His footsteps are muffled against the young grass of the meadow. Still, she can tell exactly where he walks as he nears - that ashy smell making his constant companion alerts her despite his feline subtlety. Secrets have but a breath to live between people who know like they do.
Sirius wears the fragrance of a wildfire, burning out saplings too soon, his trail-blazing revolutionary in its indiscriminate harm - heady smoke, fumes of wood, acrid chemicals mixing like potent fire whisky to her adrenaline-junkie totalled mind.
Inches from where her hair splays out, moistened by the morning dew - Pandora having foisted herself on the grass to watch the first blush of the sky as the sun banished sleep like a squalling babe - Sirius stops.
Her tongue tastes like tar. His, too.
Bated breath.
Reg likes to loiter the castle long after curfew, his black hair muddying with the shadows that crawl in the wan hours, leaving not a speck of evidence to tarnish his charming reputation.
Pandora sees, anyways. She should tell Reg his brother does, too. She should help him navigate the encyclopaedia she’d developed, charting his brother, detailing each rune of the glyphic script that is Sirius Black, chicken-scratch scrawl of his existence distorting with each layer of dust she blows upon.
That wouldn’t fix anything, the nasty, unwaveringly truthful side to her pronounces. This guilt is not what rids them of oxygen.
Always pronouncements. With her. With him. Can they help seeing so clearly? As though it were always the first time their eyes blinked open, the world nude startling white to them - bleary, immense, blindingly brilliantly bright in its every corner.
The pressure that builds behind her temple is addictive, like pressing on a wound, (like bandages and balms - but that’s a step too far for even her to acknowledge.)
That’s the crux of the issue, in truth. This isn’t about Reg. This is about them.
Like Orpheus with his Eurydice, Sirius looks to her. Making sure this shade of Pandora exists still, not the one that draws eyes in her crowd of green boys but the one only he is privy to. The Pandora dead behind her baby blues. His, in the infancy of adulthood they share.
Like Orpheus with his Eurydice, it is disastrous. It stunts them, this that they discreetly return to, unable to peel themselves from.
Like Eurydice with her Orpheus, Pandora takes Sirius’ hand nevertheless, when he lays beside her.
They watch in silence as blood-red blooms across the sky. It lingers, their quiet, over the chirping of crickets, the hubbub of students milling in the Great Hall, the boom of McGonagall breaking yet another duel in the halls, the snickers of their friends and the distant drumming of war.
It fades only in the wan hours of night. Regulus is not in bed.
Pandora rises once more. Not for him. There is a meadow in her mind’s eye.
An hour later, Sirius follows once more.
Written for @taylorswiftmicrofic April Prompts.
Day 18, Prompt: Crickets. Word Count: 500.