front of him looking at him like he wasn’t afraid at all. His expression was bizarrely soft. 

James shrugged and looked at Regulus’ hands. “I just do.” 

“Why would you let me burn down your house?” 

“Why do you want to burn it down?” 

“To watch it burn.” That didn’t feel like enough. Not true enough, at least. “To destroy something rotten.” 

“Looking at that house makes me sad. I think of the people who lived in it that are dead now, and it feels like it must be haunted. If you burned it, wouldn’t the house end up wherever they did?” Regulus stared at him in silence, transfixed by him all at once. 

Something inside of him shifted so quickly it felt very nearly destructive, like he’d been struck by lightning or shot. Whoever he thought James was an hour ago, he was someone else now.

“Like cremation,” James said. “It would be like a funeral.” 

“Okay,” Regulus said with softness that felt alien. James watched him warily, like he could sense the wolf hidden behind his eyes, see sharp teeth in his mouth, but somehow, he didn’t turn. He didn’t run, even after watching Regulus burn himself, even after seeing him carve the word Devil into the wall and strike his arsonist’s match. “If it’s a funeral, for your house…” James, eternally sunny, eternally brainless-seeming, endlessly laughing, a boy who shoved other boys in lockers and mocked them when they cried, a boy who everyone loved for his humour and apparent sweetness when he wasn’t cruel, looked solemn as the grave. Are you like me? Is there a wolf in you? “Burn it down with me.” 

“With you?”

“Yes,” Regulus said. He didn’t know whether he wanted James to pass this test or fail it. “With me.” 

James hung the keys to his truck on his index finger and rang them like a bell. “This might be quicker than your bike. Throw it in the box.” 

–𓆱–

“This is all you use?” James looked at the pile of limp paper in front of him with childlike curiosity. Wide-eyed. He had eyes like a doe. Brown and soft. Full of velvet. “You don’t want to use gas or anything to start it?” 

“Just paper and matches.” Regulus wandered back and looked at James in this room carefully. Derelict and abandoned, this golden creature in the middle of an abundance of ruin. There was something beautiful about it. James was sixteen but he carried himself like eighteen, no gawkishness or uncertainty, no awkwardness, just surety of self, confident to the point of near insufferability. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

There was something vulnerable about starting a fire like this with another person instead of doing it alone. 

“I’m sure.” James didn’t even stop to think about the question. He just knew. That confidence would have been maddening, but now that Regulus knew he wasn’t stupid it was fascinating instead. Before, he’d assumed his confidence was thoughtlessness, but James was clever in a way school couldn’t teach you to be clever. 

He looked at this house and felt mournful. Maybe Regulus was betraying his age in the surety that there was something special about that. Maybe any other boy would have felt mournful looking at a place like this, but it was beyond mournful. He looked at this place and thought burning it down would be like giving it back to the dead that lived with it, when it was alive. 

Was murder always so justifiable? Was fire ever ugly? Regulus had never seen something be made uglier by fire, not even his own skin. 

“This house has been here all your life, hasn’t it?” 

“I guess so.” 

“You don’t feel a bit mournful about the idea of it being gone forever?” 

“It was never mine. It belonged to other people. It didn’t feel like mine because I never lived in it.” 

“With a place like this you could burn it down to give it to the dead, or you could take it back for the living, and live in it a little. Give it new memories to hold when the wind blows through it.” 

“Memories,” James echoed softly. He was cross-legged on the floor folding the ruined paper into uneven, unhappy looking birds. “Like the ones we’re making here right now?” 

“Something like that.” Regulus sat beside him, and James looked at him. There was something in the lightness in his eyes. The amused curl of his mouth. A falseness. Distance. Is that what you are? James didn’t look away from him, even though Regulus had been staring at him for much too long. Is that amusement a wall, or is it real? Is this a mask, or your face? “Does it feel less dead to you yet?” 

“Deader.” 

“This is very irresponsible,” Regulus said softly. He took out the book of matches he kept in his pocket and lit one, and held it to the paper bird in James’ hand. The watery, waving little white wings looked like the wings of angels. “Very dangerous.” One wing caught, then a flickering line of light slowly drew itself between the birdangel’s shoulderblades. “We really shouldn’t be doing this.” James slowly, wordlessly added the burning angel to the pyre of paper waiting against the dried bit of wall, and they both watched fire climb, then crawl over the floor, and up the wall, and black smoke start to rise as the old wood caught and kept catching. 

“When do we leave?” James asked softly. His gaze was thoughtful and attentive, like he was mesmerized. “To watch outside?” 

They were in the attic. The fire would crawl down from the top. Regulus shrugged. 

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.” 

“Me neither.” 

The fire danced in James’ dark eyes, mirrored in his irises and his glasses, and Regulus watched him watch the fire with a sinking, awful feeling gnawing at him inside. 

Who are you? 

James looked at him. 

“Did you say something?” 

“No.” Regulus felt his face get hot, and he doubted it was from the heat of the flames licking up the wall. “We should probably leave soon, but I sort of want to see it burn from the inside as long as I can. Have you ever seen a fire like this before?”

“I was driving down the road once with the windows down, it was far away from here, near the city, and there was this awful smell. It was like burning rubber. Chemical. It was foul. I didn’t roll up the windows, though, because I saw this big, black cloud billowing in the distance. I drove up and I saw this house. It was just a little thing. It was burning, and this was winter, so the light on the snow looked crazy bright because it melted the snow all around and it was in a pool of water that turned into a pool of light. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. The smell, though, wasn’t like this.” James was transfixed by the fire crawling over the ceiling, slowly. It was getting closer to their feet. “It was all full of chemicals. Is that why you don’t use gasoline? The smell?” 

“I don’t want it to be easy. I want to earn it.” 

“I like that,” James said. “That’s how I am about most things, things that matter anyway. If it’s easy I don’t feel like I earned it. We should go down those stairs before they burn up.” 

On the third floor they watched from underneath while the flames crawled over the ceiling above them in reverent silence, watching fire dance and twist, feeling the heat build while the sun sank, and floor by floor they wandered in almost perfect silence listening to it crackle, smelling the smoke, and decided in unison without even speaking when to step out of the house and watch from afar. 

The scale of the fire when they left the house was terrifying. Four stories of farmhouse were consumed with raging fire, furious and hot as hell. It hadn’t felt like it was burning that much from the inside. James was silent. So silent. Smoke blew over both of them. Sweet-smelling like ash and mahogany. All wood and fire crumbling right in front of them. The sky was still blue, and somehow the fire still raged brighter than daylight, brilliant and full of heat. 

“Thank you,” Regulus whispered. 

“Do you feel better?” James glanced at him, sharp. There was no amusement masking his face. Naked, consuming fascination was drawn over him in red, unmissable ink. Regulus nodded. “I can still teach you how to shoot, if you want me to. It’s not pretty like this, but it might make you feel better. I know what it’s like to have too much in you to keep inside.” Regulus didn’t have too much in him. He didn’t have enough. He was always empty. Interesting, Regulus thought. Then, all over again, Who are you? Who are you? “You have to put it somewhere. You should try finding good, healthy places to put it, like shooting, even hunting, or your running. Lifting and running help me a lot when I’m pissed off” 

“Running doesn’t make any difference. It has to be like this.” Regulus glanced at James, and his eyes lingered. “I have to be doing something I shouldn’t.”

Chapter Text

"He handed me a pair of pliers

And he told me to pull out his teeth

Because as long as he had them

He'd use them to do bad things"

–Dog Teeth by Nicole Dollanganger

Flies buzzed in lazy, hot circles around the ceiling while James stretched out on his bed, in nothing but boxers despite the wheezing air conditioner blowing a tepid breeze right at him, sticky with sweat and so miserable he didn’t even want to stand up to swat at them. The flypaper his mother taught him to put up beside his window dangled limply, full of fruit flies and mosquitoes. The big bastards always seemed clever enough to avoid any trap he set for them. He didn’t change it out. He was so hot and hungover he didn’t even want to be alive. Dead things are cold, at least.

“Are you busy?” Sirius opened his door without knocking. James played dead. “Hello?” James didn’t blink, he kept his eyes glazed and fixed on a spot of water damage on the ceiling of his room, a spot of brown among all the white. “Right, whatever.” Sirius threw a thick blanket over him, and James still didn’t move. “You’re not dead, you prick. Remus called me up a while ago and told me he’s on his way over. You promised you’d help him with that monster Hope bought. That thing is unholy.” 

“It wasn’t a monster when she bought it.” James shoved the blanket down, and off of him, and sat up. His hair was full of sweat, it stuck to his neck. He felt disgusting, not just for what happened last night, for all manner of reasons. 

“Well, it’s a monster now. That sow is the size of their entire fucking pigsty.”  

Sirius crossed his arms over his chest. He was shirtless and tattooed, wearing jeans he’d hacked into shorts with a pair of kitchen scissors that showed off far too much of his skinny white legs. Without enough clothes on looked a bit like a spider.

“You need to put aloe on that.” James touched his own chest where he could see a wicked sunburn turning Sirius’ wiry ribcage a painful shade of red. 

“I’ll just put a shirt on. Something you should also consider doing, just because you’re brown doesn’t mean you won’t get just as scorched out there as I will, I swear it’s plus one fucking fifty fucking five out there. That’s what’s really unholy.” James threw an arm over his eyes and groaned.  “Get up, you lazy bastard.”  Sirius scoffed. He kicked his ankle with a bare filthy foot and left, saying over his shoulder, “I’ll bum you a smoke if you’re dressed in the next five minutes, I know you’re out, if you don’t get them off of me I know you’ll have to filch them off Moony, and good fucking luck doing that.”  

“Yeah, fine, whatever.” James scraped himself together and threw on gym shorts, clean socks, more deodorant, and threw a clean t-shirt over his shoulder so he wouldn’t have to put it on quite yet. He was at their cheap little kitchen table in about thirty seconds. 

Sirius tossed a pack of Marlboros at him without even looking at him. James caught it and knocked it on the vinyl in a mean bit of sun that made it feel hot as metal, but even the awful heat couldn’t spoil his first un-Salem smoke of the day. It felt like purging Regulus right out of his lungs, freeing himself of poison with fresh poison. His mouth twisted with a private sort of amusement. The air was hazy and golden. Sirius propped the front door open to let the flies in and the smoke out, then put a sweating can of coke on the table in front of him. James held it to the back of his neck instead of drinking it. It cooled him down some, but not enough. The worst of him wished it wasn’t a coke, even though it couldn’t even be ten in the morning. He’d slept awfully, and the skin around his eyes felt tender, as if bruised. The lack of memories was a worse bruise behind his eyes. Regulus’ laughing eyes, his smirking mouth. “Would it really be that easy?” Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Goddamn demon. 

“What does Remus even need help with?” 

“Moving the damn thing to the new pen Hope built with him. I won’t do it. It scares the shit out of me. I don’t know how it doesn’t scare you. I don’t like the look of pigs, I can see that they’re truly quite clever and they’ve got evil beady fucking eyes like… I don’t know, rats or something. It puts me off pork, honestly. I can’t even look at that thing, and Remus dotes over it. He dotes even more over the piglets. I don’t know how the hell he does that when he knows he’s gonna have to slaughter them, you know his mother can’t stomach it, so she makes him… I just can’t do it. I can’t even make myself say it. What did they name her, anyway?” 

“Do you even listen to me when I talk?” Remus was leaning in the open doorway of their little house, Texas drawl thicker than their thin middle-america plainness, their absence of accent. Bits of his voice seemed to rub off on all of them over the years, like instead of adopting the voice of Nebraska he was bending Nebraska to his voice. His truck idled on the overgrown grass in their front yard. “Her name is Sadie Mae, like that bitch from the Manson case. My momma only names the pigs after evil people so she doesn’t feel as bad when we eat them.” 

“That makes it worse.” Sirius had pure acid in his voice. “Naming them after people makes it so much worse. What, do you label them with the names when you carve them up and stick them in plastic in your freezer?”

“Right we do.” 

“You’re batshit crazy, you and your whole family.” 

“Guess it’s in my blood, and I’m pretty well blameless aren’t I?” Remus smiled his most crooked smile. He had his hat on backwards and a hand in his pocket. He jerked his head toward his truck. “James?” 

“Yeah, I’m on my feet.” James was still in his chair, really. He paused at the door and shoved his feet in his work boots even though he knew they’d be hotter than sneakers. He had the terrible feeling he’d have to trudge in mud today. He tossed the can he was holding to Remus, who caught it and cracked it open and stole a sip while James put his shirt on properly and sat in the passenger seat of his ancient behemoth of a truck. “This is ungodly,” he said, pointing at the sky. Remus shrugged like, what can you do? and backed out of their lawn. He threw his hat on the dashboard and ran a hand through his sweaty brown hair. 

They kicked up dust on the gravel but Remus kept all the windows down because his truck didn’t have anything resembling air conditioning. The quicker they went the colder the wind felt, so Remus drove fast as hell. James tied up his boots while they soared down the road, sucking absently on his cigarette and blowing the smoke out his nose. By the time his shoes were tied the ash was nearly half an inch long. It was hard to make any sort of conversation over the sound of the wind and the loud music Remus always had playing, so James squinted into the bright day and watched the little golden cross Remus hung on his rearview mirror shudder and swing with the cold in the can in his grip whenever he hit a pothole or swung around a corner as quick as lightning. 

Remus had his arm hanging out the window, drumming on the air with his fingers and he was only sort of watching the road. James looked at the sunflowers and cornfields whipping past and the perfect, cloudless blue of the sky over all the gold. The beauty of it barely touched him. He was still in that dim living room. The rain was kissing his skin in mean hyphens, a dog was barking, and water was pooling in his skull. He couldn’t run from Regulus anymore than he could run from any other mistake he’d made in his life. The heat all over everything didn’t soften the ice in his marrow. James bit on the filter of his cigarette. He kissed his fingertips and watched the shadow of a telephone pole slice a dead old farmhouse in two. 

“You’re helping us out so my momma is gonna try to feed you,” said Remus as soon as he shut off his truck on his front lawn. James jolted back to life. Lyall was apparently somewhere else, dealing with sourcing something they needed in bulk for their massive garden, sometimes he drove halfway across the state to get cheap deals for machines, or whatever the hell they needed to maintain this much random shit. The Lupins were not farmers, but by the look of their land you really couldn’t tell. It was a bit of a hobby farm, but they didn’t call it that. They called all of it a “garden.” The chickens gave James the heebie-jeebies the way the pigs gave Sirius the heebie-jeebies, but not as much as the geese did. Those fuckers had free reign of the place, and they were mean. James kept them at a respectful distance. They were half like guard dogs. Half, because the Lupins had a real mutt named Lucky that they left roaming with their geese. “You don’t have to eat if you ate already, she won’t take it personal, you know how she is. She’s gonna try, though.” 

“I know your mom well enough I knew not to eat, Moony.” Remus grinned at him and tossed his keys between his hands, walking backwards on the long gravel drive to his front door. For some reason Remus always parked way the hell out of the way at the end of their driveway when he parked at his folk’s place. He was probably scared he’d run over one of their evil geese or something, but James usually liked the walk up… maybe Remus liked it too. “I’m stealing a hat off of you, I forgot to bring one.” 

“Well that’s alright,” Remus said. He winked at James. “You look pretty in my clothes anyhow.” 

“Fuck off,” James laughed, he shoved at his shoulder and Remus danced away from him, just out of reach. “You say stupid shit you better be quick or fucking tough, Lupin.” 

“Maybe for you it’s either/or, but I'm sure I can be both.” 

They chased each other, laughing, through the front door, and Remus kept running to his bedroom so James followed him. 

“Shoes!” Hope called after them, but James was too busy grappling with Remus to listen to her, though he knew if his mother was alive she’d flay him for it. “Not in my house. Not in my goddamn house. Right, that’s enough of that, get off of each other. I’m sure at your age you know much better than that, really, Remus, in shoes and all, the pair of you oughta clean this place if you wanna be disrespectful.” 

“I’m very sorry, ma’am.” James held Remus’ hat—which he’d acquired in their brief bout of roughhousing—to his chest like he did when they had to stand for the anthem back in school in a show of utter sincerity, shit eating smile be damned. Remus snatched it out of his hand. James shook his head at him with mischievous disappointment before the yelling even started. Too fucking easy. 

“Remus John!” Hope gave Remus hell while James silently took off his boots on the edge of his bed and carried them to the front door, then stood in front of the open fridge for a bit pretending to look for a drink to bask in a scrap of cold before he was tossed outside to wrangle that monster they had in their backyard. Lupin's place was a hell of a lot nicer than the place James and Sirius were living in. He had a good spot living with his parents, one James envied more than he could say, as much as Remus complained about it. They had central air. And their fridge had real food in it instead of a bunch of tv dinners and beer. And he had parents to yell at him when he fucked up. James had no such thing, and it sort of made him– he shut his eyes tight: (don’t think). James took an apple and sat cross-legged at their nice wooden table and waited for Remus to come back in pretending to be sorry for his mother’s sake. She was still reading him the riot act, as if he was seventeen instead of in his twenties. He could hear it down the hallway. He nibbled at the apple. He already wanted another cigarette. He did not think. He stared at the white flesh of the apple, and pressed a finger into a bruise on it, and did not think. 

“I oughta kill you,” Remus muttered right in his ear when he was free of his mother’s lecture. 

“You’d have one less set of hands to move Sadie Mae if you fed me to her, so if I were you I’d wait a couple hours. It’s not my fault you disrespected your mother in her own house.” In a mocking imitation of his drawl, “tsk tsk.” 

“Sirius ain’t here to laugh at your bad-natured little jokes, you oughta shut up.” 

“If making yourself laugh isn’t enough for you, you're living half a life.” 

“Is that right,” Remus muttered, not wanting any kind of reply at all. You’d think his mother beat him. “You can steal a hat off my momma.” 

“I bet I’d look as pretty in your momma’s clothes as you think I look in yours.” 

“You’d think you don’t like having teeth in your mouth, the way you like to talk.” 

James smiled at him as nicely as he could, sweet and pretty, contrasting words thick with mockery. “Like I said, it ain’t my fault you don’t know how to act right.” 

“You’re lucky I like you, don’t know why I do. You’re a prick.” 

“You know, that’s the second time today somebody’s called me a prick. I don’t know why. I’m a saint, really.” 

“Patron saint of boys that are all bark and no bite.” 

“That’d be you, Moony. I’m patron saint of patron saints.” 

“That has to be some sort of blasphemy, you’re lucky I don’t know enough about religion to condemn you the way you oughta be condemned.” 

“Lots of talk about what I oughta do with myself around this place, like I’m not doing you a favour. You’re so mean to me, breaks my goddamn heart.” 

“Right, sure,” muttered Remus, like he was already getting bored of him. He held open the side door. James kept his boots untied, the laces swinging like the cross in Remus’ truck while they walked over the grass. “You’re out of smokes, you can have one of mine.” 

“I guess if you’re splitting darts with me you can call me pretty.” 

“Sure.” Remus lit a smoke and took a drag then passed it to James with a jab of two fingers, his hand out like a kid playing with an imaginary gun. Preoccupied. “I wish she would give up on pigs, I hate killing them.” 

“I couldn’t do it.” Not like that. Not something that couldn’t run, or fight back. 

“You used to hunt all the time with your daddy, don’t act like you don’t have it in you. It pisses me off when Sirius gets all wilty about it, like a fucking girl. You know, even after everything you had to fix up when your parents… sorry,” the eternal sting, like a branding iron pressed behind his eyes, turned his smile stiff instantly. Remus floundered, “I mean… but… you know, he still doesn’t understand that not every person on the face of the goddamn earth was born with a silver spoon shoved up their ass—“ James sucked on his cigarette very pointedly. “—nothing against you, obviously, but he just gets so fucking snooty, sticks his nose up, like I’m choosing to do it. Oh, I could just never! I would just be sick! They’re clever as a three year old! Like I don’t fucking know. Like I have any choice at all. He doesn’t seem to realize it’s not if I wanna kill them, it’s if I wanna eat or not.” 

“I mean that’s just Sirius, he’s a bit insensitive but he doesn’t mean anything by it.” 

“Yeah, just Sirius.” Remus turned his hat around so it was blocking the sun from his eyes properly. “Now I’m mad enough to move that stupid thing.” 

“I’m not finished with my smoke.” 

“I’d put this off too if I was you, I don’t blame you, but if we sit around until we actually wanna do it we’ll be here all day.” 

“I guess you’re right, like always.” James stepped on his smoke and followed Remus to the bottom of one of the pretty, shallow little hills on their land, and met a pair of beady black eyes, and turned his hat around to keep sun out of his eyes. 

“See? That wasn’t so bad.” They were both covered in mud. James felt like he’d been hit by a car or maybe ran a marathon or like he did when he lifted too much at the makeshift gym he and Sirius kept on their back porch. 

“I’m starving.” 

“You can shower here if you want. I’ll get you something clean to wear and we can drive to town so you can get a pack of smokes, we could stop off at the bar and get something cold to drink. I can keep myself busy while you get a free drink off her, I feel pretty lucky.” 

“Ros should ban you from those fucking things.” 

“She’d never. If she stopped selling me those pickle cards she’d miss out on about… uh, ten bucks a week? She’d be ruined.” 

“Even if you’re only spending a couple cents at a time, gambling is still stupid. It’s like you’re lighting your money on fire.” 

“You’re not lucky, so of course it looks like that to you. You have no room to talk about shit being dumb as hell either, you think I didn’t see the hickey you’ve got on the side of your neck? Who’s that from? Do you even know her last name?” James desperately wished he remembered more from last night, more than blurs of skin, and liquor, and smoke, and the Joy Division song Regulus liked the best repeating while he fumbled with the player, while he straddled his hips and held a cold hand to his heart, while his teeth kissed his throat, To the depths of the ocean where all hopes sank, searching for you…

“Tell me,” James ignored his second point completely, as if Remus had never said it at all, “don’t you dare lie, what have you ever won off those things?” Remus said nothing. “I’m waiting.” 

“I mean, the sun today is really cooking. You’d think we lived down south… You’d think, whatever. Anyhow, you really need a shower.” 

James rolled his eyes. Point made.

They wandered back into the house through the side door. James took a shower and dressed up in Remus’ clothes when he was clean. While he waited for Remus to finish washing up, Hope Lupin fed him fresh baked cookies and pressed heaping containers of food into his hands to take home. Thank you, ma'am. Her hand ruffling his hair. Not a word of that out of you, James.  

“My momma will wash these up for you while we’re out.” Remus grabbed his filthy clothes and threw them in a hamper, then he took the containers of food under his arm and took off out the door. “We just have to stop off here before I get you home.” 

“We should call Sirius and see if he’s busy.” 

“Peter too.” 

“Do you think Lily would come down there to meet us if I called her? Just friendly, you know, how she used to.” 

“Not a chance in hell.” Remus laughed in his face, and James slouched and hid under his hat, knowing better. Old bad habits. “She wouldn’t even come on down if I called her. If she did what you did to Snape to Sirius, I think you would’ve burned her house down. I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing trying at all with her anymore. You nearly killed him.” 

“Whatever.” James rolled his eyes. “She’ll get over it.” 

“Lily ain’t exactly the getting over it type.” 

“Well I’m not exactly the giving up type, so I guess I’ll have to teach her how.” 

“The line between confidence and delusion is thin as a razor blade and you weren’t born for walking tightropes, boy.” 

“You can’t call me boy like you know so much or some shit, we’re the same age.” Sometimes Remus sounded like he was about forty-five, and other times he acted like he was still that gawky seventeen year old with mousy hair and limbs so long he didn’t know where to put them. 

“That right, boy?” 

“All your talk about knocking teeth out and here you are, talking stupid. Like I said, quick or tough, boy—“

Remus took off down his driveway toward the sun, and James ran after him, laughing. Remus started driving before James made it to the car and he jumped in the box of his truck then in through the passenger window while he drove a bit too fast down the backroads toward James and Sirius’ place. 

“You trying to get yourself killed?” Remus asked him. 

“Are you trying to kill me?” James replied. Remus kissed his teeth and turned to watch the fields instead of the road. “You drive like you have nine more lives I’ve never heard about.” 

“Maybe I do.” Remus lit himself a smoke and passed it to James. “You can’t have that whole thing.” 

“Got me in your clothes now you’re splitting smokes with me, might as well lay one on me right now. You’ve got me all alone.” James batted his eyelashes and Remus swerved the truck trying to slap his hat off of his head. 

“You won’t use that tongue of yours to get me to let you keep that all to yourself.” 

“They’re getting so damn expensive. How am I supposed to make rent like this?” 

“If you can’t keep enough change in a jar to maintain a smoking habit you really oughta quit.” 

“More talk about what I oughta do with myself.” James passed him the smoke. “What I really oughta do is set up a swear jar, Sirius would fill it up in three sentences. You’d never guess who raised him, the way he talks.” 

“There’s no shortage of reasons you’d never guess who raised him.” 

Remus turned down the Pettigrew driveway and laid on the horn until Peter’s mother showed up outside in a bathrobe with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and gave him the finger. James waved at her, nice and friendly, and she gave him the finger too. She was closer. Her blonde hair was unbrushed and wild. Their yard was a wreck of plastic Christmas decorations including a cheap nativity scene bleached white as snow by the sun, even though it was the middle of July. 

“I thought I told you to stay off my land and stay the hell away from my boy.” 

“Sorry, ma’am.” Remus tipped his ballcap at her like it was a proper hat. James blew smoke in her eyes on purpose. They were smeared with black. Her breath smelled like liquor and it was hardly noon.

“Is Peter home?” 

“If you’re asking?” She looked at Remus, not James. “No. He moved out of town.” 

“Mom.” Peter finally made it outside, walking barefoot on the grass with shoes and socks in his hands. His eyes were red, which meant he was stoned or he’d been crying, and based on the size of his pupils James figured it was the former not the latter. “Won’t you just leave him alone? Remus never did anything bad to anybody. It’s just a nasty rumour.” 

“You’re only as good as the company you keep.” Mrs. Pettigrew’s cornflower eyes shot to James. “You keep an eye on my boy, Potter. Your mother was a good woman. I hope you mean to make her smile down at you instead of frowning.” James had never wanted to hit a woman so much in his life. 

“I never knew my mother to frown at me for anything, ma’am.” 

“I’ll see you later, mom.” Peter’s mom kissed him on the cheek then let him climb into the truck, despite all her glaring at Remus. 

“Trash is trash,” she said, mean as hell.

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Remus, with a benevolent smile. He drove off so fast Peter jerked backwards into the seat like he’d been shot. 

“Sorry about her,” said Peter. James passed him the cigarette they were sharing and Peter shut his eyes tight when he took a drag. He rubbed his temples as if fighting a headache. “I wish she’d forget about all that shit from high school.” 

“It’s alright, really.” Remus didn’t seem alright but neither of them pushed it. James liked sitting in the middle of the bench seat in his truck. He was so tall they normally had him in shotgun, but he liked being in the middle with the people he loves on either side of him. It made him feel like a little kid in a good way instead of a bad way for once. 

“I’m getting dressed in my own shit, you can have these back.” James pulled off Remus’ shirt and threw it through the open window of his truck. Sirius was in the mirror beside their front door tying his long black hair up to keep it off his neck. 

“How was Sadie Mae?” Sirius asked. James shrugged. “Where’s your shirt?” 

“I think we should have a couple here and drive over to the bar when we’ve got a buzz, it’s cheaper,” James called to Remus and Peter, ignoring Sirius completely to open the fridge before anyone replied to him, opening a beer and holding it with three fingers at the neck by his side while he wandered off to his bedroom to change with muddy work boots still on his feet. He took off the rest of Remus’ clothes and put them in a crumpled pile on his unmade bed then got himself dressed properly to go out, a clean pair of blue jeans and one of his newer t-shirts, one that was still pretty much white, and his own hat. He found a better belt. He finished his beer a bit too fast. He was hungry. 

“Here.” He tossed his borrowed clothes at Remus. 

“You’re welcome,” Remus grumbled, folding the clothes like he was planning to wear them again. He had an open beer in front of him. Peter was lighting up a joint. “Do we even have to go to town, really?” 

“I don’t have any fucking cigarettes.” 

“What about that swear jar you were talking about on the drive up, you wanna start that up?” 

“Fuck off.” Peter’s mom left James in a foul, dark mood. “I want to go to town and find a girl or something, I’m bored being around guys all the time, none of you are pretty or sweet. I want someone to smile at me. I haven’t had a girl in too long, you’re all so happy without girls sometimes I think you’re a pack of cocksuckers.” 

“That’s real sweet of you, James.” Peter offered him his joint and James waved him off. 

“I’m pure sugar.” James finished a second beer too quickly. “Are we getting out of here or not?” 

“Where’s the fire?” asked Sirius, plucking the joint from between Peter’s fingers in a way that was almost dainty. He stretched out on their couch, taking up half of it, lounging there all in black. “You’re pissed off about something, what happened?” 

“Christmas in July,” James muttered. 

By the time they made it to the truck they were all tipsy. Remus was slightly more sober than the rest of them. He took the backroads slower than usual. The sunlight felt warm instead of hot. James was melting into the fleecy plaid blanket over the bench seat of his truck. Sirius had his legs up on the dashboard and his ankles crossed, flicking through the bible Remus kept in his glove box. Peter was fidgeting with the brass zippo he kept right next to it, flicking it open and closed while they zipped down gravel roads through the fields of cheerful canola and sunflowers, blue and gold in every direction. 

When they got to town James and Sirius went off to the convenience store to buy more smokes, two packs apiece, then they walked side by side, smoking in the hot sun, to the bar together. 

Sirius was so stoned he kept telling James idiotically simple observations about life as if they were earthshattering revelations while they walked, and kept taking deep breaths of hot air and slowly exhaling like the air was sweet instead of the same old air they were always breathing. James didn’t like pot very much, most of the time when he smoked he just got scared. It was worse when they were kids and his parents weren’t dead and he could actually get in shit for it. 

Lately, Sirius put every spare moment he got into a bowl and smoked it. James assumed it was so he wouldn’t have to think or feel too much of anything. He wasn’t enough of a hypocrite to take issue with it, considering his own habits, but it made him a little sad sometimes when he got home and found Sirius glassy-eyed on the couch, too stoned to move, watching a movie he’d seen a million times all over again, forgetful, giggling and hanging off of him the second James sank onto the couch beside him like he was making sure James wouldn’t run off. When Sirius was sober he painted, he plucked away at a guitar, he tinkered with his motorcycle in the yard. When he was high he was happy to lay there doing nothing but watching smoke curl on the ceiling until the sun went down.

A familiar fancy black car slowed down to a crawl beside them. 

Sirius’ batshit crazy cousin Bellatrix threw a drink out the passenger window at him and missed by a mile. Sirius called her a slur and threw his lit cigarette through the window right back at her, and whoever was driving the car sped off even though they both heard her shrieking at him to slow down and pull over and beat the shit out of Sirius for her. Neither of them could stop laughing for the next block solid, giggling to each other, mimicking her shrieks in falsetto. Sirius nearly fell over trying to run along the curb. His arms were out like a flightless bird, his tightrope walking leading the pair of them past the bar entirely. James grabbed him, and Sirius shoved his shoulder, nose crinkling with his smile when he shoved James’ hair up out of his face and James swatted his hand away. Sirius half-fell away from him toward the street. 

“You’re gonna fall into traffic,” James told him, holding both his wrists to keep him upright. 

“Nah, you’d never let me.” Sirius wound his arm around his shoulder, and James tried and failed to corral him toward their waiting friends. “I haven't seen you all day, let me keep you to myself a little longer.” 

“They’re gonna wonder where we got to without them.” 

“Let them wonder.” 

James followed Sirius down the main drag, then down a furtive turn down a back alley, finally under a blanket of shade after what felt like days of cooking in the hot sun. Sirius leaned against the brick wall at the back of the barbershop and looked at James for a long time in the quiet. 

“Are you alright?” James looked at him in silence for a beat. Motherfucker. He cornered him on purpose. Sirius was studying him like he was assessing whether or not a scraped knee needed tending. “Just asking.” 

“Why wouldn’t I be?” 

“That’s the question isn’t it.” Sirius’ hair was coming undone after their windy car ride, loose black strands were already wild around his face again–one wisp of a curl sticking to his temple. He looked at James hard. “But you’re not.” 

James leaned on the wall across from Sirius, white plastic siding washed cool with shade. There was a beetle crawling across the alleyway between them, a big ugly one. James watched that instead of replying. 

“You don’t have to talk about it, but I’m here if you want to. You’re drinking a lot again.” 

“I’m fine.” 

“That’s alright, I’m just saying.” Sirius tapped his scrappy combat boot on the concrete. “I care about you, you know. You weren’t around last night, and today you’re… I don’t know, you’re how you get sometimes. I’m just saying if something bad happened, you can tell me.” 

“Nothing happened.” 

“That’s alright.” Sirius crossed his ankles back and forth, tapping one heel on the concrete the way some people open and close a pen when they’re nervous, then straightened up. His smile was awfully rakish. “You don’t want to talk about it, so I assume you don’t wanna think about it much either. Whatever it is. We can just go in there and pretend drinking actually makes you forget a goddamn thing, how you like to do. That’s really healthy, James. Super. Crazy that it used to be you always on my ass about suppressing all the bad shit that happens to me, and now look at you–” 

“Nothing happened,” James insisted a second time. “Drop it.” Sirius narrowed his eyes at him suspiciously, looking a bit like he was squinting right into the sun. 

“I wish you’d be more careful with yourself is all. Talking helps sometimes. You’re the one that taught me that, but you’re still like a lockbox whenever you’re doing bad again. I can tell when you are, and it hurts a hell of a lot more to watch and not be able to do or say anything to you about it than it would to hear whatever it is that’s eating at you. I won’t push it, since you wanna forget or whatever, but just so you know… you won’t be able to outrun yourself, James. Not never. No one has or can. That’s just life. You can carry it all by yourself or you can split the burden with other people. Drinking won’t get rid of it. It just delays the inevitable. I don’t even mean you have to talk to me. Talk to Remus or Peter or whoever else for all I care, as long as you’re talking I’ll be satisfied. You’re at your worst when you let yourself get in those loops up in your head, you spiral and make yourself so crazy you start circling the drain and end up doing stupid insane shit you’d never do if you were in your right mind, then you end up drinking to forget doing that shit, and you’re never normal again, not for months. Eventually you come back, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t go away at all. I just want to help you before it gets really bad instead of sort of bad. Which you will, if you keep walking down this road all on your own.” James felt the tension in him all over, radiating, and apparently Sirius did too. “I mean, you have a pattern. It’s… You know what I mean. Whatever. It’s all up to you. You know what I’d prefer, but it isn’t my choice, so…” Sirius smiled at him gently, his cleverest smile, like a fox. All long grey eyes and knowing. “You can’t outrun me either. Not never. I hope you know that, you prick.” 

“I’ll tell you all of it someday, but I can’t now. Not yet.” 

“You don’t have to tell me what it is. I know it’s hard, so let me make it easier however I can.” Sirius leaned back against the wall, looking up at him. “Whatever you need right now, James, you can have it. Anything you want.” James looked at him for a long stretch of still quiet, then crossed the alley in three strides and pulled Sirius into him hard. Sirius hugged him back without a second of hesitation. James buried his face in his wild hair while Sirius squeezed the breath out of him. I’m sorry, James thought loud enough he worried Sirius might hear it. 

They stood there holding each other for a long time before James could make himself let go of him, and go back to the real world– one outside of his friend, the closest thing to a brother he’d ever have. Every time James loosened his grip, Sirius held him tighter. By the time they let go of each other, James felt guiltier and about as bad as he ever had, but something in him had softened. The sharp stab of misery in him was dulled to the point of a knife instead of a razorblade. He used to hold his mother just like that when he was too upset to talk, and she let him. Now, Sirius was the only scrap of family he had left, and James was betraying him all over again. The flood water inside him was full of mud and rubble. It stuck in his throat. 

I need a goddamn drink. 

James didn’t like to be alone. That was another rule he had to follow to keep himself sane: AVOID MIRRORS. Lonesomeness is a mirror. It forces you to look at yourself. James couldn’t look at himself without seeing the ugliness all over him on the inside, on bad days. On good days? The opposite, in a way it was just as bad. He could get lost in his own eyes. Hello, gorgeous. He could press his lips to his own reflection with a smile, lightness in him. Or, the third face he saw: nothing at all. No recognition that his face was his face. Emptiness deeper than abyss, bigger than the space the planet drifted through. Profound, dizzying emptiness. Emptiness like a well with no bottom. So he avoided mirrors, and he avoided long drives down the highway alone. Hard lessons he learned the hardest way every time. James was not the type to learn from the mistakes of others. He always had to see for himself, for better or worse. 

The bar seemed darker than usual after getting caught up in the bright daylight all over everything outside, bleaching the world. 

It was a Saturday, and it was crowded. Some local band was playing in the corner, a pack of what seemed like teenagers. They were better than you’d expect. James snuck away from Sirius to the bar before seeing the rest of his friends and the second she set eyes on him the bartender poured him a double shot of bourbon. 

“Thanks, Ros.” He tipped it toward her with an easy smile and she batted her eyelashes at him. Anything for you, sweetheart. Thank you kindly. A routine already growing old, though he was hardly twenty-two. He ordered a High Life and drank enough to hide the whiskey on his breath then wandered over to his friends’ usual table in the corner. 

Sirius was already there, laughing into Peter’s shoulder–pinkfaced with liquor already even though it was hardly eight. His fair face flushed with colour brought a vicious memory of Regulus to the forefront of his mind against his will. The night before, a supercut: his flushed face, the neck of a bottle of vodka pressed to his mouth with James’ insistent drunken hand, spitting on him and giggling, pale eyes bloodshot and glossy, then slack lips, drooling on three of his fingers, pressing hot kisses to the inside of his thigh. 

“...Hello?” Sirius waved his hand right in front of his face. 

James jolted back to life and lit himself a cigarette, and realized too late that it was the last of the menthols he’d stolen from Regulus. They tasted like his mouth, and made his preoccupation worse instantly. 

“I thought you smoked Marlboros,” Remus said, sinking into the seat opposite James and kicking his ankle playfully under the table. James covered the label on the filter of his cigarette with his fingers and eyed him as mischievously as he knew how. 

“I bummed this one.” 

“Off who?” asked Remus. James winked, smiled, sipped his beer. “Whatever,” Remus drawled, but Sirius looked at him hard. James shoved at his shoulder. 

“I’m fine, you worry too much. I swear to God.” 

“Fine, are you?” Sirius narrowed his eyes. 

“Leave him alone, Christ,” said Peter. “He’s just having a good time… or had one last night, I guess. What are you, some kind of cop?” James blinked hard. The four drinks he’d had in the past hour were finally getting him something close to a buzz. He wanted to be drunker. He wanted to be as drunk as he’d been last night, but he’d been drinking so much lately it took a hell of a lot more liquor to get him to feel anything more than a little blurred around the edges. He wanted to slip out of his own skin, and his own memories, and be free of thought, and memory. He wanted to be drunk, not even to be happy, just to be drunk, just to feel the world go soft and fuzzy, to make himself stupid, even if he wound up as maudlin as he had nearly every time he got drunk for the past year (for the past two years, if he was honest with himself). He polished off his drink, though he couldn’t have been at this table for more than six minutes flat. He didn’t want to draw Sirius’ ire by getting up for another already, but he wanted another. 

James drummed his fingertips on his knee under the table.

When I get up and go to the bar, I can sneak another shot, and get myself another beer. A beer is practically water. Maybe I can get a double whiskey and coke, a shot and a double– 

He heard his name paired with a greeting and looked up. 

“So, is it true?” Marlene Mckinnon’s choppy blonde hair was wild, like she’d crimped it.  

“What?” 

“I mean…” she lowered her voice and leaned across the table toward him. “I didn’t believe it when I heard who was saying it, but I figured I’d ask anyway. Everyone is talking about it, picking sides–about how true it is. You know how this town is. Everyone’s bored, they’ll probably talk about the rumour forever, but eventually everyone will stop thinking it’s true, if it’s a lie.” 

“Saying what?” A pit was opening in his stomach. Marlene’s eyes darted to Sirius, who was staring at her very intensely, his good spirits thoroughly diminished. 

“Apparently you’re fucking Regulus Black.” James laughed before he could think, and Marlene laughed too. “See, I knew it was bullshit, I mean… it was Severus Snape talking about it, and you two… I mean, he hates your guts, and then that mess with Lily. I mean, if anyone has reasons to start some bullshit rumour that you’re a fag, it’d be Snape. I wouldn’t be shocked if Regulus was a queer, he’s always been a bit… off, odd, you know? But I don’t know how he thought he’d get away with lying about you like that. You’re so…” She gestured the length of James, from head to foot. “Thanks.” She winked. “I just won a bet.” 

“Wait. Hold up a second.” James had to figure out how much shit he was in. “What exactly is he saying about me?” 

“Apparently you were fucking Regulus behind Lily’s back for like, three years or something… maybe since high school? I don’t remember, plus I heard it from Mary and she barely listens when people talk, anyway, then you broke up a year ago over something, and you just showed up at his place last night stumbling drunk and slept together again.” 

How the fuck did Severus Snape know all of that? James kept a smile plastered on his face, amused, mean, and bright, and Marlene kept talking. 

“It’s a lot of detail for a lie. What is he, having queer little fantasies about you? Regulus Black of all people. I’ve never even seen you speak to him, he’s almost as much of a freak as Snape. No offense, Sirius. Your brother is, like, indisputably weird. Anyway, I need another drink.” She wiggled her empty glass in front of him. “See you around.” 

“See ya.” James stared at his empty drink, trying to look normal, and at ease. Had it been Lily, or Regulus who opened their mouth? Lily was most likely, because she was the one sleeping with Snape, but how the hell would Lily know what he did last night? James wanted to leave, right now, but he couldn’t leave without looking guilty of the crime he’d absolutely committed, so he stayed in his seat, suddenly stone-cold-sober. 

“So, what’s your alibi?” asked Remus, rather mischievously. James stared at him blankly. “The girl you were with?” 

James smiled very brightly, like he was happy, lowered his voice, leaned over the table, and said, “There is no girl.” 

Remus’ expression flickered. Sirius went dead still beside him. 

James deserved this. He knew he did. Karma had to catch up with him eventually. He should have told all of them sooner, on his own terms. He couldn’t lie to them now, not more than he already lied for years on end. Lies of omission, all the things he never said, had piled up into a debt, and now he’d have to pay.

“It was Regulus. I’m fucked.” His friends had enough sense not to react with their faces. They said nothing. “I need another drink.” 

James stood, and walked with the dazedness of a bad dream to the bar, ordered himself that double even though he knew he shouldn’t get drunk tonight, not here and now, not with what he’d just heard, but with what he’d just heard, he needed to be drunk–stupidly drunk. He leaned over the bar and flirted with Rosie until she was chewing on her lip, and batting her eyelashes, showing him what it looked like down inside her shirt, and ignoring everyone else at the bar to talk to him about nothing at all, music and weather, all the while making eyes at him and tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder. 

James got another drink before he went back to his table, falling over into his seat and laughing at himself for it. 

“So, was that a joke?” Sirius hissed in his ear. He looked very pale. James smiled, impish and too drunk to be even remotely delicate about this, chewed on his lip, shook his head: Nope. “I feel like you have to be fucking with us.” 

James shrugged and reached for his drink. Remus quietly slid it out of his reach. James drummed his fingertips on the table and looked at Remus, pleasant as ever. 

“Are we playing keep-away?” Remus opened his mouth to speak and nothing came out. “I just have to stay here for fifteen more minutes before I can leave, let me drink.” 

“You’ve been fucking my little brother?” Sirius was whispering so quietly James could hardly hear him with his mouth an inch away. 

“Do you actually want to talk about this?” 

“For how long?” 

“You heard Marlene.” 

“All of that was true?” Sirius’ pleasant mask flickered to something else, something almost wounded that James couldn’t make sense of, a flicker of a pain too deep to be about this, something that looked seething, then back to careful blankness with the smallest edge of pain around his eyes. 

“It wasn’t three years.” James played with his lighter. For a second, Sirius looked relieved. “It was five. Maybe six, if you count–you know what? Never mind. Whatever. We’re done now. He’s…” James shoved up his glasses to rub at his eyes. “We’re done,” he repeated decisively. “So it doesn’t matter.” He snatched his drink up from Remus and downed it before anyone could stop him. 

“Six years?” Sirius looked like he was going to be sick. 

“Don’t look at me like that. Pretend we’re having a normal conversation. Smile.” Sirius smiled stiffly, dead-eyed. “Thanks.” 

“You’ve been fucking my brother behind my back for six years?”

“That’s about the shape of it, yeah.” James looked him up and down, narrowed his eyes, still smiling with absolute ease and warmth. “Are you upset?” 

Sirius raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth and nothing came out. 

“Good.” James patted his shoulder, looked at his watch, then drummed his fingertips on his knee under the table. Remus was staring at him intensely. “Whatever you’re thinking, Moony, say it. Quietly.” 

“Are you gay?” 

James shrugged. “No.” 

“But you’re sleeping with another guy.” 

“I was, y’know. Past tense.” 

“Past tense, as in, yesterday?” Remus stared at him incredulously. 

“Exactly.” James smiled at him impishly, as if nothing was amiss, absently fishing a thin shard of ice out of his glass to chew on. “Anyway, time’s up.” He stood up, put a cigarette in his mouth like an excuse, then made for the door. 

Remus drove him here, but this bar was a twenty-five minute walk from Regulus’ place, and James knew he was the one who opened his fucking mouth, so his feet found familiar steps as if no time at all had passed since the last time he’d last been on this road to ruin. The whole town was brilliant and washed white with sunlight, though it was nearly nine now. The main street of Ithaca was completely dead because everyone respectable was home at this hour to sleep or spend time with their families. James was a sticky, awful, miserable sort of drunk. The white sunlight felt like even more karmic debt getting cashed in. He heard the door open behind him and kept walking toward Regulus’ place, casual, not too quick. 

“James.” He didn’t turn around or slow down. Sirius jogged to catch up with him, and James kept walking. “James, please talk to me.” 

“Why?” James stared at the concrete underfoot, still avoiding the cracks for his dead mother. 

“Because this is a big deal.” 

“Why?” 

“You’re a queer?” James faltered midstep and finally looked at Sirius. He couldn’t read his expression. 

“I don’t know what I am,” he admitted. It was the first time he’d ever said it out loud. He looked back at the concrete. 

“Do you love him?” 

That question hit him like a hot knife right between his ribs. James flinched with his whole body as if Sirius struck him. 

“We can talk later, I want to be alone.” 

“James…” 

“I’m fine. I can handle this myself.” 

“I know you can, but you don’t have to. I’m right here.”

“Why aren’t you angry?” James glared at him, slipping around on so much whiskey in his own head he couldn’t keep his distortions on the inside. “Why are you pretending you’re not angry? Your little brother, Sirius. I’ve been fucking him. For years. I didn’t tell you. You’re playing nice, like you’re not furious, but I know you have to be, because I’ve looked at this every which way inside my head for the past six years, this moment, you finding out, and in none of those stories I told myself were you ever this fucking nice. And I know you better than you know yourself.” 

“Maybe we both think we know each other a lot better than we really do.” 

James looked down at his hand and realized it was empty. His cigarette was gone someplace already. He must’ve dropped it. 

“I don’t love him,” James said, quick and ugly. “I was just using him to get off, because I’m a piece of shit asshole.” 

“Don’t do that. That woe-is-me guilt trip of self-depreciation shit. You sound like my mother.” 

“I’m just a stupid asshole, and a liar, and I deserve all of whatever is coming to me, because all I do is hurt people all the time. It’s all I’ve ever done.” 

“That isn’t true.” Sirius was talking small. His hands were nervous on the edge of his t-shirt. “You make my life a million times better just by being in it, James. Everyone is guilty of hurting other people. That’s part of being alive.” 

“I hurt you, and now you’re comforting me. Do you not realize how fucked up that is?” James stopped to stare at him. They were out of town already, walking on the shoulder of the dirt road to Regulus’ house, both of them pretending not to know where they were walking. “Go back to the bar and sit with your real friends, alright?” 

“James…” Sirius reached for him and James recoiled like he’d been burned. 

“Everyone already thinks I’m a faggot, what the hell are you touching me for?” Drink made him mean. “Are you a faggot?” 

Sirius turned sickly white. 

“You know, I always thought you were out of reach because you were straight.” James went still. Sirius frowned. “I made my peace with that. I thought, well, I can have him like this and that’s a gift, more than enough for me, to be your best friend, to know you inside and out, to live with you and play at what it might be like in my own head—”

“Wait.” James didn’t want to be drunk anymore. He wanted to be sober enough to be quick with his mind instead of painfully slow. “Don’t be stupid—”

“And you’re not even straight. You just didn’t want me because you were too busy with my brother.” 

James felt like his heart climbed up into his throat. He was going to be sick. He could feel it. Sirius stared at him, silent as the grave. 

“I never suspected it. Six years, and never once did I think it was you and him.” 

“I have wished to God a thousand times for it to be anyone else.” James blinked hard. “But it can’t be anyone else. I’ve tried. Even Lily, it wasn’t... You…” 

James wanted to reach for him but he didn’t. He wanted to comfort him but he didn’t know how. He felt suddenly viciously aware of his own body, his own skin, and Sirius looking at him with a bone-deep sadness that hurt him just to see. He’d never once thought of Sirius as anything less than a brother. It was like he hadn’t even realized he was an option. They felt related. Too close to touch. 

“I know that isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. I think I owe you truth, after all the lies I’ve been spinning all this time.”

“More lies might be nice.” Sirius smiled bitterly. 

“What are you trying to say?  You’re in love with me?” 

Sirius stopped in his tracks to look at James. “Do you love him?”

“You already asked me that.” 

“And you lied.” 

“Isn’t this a bit like rubbing salt in the wound?” James didn't want to think about this question. 

“Are you in love with him?” 

“I know I used to be. Is that enough of an answer for you? Are you happy now?” 

“How do you feel about him now? If you used to love him?” 

“I hate him.” That felt true. Apparently, Sirius felt the same way. He looked like a ghost, a corpse. 

“Why?” 

“He’s your brother.” James looked toward the horizon instead of looking at his face, the fields of corn, ominous shadows gathered beneath the ears turned toward them. His voice turned ugly. “Guess.” 

“I think he’s sick.” 

“You think?” 

“I think he was born sick. He’s always been that way.” 

“I used to like that about him. It’s crazy. The things you think you love about someone turn into the things that make you wonder how the hell you didn’t see the rottenness in them sooner and turn tail and run, like anyone with a brain in their head would run if they were dating a goddamn psychopath. You know,” James rambled drunkenly, “I took him out shooting once and he couldn’t hardly hit paper, but somehow the first chance he had with some stag that wandered over he put a bullet right in it, right where he wanted it, because he finally listened to me. Not when the target was paper, when it was flesh and blood. It’s like he’s wired to destroy things. Living things. That was in high school. How can a fifteen year old already have that much death in him? I mean the thing was beautiful, and he sees this beautiful thing, on this beautiful day, and his first instinct is to kill it?”  

“I said he’s always been sick–” 

“The first thing we ever did together,” James laughed bitterly, half-hysterical, “I helped him burn down a house. I mean, a burning house seems like enough of an omen, and we started the fire together. I held the paper right to the match he was holding, and I wanted to know him so bad I would’ve done anything to keep his eyes on me. Somehow I didn’t know what was happening then. I thought I wanted to be his friend. We’ve never been anything resembling friends. I taught him how to drive, you know. That was me. I taught him how to drive, and shoot a gun. He taught me how to smoke a cigarette, and like the taste of liquor too much, and hurt everything I put my hands on just like he does. I really loved him. I really did. And he’s telling everybody that we—” James wouldn’t let himself cry. He glared at the gravel underfoot and chewed on his lip hard enough he half worried he might draw blood. 

He’d never talked to anyone about Regulus. Ever. Both his parents died without knowing. The only person on the face of the earth who knew about the two of them that wasn’t them was Lily Evans. Well, had been Lily Evans, before their business became everybody’s business in the blink of an eye in this close-minded nothing town. Ithaca was always inviting James to leave, his whole goddamn life it had been whispering such a thing right in his ear, and now he had a better excuse than any he’d come across before. He didn’t know what he was planning to do when he got to Regulus’ front door. Nothing good, but maybe not something all bad either. 

“I doubt it was Regulus. He cares about appearances a hell of a lot more than most people do. He’s like our mother that way.” 

“He’s the only one who knows where I was last night. There is nobody else. If Snape knows, he knows because Regulus mentioned it where he could hear. I don’t know who the fuck he was talking to. Crouch, probably. That Rosier guy Crouch is always stuck to has been buddy-buddy with Snape forever.” 

“You don’t even have one thing in common with Regulus, I don’t know how you’re all obsessed with him when he’s so…” Sirius trailed off, too much pain in his voice. 

“Not one thing?” James eyed Sirius carefully. “Are you sure about that?” 

“Dead sure.” 

“I think you were right about us not knowing each other as well as we think. I think you hit a real bullseye with that one.” 

“Is he the real reason you went off the rails last year?” 

“Both my parents died.” 

“Right when you broke it off with Regulus.” 

“You’re correlating the wrong things.” 

“So, you broke up with him because you were going off the rails?” 

“I don’t know why I do anything.” James stopped in his tracks at the end of Regulus’ short driveway, noticed an unfamiliar black Lincoln parked in front of his house, and looked at Sirius. “You know where we are. I’m not taking you with me to his front door, so kindly stay here or go back to the bar and do what I do when I’m pissed off, and try to drink yourself to death, Moony will look after you.” 

“I’m not pissed off, James. I’m worried about you.” 

“Give up already and fuck off,” James snapped on pure instinct, then frowned. “Sorry, I just…” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Please don’t worry about me, I don’t want you to. I just want to be left alone to deal with this. It’s already bad enough you know I’m a faggot—”

“Did you miss the bit where I told you I’m a queer too?” 

“No offense, Sirius, but you’re not a queer. Having a few thoughts about a guy is different from what I’ve done. You don’t really know anyway until you try it, you’ve had a hundred girls, way more than me, so I don’t know what delusion you’re under where you think somehow you’re a fag all of a sudden just because everyone thinks I am, just over a couple fantasies or wh—”

Sirius grabbed the front of his shirt and kissed him. His mouth was hot and tasted like cigarettes, and his hands were grabbing him so tight his knuckles had to be white, and James could see his eyes shut just as tight, and his long black hair, and he felt a hand in his hair, and a softening, the violence of the kiss melting away, like sugar dissolving, the impulse to close his eyes, to see what gentle hands would feel like instead of bruising ones, what a mouth would feel like kissing with tongue instead of teeth–to let himself kiss Sirius back, to kiss instead of being kissed. The voice of the devil. 

James shoved him away with both hands and his face hotter than fire. 

“Don’t do that. Ever again.” 

Sirius was redder than he’d ever seen him. “Don’t try to tell me what I am.” 

“Go home, Sirius.” James was badly shaken. “I need to talk to Regulus.” 

“You said you hate him.” 

“I do hate him.”

“You’d never hate me. It would be easy with us. Like breathing.” 

“Go home, Sirius.” James was too drunk for this. “Please. I can’t.” 

“Why can’t you?” 

“Because you’re not him.” Sirius went white, like James hit him. He looked wounded, a kicked dog. “Six years is a long time.” 

“Six more years will pass. You wanna pass them with him, or me?”  

“Is that what this is?” James tried not to raise his voice. “You’re making me choose?” He knew he shouldn’t shout at Sirius. He knew what it did to Sirius, being shouted at, but he couldn’t hardly make himself stop. 

Sirius glared, unmoving. 

“Sirius, please.” 

“You said you imagined it every which way, me finding out, and never once did you think I’d make you choose? You think more of me than I think of myself, and less of me.” Sirius was red as fire. “You don’t have to choose right now, but you will have to choose.” 

“I’ll tell you now what you can do, because I owe you more truth than I can pay. This is it. Don’t make me choose. Because it’ll be him.” Sirius looked like the world was ending, like the sky was falling down right in front of him. James felt his heart cracking, rage and misery mixed up in him. Helpless to it. “I can’t stop myself. I’ve tried.” 

“I’ve been in love with you since we were kids. I’d do anything for you, just to make you happy. We’d be happy together. It would be good.” Sirius’ eyes were welling up. “You’re choosing misery and hate and chaos over peace and real love. I hope you know that.” 

“I could lie to you and make you happy for a few days and say I’d pick you but I know myself well enough to know even after a year clean I’ll always go back to him. I don’t know why but I can’t escape him, even in my own head. He’s in my blood. He’s down in my bone marrow. He’s half the reason I am who I am now—”

“So what am I?” Sirius was glaring. “If he’s half the reason, what am I?”

“You’re my best friend.” James swallowed hard. “I know you made me who I am too, I can’t get it to come out right. He means a lot to me, Sirius. I know you would be better for me, but I can’t want anything that’s good for me. I wouldn’t deserve you. I’d end up hurting you. I’m a bad person to be in love with. I’m sure you’re figuring that out right now. I’m too goddamn selfish. Please don’t do this. We can go back to how it was, and I’ll pretend you never said it. I’ll take you home and—”

“No. We can’t.” Sirius looked like someone he loved just died. “One of these days there will be a crossroads you’ll hit, and you'll realize you can’t walk in every direction all at once.” 

Sirius turned around and walked back the way he came, shoulders trembling like they trembled the night he stumbled in at sixteen, collapsed on his parents’ floor begging to stay the night just once, sobbing blind, walking with small stiff steps like the sole survivor of a car crash. 

A good man would have run after him. A good man would have taken him in his arms like everything was just the same, and hugged him, and wiped away his tears, and figured out a way to get past this or through it, or maybe how to give it a go, see if that voice of the devil he’d heard was really his better self stepping up and raising his voice for the first time in a long time. 

But James was a junkie, not a good man, and his fix was thirty feet away behind one screen door. 

–𓆱–

“You’re pretty.”

“Pretty?” 

“Pretty.” 

“No one has ever called me pretty before.”

“You’re pretty as a girl, I swear. It’s your eyes. That’s why no one says it, you’ve always got glasses on, but I can see it now. I can see you now. Really see you. You’re real pretty.” 

“Do you think I’m…”

James always had a hard time saying the worst of it out loud.

“I’m not a queer.” 

“I know. That’s alright. I don’t mind.” 

“You’re calling me pretty.” 

“You called me a devil. Why’d you call me that?”

“What I think about when I look at you.”

“What do you think about?”

“I can’t say. Just you.”

“Do you have any idea what I think about when I look at you?” Regulus sounded so nice James let himself forget he was listening to the voice of the devil. “You, looking right at me with your hand between your legs. Wet with spit, red all over, begging for me to touch you. I think about you on your knees. I think about you sleeping naked with your legs open, all used up.”

Shame and hunger filled his lungs, no room for air.

“I think you’d look really pretty like that, James.”

His tongue. His teeth.

“Beautiful.” His cold hand sliding up his thigh. James watching him like Eve must have watched the snake in Eden. “Just like an angel.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Angels don’t do what we do. Not ever.”

“Heaven must be boring.” His laughing eyes, full of the light of perdition. James couldn’t look away. “I think you’re prettier than any angel.”

“Please.” 

“Please?”

“Don’t stop.”

His tongue. His cold hands. His laughing eyes.

Heaven must be Hell. 

–𓆱–

“That was quite a display.” It took every ounce of self-control in him not to smile like an idiot. Regulus had been avoiding him for weeks, ever since he’d shot that buck and left the antler in his passenger side, yet here he was, coming up out of nowhere. It didn’t much matter what he was saying, or that he hadn’t given James his jacket back. He was talking to him again. Willingly. A bubble of absurd happiness swelled in him. Oh, hello. It’s you. “Do you think he’s gonna go home and cry?” 

“What?” James asked as absently as he could. 

“Snape.” Regulus was speaking small and slow, even though they were the only people in the hallway. James always stuck around to listen to Lily talk at those stupid, boring student council meetings every week, and the entire school was always empty and haunted-seeming and dead by the time they finished. James didn’t like walking down empty halls after school hours. It felt like that old house had. Abandoned and lonely. It made him want to burn this place to the ground. “I bet when he goes home tonight he hides that bag you ruined from his poor mother, and thinks of you when he’s in his room, all alone. I saw the whole thing, start to finish. He was just sitting there eating his sad little paper bag lunch. I don’t know what the hell he did to provoke you like that, but I know for a fact he’ll think of you all night. Your face looming over him, laughing how you did.” James couldn’t have looked away from him if he tried. “I bet he cries.” 

“You know, I don’t like to think about that. I don’t think of him at all.” 

“Liar.” James locked up his locker and leaned against it and tried to look like he didn’t care as much as he did, because he couldn’t understand why he cared so goddamn much whether or not Regulus Black was speaking to him. He just wanted to talk to him, and know him, and listen to him talk, and watch his eyes, and he couldn’t work out why or when it had gotten so strange for him with this boy. Regulus was all in black, as ever. He was so narrow and small he looked like a knife that wished on a star real hard to be a real boy. It wasn’t like he was even all that good looking or something. Not that that would’ve mattered with a guy. James tried not to look at him. Real hard. “Liar, liar. You smell the smoke yet, Potter?” The only smoke he could smell was the dirty-mint cigarette smoke that clung to Regulus like a second skin at all days and times. 

“Do you want something?” 

“You asked me why I always have to do things I shouldn’t, but today I realized you’ve already got the answer.” James suddenly felt hunted. The way Regulus was looking at him was too knowing. He had this feeling, looking at him, that once Regulus knew how to use a gun properly he’d shoot to kill every time, even if it wouldn’t be merciful. He had something dark in him, behind his eyes, that James had never encountered before, but felt the way someone can feel how cold the depths of water are beneath them when they’re swimming in the deepest lake, even if they’re touching sunlight and treading water. “Look at you.” 

“Sort of difficult, where I’m standing.” 

“When I said he cried about you all alone, your mouth twitched like you were trying not to smile.” 

“Well, it’s a bit funny—”

“Liar.” Regulus was closer now. Too close. “You know what I think?”

“Even if it meant my life I couldn’t guess.”

“That little smile—”

“I was smiling because you’re talking to me again.” His face felt hot, how it often did around Regulus. “I don’t give a shit about Snape.”

“Interesting.” Amusement glinted in his eyes. Regulus looked up and down the hallway, then stepped closer, his voice very low. “So, you’re not like me?” 

“My answer’ll largely depend on what exactly you mean by that.” 

“You don’t like doing things you shouldn’t?” Regulus was too close. James knew he should step away, if anyone saw them this close it would look wrong, but he couldn’t make himself do it. “You must be a little curious why I’m still here after hours.”

“It didn’t cross my mind.” 

“Of course it didn’t.” 

“Are you planning to tell me? Or are we gonna play guessing games here until the sun goes down?” 

“I like playing guessing games, when I’m the one with the answers. Don’t you?” Sometimes when Regulus spoke James caught himself staring at his mouth trying to see if his tongue was forked. He watched him smirk and looked at his neat sweater instead, his meticulously arranged and freshly trimmed black hair, so precise in every aspect of his appearance, so collected, it was nearly impossible to believe Sirius could even be related to him, let alone only a year older. It was really no wonder he wound up burning houses down and burning himself up and shooting to kill, when he had to be perfect all the time in a thankless hell house like the House of Black. James had never met their mother, but he knew even this level of restraint and propriety wasn’t enough to satisfy her. Nothing would ever satisfy her. 

“You don’t often meet people who make mistakes on purpose, in life. You’re a bit of an anomaly. Have you ever noticed that about yourself?” Being this close to Regulus felt like touching fire and trying not to get burned. Just a little at a time was alright. Not too much, though. Quick and easy. Don’t let yourself linger. But James wanted to linger. He liked the way Regulus looked at him, like he was a puzzle that needed solving. “Is that what you’re here for?” James looked at his hands, still as a statue, then his eyes. Too attentive. But, James liked that. He’d always liked attention. “Are you making another mistake?”

“I’m inviting you to make it with me,” said Regulus. “Very generously. You should feel very special. I don’t extend these invitations to just anybody.” 

“Am I in prestigious company?” A wry smile crossed his mouth. “Who is it, me and Crouch Junior?” 

“Just you.” Regulus stepped away from him and James stepped with him on instinct, like they were dancing, then faltered and stopped stiff. Regulus smirked, then James was looking at the back of his head and walking faster than he’d like just to keep up with him.  

“And you call me a liar.” 

“I’m not lying. You’re the only person I’ve ever done any of this with. You’d think it would be Barty, with how much time we spend together, but I don’t know… he wouldn’t get it. When he’s destructive it’s not like it is when I’m destructive. He’s such a child.” 

“But you think when I do it, it’s the same as you?” 

“No, but I think you don’t really care whether or not you can understand why I’m doing something when you’re watching me do it.” 

“That’s not true.” James followed Regulus through the empty school, curious despite himself. Touching fire for way too long. “I want to understand you just as much as anyone else would want to understand you.” 

“If you were in a room with every person alive who wanted to understand me for who I really am, who isn’t just hoping to see someone I pretend to be for them, you’d be standing there all alone.” Regulus took a ring of keys out of his pocket and unlocked a heavy door that said: STAFF ONLY, in red. “That’s not something I’m saying for pity or something, it’s just true.” 

“What about your friends?” 

Regulus shoved open the door with his shoulder instead of replying. 

“Where are we going?” James followed him into the dark, down well-worn stairs. “I didn’t even know the school had a basement.” 

“Oh, there’s a basement alright.” Regulus shoved open the next door and let it fall back on James, not even pretending to wait for him a little. “It’s… well, you’ll see.” 

There was hardly a scrap of light down here, most of it was washed in the dim red of EXIT signs, and veiled in shadow. He could hardly see Regulus, merely the silhouette of him in the nightlike dark of this hallway. It felt the same as the hallway above them, but somehow even more forlorn. 

“There used to be classes down here.” Regulus’ voice was soft, but it still seemed to echo in the hollow belly of the school. “The population of the town shrank so much they had to close off this part of the school entirely, because it was just so disused. No one really comes down here. They clean it about twice a year, but other than that, no one really pays attention to it.” 

“How did you even find out about this?” James walked quicker to stay close to him. He didn’t like how watchful the dark felt. It felt haunted. 

“Well, I stole these keys because I like stealing, and then I walked around the school after hours matching them to doors. I was trying to find something really good I could take but I haven’t found anything better than this basement so far. I mean, it’s like those underground cities they find sometimes, those archaeology people.”

“You like stealing?”

“I guess I’m a bit of a klepto, I like taking stuff just to take it. It’s fun.” Regulus stopped in his tracks and faced James, though neither of them could really see each other all too well. “Can I tell you something?” 

“Anything.” 

“When someone talks about going away for vacation before summer, in class, I listen really closely. Sometimes they say dates they’ll be gone, and when they do, I bike to their house while they’re off and far away and break in. I do it in the middle of the day. No one ever stops me or even looks at me twice because I look so nice, when I walk up to the house they always just assume I’m checking up on it. People are so trusting in this town they never even lock up their windows. Once, I tried the front door and it was unlocked. I just walked right in.” 

“Why?” James asked. “Do you steal from them?” 

“No. When I break into peoples houses I don’t steal. I like to sit in their living room. I’m not meant to be there. The thrill of it is something else, even though I know I won’t get caught. I like to look at the pictures they have up on their walls. I look through the books they read. I lay in their beds. I put on their perfumes.” Regulus opened one of the doors and turned on the lights. It was a classroom like any of the rooms upstairs, with a blackboard and rows of neat desks, but it was windowless and neglected. The light was weak and wavering. Regulus stood at the front of the classroom, opening the desk drawers while he talked, looking for something. “I play house when I break in. I pretend to be them. All by myself. Sometimes I look through their cupboards and see what they like to eat. You wouldn’t believe the things I know about people in this town.” 

“Like what?” James leaned on the desk beside him. “What do you know?” 

“I’ll give you a sample. Try this on. Marlene McKinnon’s sainted stay-at-home homemaker mother is taking about six different antidepressants, antipsychotics, you name it she’s taking it, a day… and benzos on top of it, for fun I guess. She’s a total headcase.” Regulus smiled like that was a good thing. “The Greengrasses are completely broke. They’ve got nice things to wear, but it’s a sham. All their pantries are completely empty, that’s the real reason the girls are all thin as reeds.” He paused for a moment, like he was about to dangle something good right in front of him. “I was in the Evans house once, wanna know what I know about that girl you’re so obsessed with? I was in her room before you, I think that’s a little funny.” 

James shook his head, no, and Regulus smiled very devilishly. 

“No?” 

“Why do you do that? You told me why, but why do you have to? Are you an adrenaline junkie or something?” 

“I’m always so bored. The boredom is intolerable. It’s like it gets under my skin and worms in, and makes my life feel like one big long unending punishment, like living purgatory, and I cannot tolerate it.” Regulus eyed James, somehow much closer than he had been before. “My Sisyphean task is living between moments like this, when I’m actually doing something interesting with myself, and the rest of my life when I’m waiting to do something interesting again. I’m just rolling the boulder up the hill, day in and day out. I am not happy. Not generally, anyway.” 

“Do you think it’ll feel like that forever? Your life, I mean?” 

“I don’t know.” Regulus smiled, this time a smile that actually showed his teeth for once. He had crooked teeth, and canines like fangs. “You aren’t boring. Maybe I just need to find someone interesting enough that the spaces between my bits of real entertainment don’t feel like punishment.” 

“I don’t know what makes me so interesting to you, you don’t know much about me.” 

“What did he do to provoke you, James?” James stared at him for a beat in silence. “Tell me.” 

“I just didn’t like looking at him.” It was an ugly thing to say out loud, he knew it was, but he said it anyway. He never would’ve said a thing like that out loud to anyone else. He would’ve made up a better excuse for it. He would’ve lied maybe even in his own head. But for some reason, when Regulus was the one asking, James felt like he owed him the truth. 

Regulus looked like he wanted to dissect him. “Why did that mean you had to pour a half-gallon of milk over his head?” 

“He sat there and let me do it.” James didn’t want to think about himself this much. “So if you think about it, it’s half his fault.” 

“Sev is friends with my friends. We share a couple. I’m closer to his social circle than yours, so why are you here alone with me when he disgusts you so much? How am I different?” 

“You’re not like him. You’re different. I could never…” James stopped himself right there. Regulus’ eyes looked like they were shot full of electricity. “You’re Sirius’ brother.” 

“Sirius doesn’t like me. If anything, your closeness to Sirius is another strike against me. Does he even know you’ve been talking to me?” James felt like his face was on fire. Regulus was very close, closer than he’d ever been to another boy before, their faces almost touching. “I bet you didn’t tell him.” 

“I…” 

“I bet you never will.” 

James looked at his eyes, a fan of dark eyelashes, so close he was half a blur, the smell of cigarettes lingering so close and strong he felt like he could almost taste them. What would it taste like? He’d never smoked before. Tobacco, mint, and spit… close enough he could taste…

James slid the entire desk backwards forcing himself away from him. It made an awful sound. Regulus looked owlish, tense as a taut string. Both of them scarcely blinked. 

“What is this?” James demanded. “Is this the mistake you were talking about?” 

Regulus didn’t say a thing. He was frozen solid, staring flatly, expression so blank he almost looked like a doll. A mannequin. 

“I knew you were a freak but this is something else.” 

“I didn’t do anything.” 

“Didn’t you?” James felt hot all over. Mortification and humiliation burned through him hotter than any hellfire would ever be. “You…” James couldn’t even say it. “This is sick.” 

“You’re the one freaking out. All I did was stand near you—”

“Half an inch from my face!” James couldn’t look at him but he couldn’t look away either. This wasn’t a boy, it was a goddamn demon. A monster in human skin. Sick, and trying to spread his sickness. “Like some kind of invitation or something. What about me made you think I’d want to…” Shame choked him a second time. 

“Because you do want to.” James felt nauseous. Regulus took a step closer to him again, and James couldn’t make himself move. He was backed up against the desk. He was frozen solid, watching Regulus’ pale face in the dim light getting closer, and closer. 

“I don’t.” 

“So you don’t have to.” Regulus lined up his body with his body, his eyes so close now, right in front of James’ eyes, cornering him against the desk. James was bigger than Regulus but he felt small with his attention all over him. This close. His breath on his mouth. “You don’t have to do anything.” 

Regulus touched his belt. James grabbed his wrist. 

“Is this what you really meant, when you asked me if I’m like you?” James squeezed his wrist hard enough he knew it had to hurt, but Regulus didn’t show it. He was looking at James’ mouth. James felt stupid. He’d followed him around like a dumb little puppy, oblivious, for weeks now, and all the while Regulus was looking at him with this queer and sick hunger in his head. It was beyond unnatural. It was unholy.

“You can close your eyes, if you want. I’ll take care of you. I don’t need a thing.” God, close your eyes and let me taste him just once, and I’ll never sin again. “You don’t even have to look at me, you can pretend I’m a girl.” 

“Regulus, I can’t just…” James let go of his wrist and took his face in both hands, harsh and almost violent, restraint and fear of God forgotten in the tide of the rage that woke up in him with that sentiment in his mouth. “Don’t you ever say that to anybody ever again.”  Regulus’ eyes were blacker than a shadow at high noon, and wild. He looked hungry. James didn’t have to guess for what. He already regretted touching him with any warm intention like this. “Not ever.” 

“I thought it might be easier for you if you—”

“No.” James felt sicker. His hands felt glued to him, every muscle in him fighting the magnetic need to pull him close enough they were in each other, sharing breath and spit. This has to be unholy. God forgive me for the desire I am swallowing.  “Why would you do a thing like that with someone if they don’t even wanna look at you? Looking at you would be the best part of it with the right person. You need to give that to people who deserve it. Don’t you know you’re…” James stopped himself before he called him something stupid like beautiful and let go of him, then crossed the room, just to put distance between himself and temptation, running a hand through his hair and grabbing a handful of it and pulling and fighting the urge to curl up in a ball on the floor like a child. He felt sick and dizzy and awful. He wanted to feel his nails dig into his skin until they drew blood. Blood would be a sort of atonement for sin. Pain brings absolution. James hadn’t sinned yet. Somehow he still felt like he had something to atone for. These thoughts, unnatural desires, the images and sensations locked up in his skull behind his eyes, freshly woken by warm breath on his mouth in this dark abandoned awful place. If he fucked him, he knew Regulus would dig his nails in. He knew Regulus would bite hard enough the sex would be punishment, atonement and sin both licking with his mouth. He wanted to be bitten. He wanted to taste evil and see how he liked it. 

James paced. He should’ve left the room. He should be gone already. This was a test set before him. Heaven isn’t free, you have to earn your eternal life. If he wanted to keep his soul clean he had to run. He wanted to pray, but when he turned himself inward it felt like looking into an abyss. The angel in him wanted to leave the room. The devil in him wanted to cross it and bend Regulus over the desk like a girl and wet him with spit and listen to him and watch him and taste him and sink his teeth in the lily-white side of his neck until he could feel him whimper with his teeth and his cock buried in him and his legs up at his shoulders and his 

“James?” Regulus sounded cloying, like rotten fruit in the summer heat. 

“If you ever try to get me alone again, I’ll make you regret it.” James couldn’t look at him.  He was bursting at the seams with hate for no one but himself. Hate bigger than the goddamn sky. His mouth tasted like bile. He felt like he was being sawn right in half. His words came out like he was spitting. “You better not look at me twice, not ever again. It’s a good thing you like fire so goddamn much.”

“What does any of this have to do with fire?”  James turned the knife inside him around, the keen edge biting him all the way up his throat. 

“Faggots burn in hell.” 

Then he was out the door, and up the stairs, and in his truck–driving like the devil himself was riding his tail.  

He did the right thing in walking away, but it didn’t feel right. It felt like his insides were shrinking, smaller and smaller and smaller, tying into a tighter and tighter knot. James pulled over on the side of the highway and vomited acid and sin and hate and lust and evil. 

There was a moth in the grill of his truck, looking at him with wilted little grey wings like Regulus’ devil stare. 

James plucked the moth out of the grill of his truck and shredded it to bits, but the grey stuck to his fingers, and then the vomit in him turned to tears, and he sank to the dirt and scrubbed his hands on the grass and scrubbed at his mouth and knocked his head into his knee and hugged his knees to his chest and felt all of five years old while he buried himself in the belly of the tall grass, where an inch of water settled into the basin of the ditch a foot from his sneakers,  and James let mosquitos chew on him, and let his truck idle, and cried for a long time before the tears finally quit him and even when the tears left, James didn’t move. 

I’m going to hell. He blinked a noseeum away from his eye, watching a beetle dance over still and greenish water. I’m going to die and burn forever.  

𓆱

James wasn’t proud of the bruises on his knuckles, but they came in handy in his repeated dance of self-flagellation in place of impossible atonement. The bruises on his knuckles smarted when he tapped them on the side of his leg, but he tapped a knuckle there anyway. He relished the tenderness. He deserved pain, being what he is.

James had been biting bruised knuckles every night while he tucked his hand in his pants and took himself in hand and thought of Regulus’ breath on his mouth, the raven feather black of his eyelashes, and the sliver of his stomach he’d seen when Regulus wiped the sweat off of his face with the bottom of his shirt after running that first day he’d really known him. The sheen of sweat on his skin in heat, his hands slick and crimson in that field, his pale eyes watching the rain, his pale eyes watching him—always watching, always seeing too much. He turned his own hand on his belt buckle into Regulus’ hand instead of Lily’s. Regulus’ deft hand, his slim wrists, his wet, warm mouth, the softness of his voice when he wanted something from him, “You can pretend I’m a girl.” In his head, James pretended to pretend, in his head, James watched him spit, and lick, and kiss. He watched his eyes, he grabbed fistfuls of his neat black hair until it was ruined, he grabbed his narrow shoulders and pushed him to his knees. James bit down on bruises hard every single time he did it, like that would ever be enough punishment. 

James imagined the wet heat of the back of his throat. He bit a bruise. James imagined licking his crooked canines. He bit a bruise. James imagined Regulus on top of him, spitting in his hand and sliding a finger into him, came so hard he saw stars, then cried himself to sleep and woke up still nauseous with a need to cry, having cried every tear already inside him. He couldn’t cry, so he pinched the soft skin on the inside of his thigh until it bruised, yet even pain wouldn’t bring a tear to his eye. He was hollow and hungry. 

He couldn’t get rid of the thoughts now that he had indulged them a little. He felt ravenous. He felt sick. 

He wanted to talk to Regulus again. Alone. Only talk, nothing more. But even talk seemed like too much temptation. 

James did what he always did when he was in agony. He turned the knife he was twisting around inside of himself outward, and sunk it into flesh that wasn’t his own to satisfy the bloodlust of the pain. 

Bruised knuckles were a burden. James had never been violent before, not the way he was now. He knew he’d probably hurt Snape with their stupid jokes, but it was mostly just to get a laugh, and he knew one day Snape would grow up and realize no one ever would’ve bothered him in the first place if he’d have just been a bit less of a gawky ugly freak (nothing personal). It wasn’t for laughs anymore. It wasn't fun, and it wasn't funny. 

He’d been driving alone and stewing with rage when he’d seen him. 

His long black hair hanging over his face, walking like he was trying to turn himself invisible even on the loneliest side street in their town. 

James pulled his truck over, slammed the door, and tapped one foot on the asphalt. Here, boy. 

Snape met his eyes like a kicked dog. The rest wasn’t worth telling. 

It was an ugly thing he did. 

It was an ugly thing he kept doing. 

James would tell himself each day, today I’m not going to do it, today I’ll leave him alone, it isn’t right. But the violence in him seemed bigger than the violence in other people. As a matter of fact, everything he felt seemed like it was bigger than what other people felt. His sadness had no bottom. His anger never ran out of fuel. His happiness had no height to which it could not climb. He was in the fire every single day, in the fire in the dreary heat that clung to the start of autumn, like summer wouldn’t surrender her territory just yet, kissing embers and calling it fire like that would make the burns all over him any less humiliating. He had a habit of stewing when he got upset about anything. His head caught him in a spiral, swirling in hypnotic circles, the same hateful words looping over and over again, faggot, spawn of hell, devil-touched, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick—then he’d see Snape with his black bruises all on his arms and his stiff, hurting walk, the tempting fragility of him. He’d remember the day before, finding him, getting him alone, doing whatever he wanted to him, and the heat of rage kept James from doing something similarly evil but far sicker with Regulus. 

James hit Snape everywhere but his head and his face, he hit him until Snape could barely bend enough to get himself up off the ground, then he walked away, and did it all over again the next time he started feeling like there was too much sickness and wrath inside of him to live. 

He knew it was bad but it wasn’t as bad as what he wanted to do to Regulus so he kept doing it, and as weeks went by Snape seemed to grow smaller and smaller and smaller, and James figured out if he uses his feet more than his hands his mother won’t bother him about the bruises on his knuckles so much. 

He fucked up today. He broke his own rules about the boy’s face, hitting him in the jaw, and Snape took it willingly even as he fell to the ground and caught the wall behind him. James was so sick he was shaking. Snape looked at him from the ground, opened his mouth and weakly poked a wet red molar out, as slow as molasses. It fell to the ground, pathetically small, and rested next to his crumpled body in a puddle of blood. James’ breath came quick and ugly. Panic and self-loathing flooded him with a sudden awareness of his own monstrousness at the sight of that pearly tooth on the blacktop. 

James crouched and touched Snape’s narrow, battered face with the gentle hands he wore with anybody else, tilting up his chin and examining the blood smeared around his split lip. He picked up the tooth and wiped off the blood with his sleeve. 

“It’s not split, anyway. Or broken.” Ordinarily when they were doing this, James did not speak. He’d have to think too much about what he was doing if he talked. Snape was looking at him the way James imagined someone might look at a grizzly bear if they happened upon one alone in the woods. James pushed his long bloody hair away from the blood on his mouth and Snape watched him unblinking. “I’ll take you to get it fixed up, but you’ve gotta do something for me first.” 

Snape didn’t seem to breathe or blink. James took his thin knobby hand and opened it up and put his tooth in his palm. 

“You hit me, right here,” James tapped his own cheek. “And I’ll take you to a dentist right now and you won’t have to pay a dime for it. But if we’re talking and anybody asks what happened, we were fighting like anybody fights. Got it?” 

Snape nodded once. 

“Or you can stay here and be as toothless as you always are, just a touch more literally.” James smiled at him. “Normally I don’t let myself get your face. Sorry about that.”

“Why do you do it?” Snape’s voice was thick and full of blood. James looked at him. 

“You make it easy.” A non-answer. A half-truth. 

“Why do you have to hurt anybody? Why do you have to make my life hell every single day, even before all this? Why did you—”

“Just hit me,” James said, feeling merciless and evil and like he wasn’t all that good at avoiding the call of the devil after all. “You’ll understand.” 

Snape hit him weakly. James grabbed his fist and opened it, then refolded it properly. 

“You keep your thumb here when you make a fist, otherwise you might break it if you hit somebody too hard. Didn’t your dad ever teach you that?” 

“My dad doesn’t teach me anything.” 

James shook his head, disappointed, finding himself speaking to him the way he’d speak to anybody, to his friends, so miserable and full of loathing and so used to him he was being too vulnerable already the second he opened his mouth a little. Too real. 

“Well if he won’t, I will. When you hit something you’re doing violence to them but you’re doing it to yourself too. However hard you hit somebody, their body hits you back with the weight you put into your own fist. Unless you’re using your feet, but even then… you ever try to kick a wall? You ever try to punch something made of stone, or cement? You’ve gotta protect your hands, that way you can hit hard enough it hurts without breaking anything.” James brought Snape’s pale fist to his own cheek and looked him in the eye. “Go ahead.” 

James only let Snape stop hitting him when his lip was split open, but somehow that little mouthful of blood didn’t feel like enough to satisfy the knife he was twisting in his stomach. 

In his truck, James fidgeted with the cross around his neck while he drove Snape to the city, a long and quiet drive full of music he liked. Nashville Skyline, With His Hot and Blue Guitar, the white album. It was strange to fumble with the tape deck to switch albums with Severus Snape riding shotgun with him. James eyed him and clicked a couple Bob Dylan tapes together. Snape stared sullenly out the window at the horizon, quiet as a church mouse. 

“What kind of music do you listen to anyway?” 

Snape’s black eyes flicked to him, and James looked away at the road just as sharp. James drummed his hand on his knee and accidentally reopened the split in his lip with his teeth. He wiped at the blood on his chin with his battered knuckles and glared at the road, then swore. 

The car scraped to a stop so quickly both of them jerked forward when it stopped moving. They were crooked on the shoulder. He threw his hazards on. 

“Hey,” James called, already out of the car before it was even off properly, his foot off the clutch, his baby stalling instead of sleeping. The dog in the road loped away from him and James followed as he’d follow if he was hunting–low and careful. It was a big dog, some kind of shepherd or lab mix or something more than likely. A great black beast of an animal. The dog was sticking to the center line of the highway, and it was stressing James out. “Here, come here little man… you could be a little lady. I guess it’s rude to presume.” He kept his voice soft, and the dog watched him warily. James bent, crouched so low if it decided to bite him he’d be finished, and held out a hand. “You’re alright, I just wanna say hi. You belong to anybody, sweetheart?” 

The dog slowly crept closer, and sniffed his hand carefully, wild and watchful eyes glued to him. James didn’t move a muscle. 

“Nice to meet you.” Slowly, carefully, he patted the dog, and the dog let him, at first very stoically, but in a matter of minutes the dog flopped into him, so happy and content under his attention it was clear this was no wild dog. James looked at the neck, but it wore no collar. He looked at the dog in entirety, always feeling a bit rude for it. “You are a little man, I guess I was right on the money. You’re lucky I found you. Really lucky. Most people don’t stop for strays, you’re being irresponsible. I guess Lucky is the sort of thing you name a dog. Do you like it?” The dog stared at him, panting cheerfully, and James took that as confirmation enough. “Alright, Lucky it is. Nice to meet you. Are you willing to get in my truck to go somewhere safer?” 

The dog panted happily and melted into James’ scratches, and then happily licked all the drying blood off of his hand for him. James tried to lead Lucky to his truck, but he didn’t have a collar so it was sort of hard. A car zipped past quick as hell and James corralled him toward the door of his truck with a bit more urgency, but it was no good. He finally gave up and threw his car door open, ignoring Snape who was watching him silent and unhelpful, and reached under his front seat. 

His field dressing kit. It was in a waterproof bag that sort of folded open like a suitcase. James shoved all his knives around carelessly, a bone saw and a gut hook clattering together on the floor, a fixed hunting knife half as long as his forearm joining them along with the sharpener he kept in there, but not a trace of the bits of cord he knew he had somewhere among all this shit. Where are you? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Son of a bitch… Once he had it in hand he tied it loosely and patted the dog until he’d earned more trust, then looped the cord around Lucky’s neck and led him into his truck. He shoved his knives back into his field dressing kit haphazardly. 

“We’ve got one more stop to make in the city,” James said. He patted the dog he’d saved from becoming a grease spot on the highway and started up his truck again. The dog laid with his head in his lap straight away. “Or on the way home, if the shelter doesn’t have space. This dog is way too friendly to be a stray.” 

“You know, sometimes you look at someone for a long time, and in that looking you realize you’ve never really seen them.” Snape offered a hand to the dog. The dog sniffed him then settled into his side. Snape held up the tooth James knocked out of his mouth with two fingers like a cigarette. “See this picture?” He settled his other hand on the head of the dog. “This is the face of evil. You should see that, even if you never see the rest.” 

𓆱

James knew none of this could go on forever. 

The next time he found Snape alone and cornered him against a wall, James looked into his eyes and walked away without throwing a punch. 

Then he found Regulus alone.

First he watched him run like a creep, his dark hair heavy with sweat and his long legs working while he drove himself around the track until he was half-blind with exertion. He liked looking at Regulus when he was finished running, when his face was flushed and kissed pink and his skin was shiny with sweat. He liked it, and hated it, and suffered his own euphoria when Regulus jogged to the bench for his water and stopped cold. 

At the sight of him, smoke closed over Regulus’ eyes and closed him off to the world. No one home inside of him. Nothing living, anyway. 

“Learning to like the fire, Potter?” 

“I have to ask you something.” 

“Do you?” Regulus’ mouth twisted like something was funny. James still had a split in his lip. Regulus touched his own mouth where James’ lip was busted. “You get in a fight?” 

“No.” James followed him to the bike rack impatient and terrified. He felt sick, but he didn’t know what else to do. “Listen, I—”

“Your knuckles are black and blue too.” 

“Listen—”

“Why would I listen to you?” Regulus put on his backpack and shoved his hair out of his face. “Actually, why would you have anything to say to me? I’m a faggot, faggots burn in hell, you’re clearly a good christian boy, what with your bloody knuckles and your self-righteous delusional bullshit, so why the fuck are you wasting my time with your goddamn complex about your fucking—”

James lost his temper and the new violence in him reared its ugly head. He grabbed Regulus by the handle on his bag when he tried to walk away, ripped the bike lock out of his hand, and cornered Regulus against the bike rack. Too close again, but this time it wasn’t Regulus’ fault, it was all his own. 

“What if I didn't want to close my eyes?” James spat out, before Regulus could cut him off a third time. “What would that make me?” 

Regulus’ eyes darted to his mouth. James let go of the hot metal under his hands on either side of him and took a stiff step away from him. 

“Why does it matter?” 

“It just does.” James felt no bigger than a mosquito. “It matters to me.” 

Regulus stepped closer silently and touched James’ mouth with two fingertips, tracing his bottom lip and tugging on the split in it. James watched his eyes watch his mouth.

They shouldn’t be doing anything like this here. James shied away from his touch. 

Regulus’ eyes flicked up to look at him, and the impact of it felt a bit like getting shot. 

God forgive me. 

“Do you have any idea, the hell you put me through?” James asked him. Regulus pressed his lips together and said not a word. 

The angel in him won a second time. 

In his truck in the middle of nowhere James screamed at the windshield. He punched his steering wheel. He screamed again, and pressed his forehead into the cold steering wheel, then pressed his fist into his eye hard, swallowed hard, turned up the music and started up his truck again, driving out of the middle of nowhere and back toward home. 

He went home, his hands hardly feeling like his hands, the knuckles that were not his knuckles still smarting where he’d hit bone under flesh. 

The flypaper in the sunroom needed changing, and there was another car outside. At least he wouldn’t have to be alone with himself today. Small mercies. Thank you, Jesus. 

“Where’d you get to after classes?” asked his mother. His parents were watching something on TV in the living room, in the golden light of this accursed awful day.

James silently crossed the living room and folded himself up into her side, and she put her arms around him wordlessly, and held him to her heart like he was younger, like he was still a boy. She brushed his hair away from his face. She eased her sunbrowned fingertips over his knuckles. 

“You shouldn’t be fighting.” 

“I’m sorry.” James blinked the blurriness out of his eyes but it wouldn’t go away. His mother pulled him in tighter. 

The newscaster said something about a tornado, and the ocean rising, and his father muttered, “...rapture’s coming any old day now.” His mother shushed him. 

James hid in his mother’s shoulder. He felt safe from the sight of anything there, on earth or in heaven. 

“You let it out, my darling,” she whispered. She ran a hand over his hair and his shoulder. James cried, trying and failing to stop. “Do you wanna talk about it?” He shook his head. “That’s alright, you just let out all the poison in you. Don’t keep it in there.” Her voice was flecked with the Alabama warmth he’d only inherited in scraps and phrases. It was the sound of happy memories, his blissful childhood before whatever was wired wrong inside of him reared its ugly head, his cousins in summer, the smell of the south, and the alligator in the water at his feet while they laughed and dared him to stick it in the eye. “Flea, you better turn that noise off and clear out.” 

“He’s my boy as much as yours.” His dad’s hand mussed up his hair, and James wiped the tears off of his face before he looked up. He always felt ashamed to cry in front of his father. “You do whatever your mother tells you. She’s a lot smarter than me, and I’m a lot smarter than you. Clever men listen to their betters. You’re going to be a clever man, if I have any say in it.” His dad was full of stern affection. “You can help me with dinner when you feel up for it if you don’t wanna be on your own. How’s that sound?” 

“Sounds nice.” His dad patted his cheek. 

“I love you, kid.” 

“I love you too,” James said feebly. His mother hugged him again. 

“You don’t have to talk about it, but if you’re in some sort of trouble we can help you. We won’t ever be angry with you for asking for help when you need it.” 

“Do you think I’m going to hell?” 

His mother cradled his cheek in the palm of her hand. “Why on earth would you think a thing like that?” 

James opened his mouth but couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t stop crying. His mother hugged him. 

“Heaven wouldn’t be heaven at all if I couldn’t have you there with me, my darling.” James scrubbed his eyes. The tears just wouldn’t stop. “So they’ll have to let you in, just for me, no matter what. You just pray about whatever’s troubling you so about the state of your soul, if you don’t wanna talk about it, God will show you the way you’re meant to walk. You talk to Him if you can’t talk to your father or me and you need a hand. He’s your father too.” 

“I think I might be a terrible person.” 

“You could never be terrible, sweetheart. Not ever.” 

“Are you sure about that?” James felt like laughing, though he’d never laugh at his mother. “I don’t think I am.” 

“Stop talking bad about my son, I’ll pinch you for it, devil child of mine.” James pinched her, and his mother pinched him. She held him for a long time, until his tears finally relented, then they both joined his dad in the kitchen. 

James cut up everything his mother told him to, and watched his parents dance around the kitchen together to some good old music with wet eyes, drinking tea and trying not to think of the shadow cast over all of it, blinding him to the golden sunlight.