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The door slammed shut.
Regulus looked up from where he had his face buried in the pillows and greeted the intruder with a scowl.
“What part of bugger off is hard to understand?” he sniffed, giving him his currently best glare – which was not impressive at all since he was feeling far more miserable and sorry for himself to muster some true Black wrath. Never mind that, though, the anger would surely come now that Sirius was here; he excelled at finding the right wrong thing to make him furious.
“I heard you fine, I just didn’t want to.” Sirius shrugged, grinning in a way that was a little bit too close to a grimace to fool him into believing all was fine.
Not that he hadn’t been able to hear for himself that it wasn’t fine; the shouting had continued long after Regulus had been sent to his room. Their mother was always loud in her anger. As usual, he had tried to ignore it and when he couldn’t, he had told himself that Sirius deserved it. Neither had been particularly successful, as usual.
Regulus abruptly sat up properly – properly properly, prim and poised and everything, as if he were at a fancy dinner party and not caught hiding from the big bad world in his bed like a child.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said, voice clipped, chin lifted haughtily, “I don’t want to get pulled into any of your trouble! You’ve caused enough damage for today!”
Sirius faltered. Guilt flickered over his face before he visibly caught himself and plopped down on the bed - gingerly though, Regulus couldn’t help but notice he was moving gingerly, and he hated himself for the twinge of concern he felt.
“Prick,” he snorted and elbowed Regulus, to which he only flashed him a scowl and pointedly refused to elbow him back. “You sound like a Malfoy.”
“I’d rather sound like a Malfoy than like you!”
“Oy!” Sirius yelped. “Going for the low blows already?”
Regulus pressed his lips into a thin line and turned his face away.
Silence fell.
It was an awkward silence, such as silence often was these days between them. Or talking, or anything, really.
They had been close once, as boys.
That had been before Sirius became the shame of the family and Regulus had to choose between him and everything – everyone – else. They had been close, back before Sirius developed a fascination for everything Muggle while Regulus started listening when Bellatrix talked about her Dark Lord.
They had been close, once. Now they were not.
Regulus’s hands clenched around his thighs. “Why are you here?”
Sirius remained silent for a while, fiddling with a loose thread at the hem of his robes, and merely shrugged, sullenly muttering, “I don’t know.” He paused for a moment before adding, “I just felt like it.”
That had been the conflict today, his clothes, or namely him wearing Muggle clothes under the robes their parents had insisted on. Regulus, who had been relieved to see Sirius wear the robes with only a minimum of fuss, had felt personally betrayed when the screaming started, and then, once he was alone in his room, he had felt pathetic for feeling betrayed at all.
“Why are you always like this?” he snapped, his voice sharp and cutting, a perfect copy of their mother’s right down to the censure it held, though he could muster nowhere near as much vitriol – just the helpless, bubbling frustration he had been choking on while he waited for the screaming to end.
Sirius’s face darkened. “Always like what?” he shot back, and his own voice had sharpened as well with that underlying, barely contained anger Regulus had become so familiar with – it used to be only aimed at their parents, never at him, but that was another thing that had changed. “Not a pushover like you?”
Regulus flinched.
He didn’t know how the wand ended up in his hand, but he found himself holding it before he had made the conscious decision to. His hand trembled, fingers tight around the grip that might have snapped ordinary wood under the pressure, his breath coming in sharp little gasps as he pointed the tip of his wand right at Sirius’s face.
“Get out!” he spat. “Get out of here and… and stop pretending you care!”
“I just wanted to check on you! You looked like you were running off to cry!”
His chin lifted higher. “So what if I was!” Regulus snapped, imperious and trembling with injured dignity. “You’ve made it clear you don’t care anymore!” And he had been a fool to think even for a moment that this summer could be different – that Sirius would be different now that he was away from the corrupting influence of his so-called friends. He used to never need any friends other than Regulus.
“You’re the one who keeps parroting Mum and Dad!” Sirius shot back and got to his feet, though not before he had slapped the wand away, scathingly unimpressed by Regulus’s threat as he was by everything Regulus said or did these days. “If this is what I get for trying to be nice I don’t want to stay!”
“Then leave! Why don’t you just leave for good! We don’t need you here!” The words spilled from his lips without permission and with barely any thought at all – they weren’t even the worst things he had said to Sirius when they fought but everything felt more fraught this summer, like one more fight could be the tipping point.
Regulus didn’t want to be the tipping point. He didn’t want Sirius to leave. He wanted things to be as they used to be. He wanted Sirius to see him again even when they weren’t fighting. He also wanted things which he had been too young to want before but at night when he laid awake after shamefully indulging in desires he shouldn’t feel for a blood traitor – nor for his brother, but the blood traitor part would matter more – he thought he could be content if Sirius would simply see him again.
It finally sank in that Sirius hadn’t left yet. He hadn’t moved at all since Regulus told him to do so and he might have blamed his contrarian nature for it except Sirius looked stung, or shaken even.
“You don’t mean that,” he said quietly. It sounded half pleading.
“What if I do?”
What would he do then, he wondered, would it finally be enough to make Sirius fight for him? He wouldn’t get his hopes up, he told himself, they were too different now and Sirius had stopped caring about the things that truly mattered. But who was he kidding, even now he felt himself hoping as he watched him with wide, cautious eyes.
“You don’t,” Sirius said again. “You wouldn’t. You never want me to leave.”
A note of sweet triumph curled warm in Regulus’s belly. He was finally noticing him.
Slowly, he too slipped from the bed, placing himself in front of him. Sirius was taller, of course, which meant he had to look up to him and that was annoying, but he got a thrill from how similar they looked, nearly like mirror images if not for the age and height difference.
“You spit on our name and traditions, and blood means nothing to you anymore.” I mean nothing to you anymore, went unsaid, but he could read in Sirius’s sharp intake of breath that he heard it anyway. He straightened his shoulders a little more and puckered his lips like he had bitten into something sour. “If you want me to keep caring anyway, give me a reason.”
They stood there, silently glaring at one another while Sirius’s face went through a number of complicated expressions Regulus couldn’t pinpoint.
“Fine!” he finally burst out. He looked painfully determined and furious to boot. “Remember, you asked for it!”
Before he could even think of the scathing retort it deserved, Regulus found himself yanked forward by the lapels of his robes.
He squeaked a protest, all ready to puff himself up in indignation, and then it was abruptly silenced by lips slamming into his own.
It was something half kiss and half bite, and a lot of frustration.
Sheer instinctive spite more than anything else had Regulus pressing back into the kiss, not even pausing for shock though his thoughts had turned into a whirlwind.
Sirius yanked back first. “Like that?”
Regulus blinked at him, eyes wide and lips bitten. He darted out his tongue to run it over his lips.
“No.”
Sirius was still holding on to him. He could scream and yell and hex him, and they would never speak of it again.
Or he could… he could… His thoughts raced with all the possibilities of what he could do but mostly he just knew he wanted Sirius to stay, to keep seeing him.
Daring had never been his strength. It was a Gryffindor trait and Regulus was anything but a Gryffindor. He prided himself on his cunning and liked to take risks only when he knew he would win or could make it so he would win.
There was little guaranteed gain to this risk – except maybe the most important one of all.
“Like this,” he said and gathered all his courage.
He lifted himself to his tiptoes and slammed into a kiss with all the raw determination of a Slytherin – determined to win.