Don't Think Twice
Title: Don't Think Twice
Pairing: Sirius/Regulus but barely. Barely.
Rating PG
Summary: How wraithlike they had become, he thought.
A/N: For hostile_21 (:*) and for yeats also, because I quite fancy the idea.
:::
The house elves were Obliviated at the end of December. They would wash the windows in the middle of the night and stir copious spoonfuls of sugar into the aunts' tea, brown sugar even, so that each of the women was forced to spit out the first sip as demurely as she could. (Each, usually fastidious and tidy, found Mrs. Black's frothy-laced napkins of sudden use.) Hearths retained their penitentiary pallor because come mid-afternoon the fires were still unlit. The dishes, with their fine patterns like pen-and-ink drawings, were marred by the stagnant, gummy remains of soup and milk, and there was nothing to be done about it because no word, no warning; all of a sudden Kreacher was missing on New Year’s Eve.
When Sirius - already bored with the crime - half-heartedly confessed to it, his mother unfolded her hands, sighed, and resumed the garnet-colored book she'd been reading for days. Sirius stood in the doorway a moment longer and he had the slightly awkward air of a stage actor who has missed his cue. He tugged at the thin, bare necklace he’d taken to wearing (upon which no one had remarked). Then he departed, climbing the stairs to his bedroom.
Regulus had watched all of this from the hallway and followed ten steps behind, so that when he crossed over the threshold to Sirius's bedroom (which Sirius indifferently referred to as Elba), Sirius was just sitting down on the bed. "Well," Regulus said, as if they had been speaking all along and this was his sage conclusion: "At least she isn't angry."
Sirius raised an eyebrow. "She's livid."
Then he motioned for Regulus to close the door. Sirius fussed with his flat pillows for a minute or two, reclining on them somewhat, and he brushed the hair out of his face but the fringe drifted back into his eyes. He sighed his mother's sigh, an ordinary sigh with no particular sorrow to it. ("Rain again;” the like.)
Regulus flattened himself against the shut door. "Then why hasn't she punished you?"
A sidelong glance. "Because she's given up, you little fool."
:::
Sirius never ate with them anymore; he went out in the evenings. Sometimes Regulus wondered about the places his brother went and not wanting to give Sirius the satisfaction of curiosity, he imagined them late at night, with only the faded walls of his bedroom for inspiration. Perhaps Sirius stopped in a shop just for the warmth and for a cup of black coffee, first disregarding the sugar packets and then slitting them open with his thumbnail, to pour the crystals out on his napkin. Perhaps he bought a flower from a girl bearing a tray-full of them, and perhaps their petals froze and flecked away from the stem. Perhaps he rode the bus and saw a film.
Regulus liked this idea-Sirius had taken him to the cinema once and it had left an indelible mark on Regulus, the surreality of it: the dark theater like a kind of sepulcher, how the washed-out color of the film’s vistas made everyone’s hair gleam a certain shade in a bluish spectrum, how distinctly separate Regulus felt from the woman right of him in what he understood to be a communal experience. “I didn’t much like it,” Sirius had admitted as they emerged, but Regulus had hardly noticed the film itself.
Finally he asked Sirius one night as Sirius stood at the door and pulled his coat on. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere of consequence,” Sirius said. Then he looked more closely at Regulus and added, almost flirtatiously, “Perhaps I’m bringing you a late Christmas present.” He smiled a slightly open-mouthed smile and all Regulus could think was he needed a shave. Then Sirius was gone. A minute later Regulus was out the door following him.
The sun was just going down and it was easy to spot him, catch up to him, as Sirius rounded a corner. He hardly blinked as Regulus awkwardly switched his pace to match Sirius’s, and the only exchange between them was Regulus’s quick breaths and Sirius’s quiet amusement.
“Where are you going?” Regulus asked again.
“Nowhere,” Sirius said. “I always walk with a purposeful stride.”
They were quiet for a long while, walking in step and carefully avoiding the sidewalk obstacles-cracks, the odd bit of trash, patches of ice. Regulus kept a wide margin between himself and the perimeters of buildings; it was the eaves that worried him, resplendent in icicles like the wax run-off of dripping candles. Someone had told Regulus you could be struck and killed by falling icicles and Regulus had reacted with irrational paranoia and horror. Sirius interrupted his thoughts: “Mother know you’re out?”
Regulus shook his head.
Sirius looked at him curiously. “Well, well.”
Regulus had done nothing especially daring, though; nor had Sirius. Their comings and goings were not monitored, and there was no permission to gain or lose. Barriers were tacit. Communication was fragile. It was the same with the whole family. Mother’s sisters and their children visited often but it was nothing compared to former years; everything is more vibrant in memory, but in this case it was the truth. The cousins had all been young at the same time: itchy in their frills, snatching the sweets out of pink dishes with an ease children and pick-pockets share. Narcissa lived in the country and had once smuggled in a frog; this kept them entertained an entire evening until they tired of it and killed it. That same Christmas, Regulus, all of seven, admitted he wanted to be a Hufflepuff (he liked the sound of the word) and years later they had not let him forget it.
Regulus wondered that all of this could have occurred in the same house. How wraithlike they had become, he thought. The soft fuzzy sound of Sirius’s radio at night was as shocking as rustling in an empty catacomb. The quiet was overwhelming. The rooms were stifled with winter, spring, summer and autumn’s dust (the windows had remained sealed throughout). There was a kind of inevitability looming.
Sirius was quiet as they walked, forgoing his new hobby of constant complaint. Sometimes Regulus had the uncomfortable, uncanny, and probably incorrect feeling that they were thinking precisely the same thing; in any case he did not ask.
Suddenly he saw that they had come to a church, quite by accident. “You’ve never been in a church, have you?” Sirius said. “No, I don’t suppose you have, when would you have gone?”
“When would you have been in a church?” Regulus answered, feeling a trifle defensive.
“I like to experience a thing every now and then,” Sirius said slyly. “You might enjoy it yourself, sometime.” He turned away. Regulus wasn’t sure he wanted to but Sirius was already walking up the steps (“Careful of the ice”) and tugging at the tall wooden doors.
There were two or three other people inside, dotted along the pews with their dark heads bent. There was a most peculiar feel of not-quite-peace, but something untouchable. It was still. And it was old; Regulus understood as much. The people in the mullioned, stained-glass windows stared down at him with ancient, jewel-colored eyes, or gazed ahead with their secrets. He felt dizzy on an old peculiar scent, that of smoky incense, that lingered everywhere. Sirius led him to a row in the back.
He began to whisper so low that even Regulus, close enough so their knees bumped, could not hear every word; but he pretended he could at first. Then slowly Sirius’s voice faded in. “…now and then, don’t you? Awful place, I’m losing my fucking mind there, I think. Hence an excursion.” Sirius stared straight ahead at a baptismal fount. The sight of it made Regulus momentarily queasy. Sirius began to look around casually, as if he were considering buying the sanctuary. “I’ve never been here before. Reminds me of Hogwarts in a funny kind of way. Or maybe not.” He paused. “I don’t know why I came home.”
Before Regulus could reply Sirius had already stood up and was walking toward a rack of red candles. Regulus followed. Sirius just watched them a moment, the pure white flames bleeding into shuddering tips. The air around them wavered. Regulus was transfixed for a minute while Sirius moved to pick up the unlit votives. He handed one to Regulus and tipped the wick of his toward another candle until there were two pale purple circles around both wicks. Then the candle was white like the rest, glowing through the rusty wine-red of each little cup.
“Light one,” Sirius instructed quietly.
“Why?”
Sirius sighed (the woman in the second row stopped with her clacking rosary for just a moment). “It’s what you do,” he said. Then he looked at Regulus. “You have a prayer, right. Tell me you know what praying is? Well, you can’t be on your knees at good old St. Paul’s all day, can you, so when you leave you light a candle. It’s like you’re still praying. Or so I am told.”
Regulus said it sounded odd. It was only an automatic response; the glimmer of the candles was hypnotic and he wasn’t thinking properly.
“-Christ’s sake, Regulus.” Sirius nudged him.
He started a little. Then Regulus made a great show of furrowing his eyebrows as he lit the candle, like he was putting up with a game and its cumbersome rules. He set his next to Sirius’s and as he reached, his shirt-sleeve gathered at the elbow, exposing his forearm to a dozen, colorless threads of heat rising up from the candle tips. It was something besides warmth; it was fervor, and the prayers each votive carried. A small voice was speaking inside Regulus’s head. Sirius was staring placidly at the votives. Regulus felt something desperate as he looked at his brother, then, a sudden understanding of inevitability; the voice was a prayer, rather a mantra, saying Stay. Just Stay.
:::
There was a knock around one in the morning; anyway Regulus assumed it was a knock, though a minute later he learned Sirius had had a bit to drink and for all he knew, the thump had been Sirius stumbling into the door. Either way it opened before Regulus could get to it, and framed in the doorway was an odd black patch barely distinguishable against the dusky blue of the hall. When it moved it reminded Regulus of the puzzles in a book of optical illusions he’d been given some years earlier. A minute or two of staring would give way to sudden shapes-a star or a tree, or your very own brother. The shape coughed.
“Sleeping?” he said. “Regulus, are you-?”
“I’m awake,” Regulus mumbled, sitting up.
Sirius closed the door behind him with protests from the hinges. He struggled briefly, swore, and Regulus held his breath-irrationally, as it happened, because nights were safest anyway. Sleep absorbed his parents. (They slept so deeply that as a child Regulus often dreamt they slept through winters and come spring, ivy crept into the bedroom and wrapped its tendrils around his parents’ prone frames, till they were buried in a sea of green. Afterwards he would run to his mother’s room to wake them up but the door was usually locked. It was Sirius who sat up nights, waiting, to be found ashen-faced in the morning, scarcely blinking, with the cool watchfulness of a garden statue.)
“Have been thinking,” Sirius said thickly. “It’s not so bad, you know, and I’ll be gone in a year anyway.”
“Okay,” Regulus said uncertainly.
Sirius found the bed, groping like a blind person. “These are my thoughts, now. My thoughts for the New Year.” The note in his voice was morose. “I’m fucking-I’m considering my place, like you told me.”
Regulus could not remember having said any such thing.
Sirius began to crawl in beside Regulus. Something cold and glassy touched his shoulder and Regulus jumped; then a moment later he realized it was a bottle of vodka. It was dripping and there was the finest dusting of frost over it. (Sirius had buried it around the back in a mound of what little snow they had.)
“Have some,” Sirius commanded, tipping the bottle towards Regulus’s mouth.
Regulus said it smelled like some kind of varnish.
“It tastes almost as good too,” Sirius replied.
He slipped deep under the covers, then, pulling them just short of his chin. Next to him, Regulus kept at the bottle for a moment or two, taking the smallest sips he could-just drops, really-little beads dripping off the rim. When he tried to hand it back to Sirius, he just knocked it away, and two stray drops quietly dotted the sheets.
Then Regulus set the bottle on the table next to his bed and nestled down under the blanket with Sirius. He felt like a crab under clouds of fine sand. It had been this way when they were children. When Sirius was 13 he had put his hand on Regulus’s hip, slipped it past the waistband of his pajamas and rubbed the china-white of Regulus’s hip. Sometimes he found Sirius looking at him oddly, but he did not often think of it. Tonight Sirius was still, a cocoon unto himself. He lay staring at the ceiling, his eyes dark with no reflection. Hours ago they had mirrored the votives. (Their uncle had given Regulus a drawing lesson, once. All life’s in the eyes, he said; that little spot of light’s a window so mind you don’t forget it in your portraiture. The uncle had also stressed the importance of highlights in apples.) Sirius looked dead, with his eyes solid black. Regulus could have believed it, too, if Sirius hadn’t spoken then.
“Did they say anything?” he asked. “After we came back earlier?”
Regulus said neither of their parents had mentioned a thing.
Sirius said he expected as much.
There was a fairly ripe silence then, with a sigh like a prelude to some grand explanation. Regulus expected it. He thought Sirius would explain the convolutions of his mind, then, offer out his decisions like a meal to be had. For a long time Regulus had had some unquestioned confidence that Sirius would speak plainly about all of them, some day; sixteen years was a long silence. At the least he expected Sirius to stay awake with him but a moment later he realized the sigh was a yawn, and Sirius was asleep beside him.
Regulus rolled over on his side to watch him.
He reached out hesitantly to brush the hair out of Sirius’s face. When the strands were swept away from his neck, it exposed a faint red mark where the thin silver of Sirius’s necklace had rubbed him raw. Carefully Regulus removed the chain. He unwrapped it from Sirius’s throat and rewrapped it around his own wrist, his fingers, his knuckles. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and let the links drop into his palm, and the necklace coiled about itself like a snake in a basket. It was still warm from Sirius’s neck; Regulus decided he liked this. Finally he squeezed his fist around it, trying to capture and preserve the lingering warmth. But when it was cold again, not Sirius’s necklace but simply a thing, Regulus felt the pluck of some small, implacable loss, like a candle being snuffed out.
Pairing: Sirius/Regulus but barely. Barely.
Rating PG
Summary: How wraithlike they had become, he thought.
A/N: For hostile_21 (:*) and for yeats also, because I quite fancy the idea.
:::
The house elves were Obliviated at the end of December. They would wash the windows in the middle of the night and stir copious spoonfuls of sugar into the aunts' tea, brown sugar even, so that each of the women was forced to spit out the first sip as demurely as she could. (Each, usually fastidious and tidy, found Mrs. Black's frothy-laced napkins of sudden use.) Hearths retained their penitentiary pallor because come mid-afternoon the fires were still unlit. The dishes, with their fine patterns like pen-and-ink drawings, were marred by the stagnant, gummy remains of soup and milk, and there was nothing to be done about it because no word, no warning; all of a sudden Kreacher was missing on New Year’s Eve.
When Sirius - already bored with the crime - half-heartedly confessed to it, his mother unfolded her hands, sighed, and resumed the garnet-colored book she'd been reading for days. Sirius stood in the doorway a moment longer and he had the slightly awkward air of a stage actor who has missed his cue. He tugged at the thin, bare necklace he’d taken to wearing (upon which no one had remarked). Then he departed, climbing the stairs to his bedroom.
Regulus had watched all of this from the hallway and followed ten steps behind, so that when he crossed over the threshold to Sirius's bedroom (which Sirius indifferently referred to as Elba), Sirius was just sitting down on the bed. "Well," Regulus said, as if they had been speaking all along and this was his sage conclusion: "At least she isn't angry."
Sirius raised an eyebrow. "She's livid."
Then he motioned for Regulus to close the door. Sirius fussed with his flat pillows for a minute or two, reclining on them somewhat, and he brushed the hair out of his face but the fringe drifted back into his eyes. He sighed his mother's sigh, an ordinary sigh with no particular sorrow to it. ("Rain again;” the like.)
Regulus flattened himself against the shut door. "Then why hasn't she punished you?"
A sidelong glance. "Because she's given up, you little fool."
:::
Sirius never ate with them anymore; he went out in the evenings. Sometimes Regulus wondered about the places his brother went and not wanting to give Sirius the satisfaction of curiosity, he imagined them late at night, with only the faded walls of his bedroom for inspiration. Perhaps Sirius stopped in a shop just for the warmth and for a cup of black coffee, first disregarding the sugar packets and then slitting them open with his thumbnail, to pour the crystals out on his napkin. Perhaps he bought a flower from a girl bearing a tray-full of them, and perhaps their petals froze and flecked away from the stem. Perhaps he rode the bus and saw a film.
Regulus liked this idea-Sirius had taken him to the cinema once and it had left an indelible mark on Regulus, the surreality of it: the dark theater like a kind of sepulcher, how the washed-out color of the film’s vistas made everyone’s hair gleam a certain shade in a bluish spectrum, how distinctly separate Regulus felt from the woman right of him in what he understood to be a communal experience. “I didn’t much like it,” Sirius had admitted as they emerged, but Regulus had hardly noticed the film itself.
Finally he asked Sirius one night as Sirius stood at the door and pulled his coat on. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere of consequence,” Sirius said. Then he looked more closely at Regulus and added, almost flirtatiously, “Perhaps I’m bringing you a late Christmas present.” He smiled a slightly open-mouthed smile and all Regulus could think was he needed a shave. Then Sirius was gone. A minute later Regulus was out the door following him.
The sun was just going down and it was easy to spot him, catch up to him, as Sirius rounded a corner. He hardly blinked as Regulus awkwardly switched his pace to match Sirius’s, and the only exchange between them was Regulus’s quick breaths and Sirius’s quiet amusement.
“Where are you going?” Regulus asked again.
“Nowhere,” Sirius said. “I always walk with a purposeful stride.”
They were quiet for a long while, walking in step and carefully avoiding the sidewalk obstacles-cracks, the odd bit of trash, patches of ice. Regulus kept a wide margin between himself and the perimeters of buildings; it was the eaves that worried him, resplendent in icicles like the wax run-off of dripping candles. Someone had told Regulus you could be struck and killed by falling icicles and Regulus had reacted with irrational paranoia and horror. Sirius interrupted his thoughts: “Mother know you’re out?”
Regulus shook his head.
Sirius looked at him curiously. “Well, well.”
Regulus had done nothing especially daring, though; nor had Sirius. Their comings and goings were not monitored, and there was no permission to gain or lose. Barriers were tacit. Communication was fragile. It was the same with the whole family. Mother’s sisters and their children visited often but it was nothing compared to former years; everything is more vibrant in memory, but in this case it was the truth. The cousins had all been young at the same time: itchy in their frills, snatching the sweets out of pink dishes with an ease children and pick-pockets share. Narcissa lived in the country and had once smuggled in a frog; this kept them entertained an entire evening until they tired of it and killed it. That same Christmas, Regulus, all of seven, admitted he wanted to be a Hufflepuff (he liked the sound of the word) and years later they had not let him forget it.
Regulus wondered that all of this could have occurred in the same house. How wraithlike they had become, he thought. The soft fuzzy sound of Sirius’s radio at night was as shocking as rustling in an empty catacomb. The quiet was overwhelming. The rooms were stifled with winter, spring, summer and autumn’s dust (the windows had remained sealed throughout). There was a kind of inevitability looming.
Sirius was quiet as they walked, forgoing his new hobby of constant complaint. Sometimes Regulus had the uncomfortable, uncanny, and probably incorrect feeling that they were thinking precisely the same thing; in any case he did not ask.
Suddenly he saw that they had come to a church, quite by accident. “You’ve never been in a church, have you?” Sirius said. “No, I don’t suppose you have, when would you have gone?”
“When would you have been in a church?” Regulus answered, feeling a trifle defensive.
“I like to experience a thing every now and then,” Sirius said slyly. “You might enjoy it yourself, sometime.” He turned away. Regulus wasn’t sure he wanted to but Sirius was already walking up the steps (“Careful of the ice”) and tugging at the tall wooden doors.
There were two or three other people inside, dotted along the pews with their dark heads bent. There was a most peculiar feel of not-quite-peace, but something untouchable. It was still. And it was old; Regulus understood as much. The people in the mullioned, stained-glass windows stared down at him with ancient, jewel-colored eyes, or gazed ahead with their secrets. He felt dizzy on an old peculiar scent, that of smoky incense, that lingered everywhere. Sirius led him to a row in the back.
He began to whisper so low that even Regulus, close enough so their knees bumped, could not hear every word; but he pretended he could at first. Then slowly Sirius’s voice faded in. “…now and then, don’t you? Awful place, I’m losing my fucking mind there, I think. Hence an excursion.” Sirius stared straight ahead at a baptismal fount. The sight of it made Regulus momentarily queasy. Sirius began to look around casually, as if he were considering buying the sanctuary. “I’ve never been here before. Reminds me of Hogwarts in a funny kind of way. Or maybe not.” He paused. “I don’t know why I came home.”
Before Regulus could reply Sirius had already stood up and was walking toward a rack of red candles. Regulus followed. Sirius just watched them a moment, the pure white flames bleeding into shuddering tips. The air around them wavered. Regulus was transfixed for a minute while Sirius moved to pick up the unlit votives. He handed one to Regulus and tipped the wick of his toward another candle until there were two pale purple circles around both wicks. Then the candle was white like the rest, glowing through the rusty wine-red of each little cup.
“Light one,” Sirius instructed quietly.
“Why?”
Sirius sighed (the woman in the second row stopped with her clacking rosary for just a moment). “It’s what you do,” he said. Then he looked at Regulus. “You have a prayer, right. Tell me you know what praying is? Well, you can’t be on your knees at good old St. Paul’s all day, can you, so when you leave you light a candle. It’s like you’re still praying. Or so I am told.”
Regulus said it sounded odd. It was only an automatic response; the glimmer of the candles was hypnotic and he wasn’t thinking properly.
“-Christ’s sake, Regulus.” Sirius nudged him.
He started a little. Then Regulus made a great show of furrowing his eyebrows as he lit the candle, like he was putting up with a game and its cumbersome rules. He set his next to Sirius’s and as he reached, his shirt-sleeve gathered at the elbow, exposing his forearm to a dozen, colorless threads of heat rising up from the candle tips. It was something besides warmth; it was fervor, and the prayers each votive carried. A small voice was speaking inside Regulus’s head. Sirius was staring placidly at the votives. Regulus felt something desperate as he looked at his brother, then, a sudden understanding of inevitability; the voice was a prayer, rather a mantra, saying Stay. Just Stay.
:::
There was a knock around one in the morning; anyway Regulus assumed it was a knock, though a minute later he learned Sirius had had a bit to drink and for all he knew, the thump had been Sirius stumbling into the door. Either way it opened before Regulus could get to it, and framed in the doorway was an odd black patch barely distinguishable against the dusky blue of the hall. When it moved it reminded Regulus of the puzzles in a book of optical illusions he’d been given some years earlier. A minute or two of staring would give way to sudden shapes-a star or a tree, or your very own brother. The shape coughed.
“Sleeping?” he said. “Regulus, are you-?”
“I’m awake,” Regulus mumbled, sitting up.
Sirius closed the door behind him with protests from the hinges. He struggled briefly, swore, and Regulus held his breath-irrationally, as it happened, because nights were safest anyway. Sleep absorbed his parents. (They slept so deeply that as a child Regulus often dreamt they slept through winters and come spring, ivy crept into the bedroom and wrapped its tendrils around his parents’ prone frames, till they were buried in a sea of green. Afterwards he would run to his mother’s room to wake them up but the door was usually locked. It was Sirius who sat up nights, waiting, to be found ashen-faced in the morning, scarcely blinking, with the cool watchfulness of a garden statue.)
“Have been thinking,” Sirius said thickly. “It’s not so bad, you know, and I’ll be gone in a year anyway.”
“Okay,” Regulus said uncertainly.
Sirius found the bed, groping like a blind person. “These are my thoughts, now. My thoughts for the New Year.” The note in his voice was morose. “I’m fucking-I’m considering my place, like you told me.”
Regulus could not remember having said any such thing.
Sirius began to crawl in beside Regulus. Something cold and glassy touched his shoulder and Regulus jumped; then a moment later he realized it was a bottle of vodka. It was dripping and there was the finest dusting of frost over it. (Sirius had buried it around the back in a mound of what little snow they had.)
“Have some,” Sirius commanded, tipping the bottle towards Regulus’s mouth.
Regulus said it smelled like some kind of varnish.
“It tastes almost as good too,” Sirius replied.
He slipped deep under the covers, then, pulling them just short of his chin. Next to him, Regulus kept at the bottle for a moment or two, taking the smallest sips he could-just drops, really-little beads dripping off the rim. When he tried to hand it back to Sirius, he just knocked it away, and two stray drops quietly dotted the sheets.
Then Regulus set the bottle on the table next to his bed and nestled down under the blanket with Sirius. He felt like a crab under clouds of fine sand. It had been this way when they were children. When Sirius was 13 he had put his hand on Regulus’s hip, slipped it past the waistband of his pajamas and rubbed the china-white of Regulus’s hip. Sometimes he found Sirius looking at him oddly, but he did not often think of it. Tonight Sirius was still, a cocoon unto himself. He lay staring at the ceiling, his eyes dark with no reflection. Hours ago they had mirrored the votives. (Their uncle had given Regulus a drawing lesson, once. All life’s in the eyes, he said; that little spot of light’s a window so mind you don’t forget it in your portraiture. The uncle had also stressed the importance of highlights in apples.) Sirius looked dead, with his eyes solid black. Regulus could have believed it, too, if Sirius hadn’t spoken then.
“Did they say anything?” he asked. “After we came back earlier?”
Regulus said neither of their parents had mentioned a thing.
Sirius said he expected as much.
There was a fairly ripe silence then, with a sigh like a prelude to some grand explanation. Regulus expected it. He thought Sirius would explain the convolutions of his mind, then, offer out his decisions like a meal to be had. For a long time Regulus had had some unquestioned confidence that Sirius would speak plainly about all of them, some day; sixteen years was a long silence. At the least he expected Sirius to stay awake with him but a moment later he realized the sigh was a yawn, and Sirius was asleep beside him.
Regulus rolled over on his side to watch him.
He reached out hesitantly to brush the hair out of Sirius’s face. When the strands were swept away from his neck, it exposed a faint red mark where the thin silver of Sirius’s necklace had rubbed him raw. Carefully Regulus removed the chain. He unwrapped it from Sirius’s throat and rewrapped it around his own wrist, his fingers, his knuckles. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and let the links drop into his palm, and the necklace coiled about itself like a snake in a basket. It was still warm from Sirius’s neck; Regulus decided he liked this. Finally he squeezed his fist around it, trying to capture and preserve the lingering warmth. But when it was cold again, not Sirius’s necklace but simply a thing, Regulus felt the pluck of some small, implacable loss, like a candle being snuffed out.