how hard is it to find someone incredibly wealthy to spend all my days with who’s like, “yeah babe you can stay home and write your gay fanfiction all day while i’m busy engineering/doctoring/coding/lawyering etc. i would love to support your creative endeavors!! here i brought you a latte” ??????
'Revenge is bad' to YOU. i love when a character destroys everyone who wronged them. i love when they get to bite and maim and tear and rip and scratch and kill. Sorry ur catholic about it but i'm different
SUMMARY: Scenes from Art Heist, Baby! Sirius post Copenhagen (do not read this is you haven't read ahb! and wanna avoid spoilers!!)
WORD COUNT: 3.2k
"Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its colour."
- Separation, W.S. Merwin
(okay, this is based off of an ask by @signofthereads except I toned down the sadness factor by a lot and I wrote it in a day, so it's staying on tumblr. but i wrote it to give ahb! sirius a little more room grieve bc i felt like he needed that.)
One.
Sirius comes to on the aeroplane- if you can call it that. His mouth is dry and his throat is sore when he attempts to swallow, and he aches like someone reached in and ripped out his heart from his chest cavity. He’s struggling to keep his eyes open and his head feels muddied and murky. Any coherent thought keeps slipping just out of his grasp, in between his fingertips and back into the muddied waters of his subconscious. As best he can, he glances down and sees that his clothes are covered in blood and he feels Remus gripping his arm next to him as if his life depends on it. Even when Sirius can’t catch his thoughts, even when his bones feel weighed down like his marrow is made of cement, even when he can barely keep his eyes open, he would know Remus anywhere. Still, he tries his best to lean over and look at Remus anyway. His head rolls a bit on his neck, too heavy to hold up, so he’s met with the bottom of Remus’ shirt. Tiny splatters of drying, browning blood littered the bottom of it. Sirius’ chest aches, and he’s trying to catch his thoughts, and he’s trying to speak but his words keep getting stuck in his sandpaper throat.
Shot, he thinks nonsensically and his eyes widen in fear as his breathing comes out more rapid and shallow. That explains the blood and the burning in his chest and why he feels so disoriented. His thoughts all rush forward with a brief surge of clarity. He’s been shot.
Oh God, he’s been shot.
He tries his best to look around for Regulus but his thoughts are getting slippery again and his eyelids feel much too heavy to keep open.
“Regulus left me again,” he tries to tell Remus but his voice comes out distorted, warped and too slow. This must be why it hurts so much. “They shot me.”
“What?” Remus asks, still gripping Sirius’ arm tightly. He’s holding on, but Sirius has no intention of going anywhere.
He lets his eyes close. It’s easier this way.
He tries to repeat what he said but he only makes it halfway through the sentence.
“Peter gave you something,” Remus’ voice swirls in his mind. “A sedative, I think, to get you to stop screaming. We can–”
But Sirius doesn’t hear the rest as he fades back into his murky subconscious.
Two.
People were buzzing around him all in a flurry, all like flies, and they were moving much too fast for Sirius’ brain to comprehend but he was back in his flat. The lights were too bright and the air was stuffy and the entire place that he had called home and yearned for had been unlived in for so long that it felt unlivable. Everything felt unlivable.
Remus had set him down in the tub, clothes and all, and turned on the water so hot that steam started to rise from it.
Shows what he knows, Sirius thought to himself as he waded through his convoluted thoughts. You’re supposed to burn the clothes after a crime like this takes place. Barty and Evan are going to be furious.
Then, Remus starts scrubbing. He scrubs and scrubs and scrubs and Sirius watches the blood smear off his skin and swirl into the water in crimson splotches, like pastels bleeding from a canvas.
As he watches all his blood swirl down the drain Sirius thinks this must be what being baptised feels like. Being made clean. Rebirth. He hopes Remus scrubs his skin until it’s raw, he hopes Remus can wash the last 24 or so hours off of him. He wants to be something new again. He wants to be something light. Sirius would do the scrubbing himself except his bones are still much too heavy to be of any use and his head is still too murky to feign coherency.
It wasn’t until Remus began unbuttoning his shirt with shaky fingers and Sirius looked down to inspect the bullet wound in his chest that he realised the blood wasn’t his own. Pale skin, inky black tattoos, but no wound. No bullet hole. Which of course made sense. Because if he was shot then he’d be at a hospital or with Peter or somewhere other than a bathtub being scrubbed clean. How had he gone all this time thinking that he had been injured? That the blood was his?
No.
No, this wasn’t his blood at all. He had been confused before, but now he wasn’t. His thoughts came crashing in and shattered against his skull, leaving their splintered jagged edges embedded in his mind.
It was his brother’s blood. It was Regulus’ blood.
Oh God, he’s been shot.
Remus was staring back at Sirius with a tear-stained face. He looked as panicked as Sirius felt and his mouth was moving but Sirius couldn’t hear any words. Why couldn’t he hear what Remus was saying? When had Remus stopped scrubbing him clean?
Instead, strong thumbs were wiping under Sirius’ eyes, collecting all his tears. Steam curling up towards the ceiling in foggy wisps. Water tinged slightly pink with his blood. No, with his brother’s blood. The ache in his chest. Their blood. A calloused hand over his mouth. Remus’ panicked gaze, gravelly voice, and a ringing in his ears.
It was only then that Sirius realised he had been screaming.
That night, he sleeps in Remus’ arms. He smells like soap but he doesn’t feel clean.
Peter’s medicine doesn’t stop the dreams, though they’re just as muddled as his waking thoughts were.
He dreams about being little again. Regulus is high up in a tree with his feet dangling from a branch. He’s a little too high for comfort. He’s a little too little to know he’s in danger. But Sirius knows. Sirius knows it’s his job to watch him, and it’s his job to keep him safe. He calls out to Regulus from the ground, but Regulus can’t hear him. No matter how loud Sirius yells, Regulus can’t hear him. He just keeps swinging his legs and laughing as the wind blows through his hair, and Sirius gets a sickly feeling in his stomach. He knows without knowing that Regulus is about to fall– he can feel it in the air, but he’s powerless to stop it from his spot on the ground. Sirius can feel the sharp sting of panic, but the dream ends before anything happens.
He dreams about an ugly lamp from a wretched cousin and the laughs it inspired, he dreams about Paris in chalky washed-out tones, he dreams about sliding down the stairs with his brother in their parent's house on rugs that cost more money than a year’s salary, and he dreams about his mother which hasn’t happened in almost half a decade. In all of these dreams, Regulus is there. In all of these dreams, he’s still a small child. But the recurring dream that plagued his subconscious that night was free of Regulus entirely.
It was a hazy, panicked, and anxious dream where Sirius was all grown up, all alone, stumbling around his flat. He was late. He was so late, but he couldn’t find his keys. As time continued to pass he became increasingly distressed. For some reason, he knew that this was his last chance. He had to be on time. He knew that he had to meet Regulus for coffee but as he wandered hurriedly throughout his place, tearing apart pillows and rummaging through drawers and closets looking for his keys, he couldn’t shake the feeling that Regulus was already gone– that he wouldn’t be at the coffee shop at all, that Sirius had failed somehow and let him down, and that he missed his last chance.
Three.
The thing about Regulus is that he was always so self-assured in Sirius’ mind. He remembers when they were younger and Walburga made them clean out all the cupboards in the kitchen. They had to take out every jar and box and can so they could dust and scrub the cupboards spotless.
Halfway through the process, Sirius began feeling overwhelmed looking at the mess from the cupboards that was now sprawled out on the counters and the tables and the tiled floor.
“We’ve worked so hard and it just looks like we made everything worse. It’s a bigger mess than when we started,” he sighed, already imagining how furious Walburga would be with the both of them when she returned home to see her kitchen in utter disarray.
He watched as Regulus scrambled down from the counters to stand beside him and observe the scene.
“Sometimes,” Regulus began with a shrug of youthful indifference. “Sometimes things have to get worse in order to make them better. They’re not good right now, but we’re almost ready to put all the things back and they’ll get better again.”
Regulus always spoke that way– with absolute certainty. If he was going to do something, he did it, without fail. If he was going to say something, he meant it. If he was going to promise something, he kept it.
“This is the last heist Sirius, this is the one.”
Four.
The thing about Sirius is that he never could remember what life was like without Regulus. There was a time, however brief, when there had only been Sirius. But he had no memory of that time. As far back as he could go to pinpoint his earliest memory, Regulus was always there.
He remembers the surge of pride he felt when Andromeda said Regulus looked just like him. How people could see, just by looking at them, that they were from the same place, that they were connected. There was a time when Sirius was just Sirius, but then Regulus was born, and they had the same nose and the same laugh and the same funny way of quirking their eyebrows when something confused them. That’s all Sirius could remember, that connectedness, and it was that connectedness that shaped the way Sirius thought.
His inner monologue began reflecting his outer monologue in that didactic way that all older siblings seemed to be born with. It was never ‘here’s what I’m going to do’ but always ‘here’s what we’re going to do.’ and ‘here’s why we have to do it.’ When he spoke to Walburga or Orion it was always ‘why we feel’ and ‘why we did it.’
Even after Sirius left, even when he hadn’t seen Regulus in months, even when he felt like he was entirely alone, it was always ‘we.’
Sometimes he would feel foolish, and he’d forget who the other person was in his head that he was referring to. But it never took him long to remember it was Regulus.
The fact that Regulus was out there was enough. They were still connected, even when Sirius wished they weren’t, even when he tried to forget that they were.
In the aftermath of Regulus’ death, there was no more ‘we.’ Sirius tried to tell himself that it was just like all the other days when he and Regulus weren’t together, when they weren’t talking. That he could pretend.
But he couldn’t.
Death had settled in and cut all the invisible strings tying them together, leaving Sirius in a perpetual state of freefall. Because Regulus was no longer out there, in Paris with Orion or travelling to some far-off museum. Sirius knew exactly where he was, he was buried in the Earth, under six feet of soil, and it wasn’t enough.
There was a time when Sirius was just Sirius, but when Regulus was born there was an unspoken promise that the universe had made with him that Sirius would never be just Sirius again. That a little brother meant the promise of a ‘we.’ Whether they were speaking or not, whether they lived close to each other or far away, they were from the same place, they grew up the same way, and there would always be a ‘we.’ But then the universe went back on its promise. Who was he if he wasn’t constantly worrying about Regulus? Who was he if he was no longer in charge of keeping Regulus safe? Who was he if he was no longer an older brother? The unfathomable had happened, and now Sirius was just Sirius and somehow less himself than he had ever been.
Five.
Sirius runs his finger over the grey headstone again and again in some masochistic ritual he can’t quit.
He feels the word take form underneath his finger.
Brother.
He’s done this so many times that he’s already worried he’ll wear the stone down so that word will be smooth and illegible in less than five years.
In the early days, that’s all he does. He traces the word brother over and over again and he weeps.
Sometimes he weeps because Regulus will never get any older than he is now. In Sirius’ memory, he can still picture him, baby-faced with a missing tooth, and he can see him as a stoic teenager with eyes like flint and unruly morning hair, and he can see him as he was on that night before everything went wrong. But he can never imagine him any older than that moment. That’s all he gets. Sometimes it makes him weep and sometimes it makes him so angry that he makes himself sick.
He traces over the word brother and thinks about how it went so wrong. All the little moments he can pinpoint that led them here. In time, he imagines he’ll be able to trace over the word and think of all the times they got it right too. He wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling like half of him is buried in this soil that he sits on.
On Regulus’ next birthday, Sirius bakes a cake. It’s warm and it smells like cinnamon and it’s a little lopsided, but Sirius is sure Regulus would appreciate the effort. He goes by himself in the afternoon just before the sun starts to set. It’s freezing cold and Remus offers countless times to go with him, but Sirius declines.
He takes himself to the cemetery, and he sits with his lopsided cake and his black coffee and his brother. He smiles at the freshly cut and placed purple flowers by the grave and he traces over the word brother a few times for good measure.
Six.
Sirius and Regulus share the same nose. They have the same laugh and the same funny way of quirking their eyebrows when they’re confused. When they were younger, Sirius loved it. Parts of himself in his brother and vice versa. When they were both young Sirius could see Regulus in himself through the crinkles by his eyes when he smiled too wide and he could hear Regulus in his own laugh. As they got older and started growing up and apart, he began recognizing Regulus in himself differently. Sirius saw the same downturned frown or the same darkened stare when he looked in the mirror. They still had the same nose and they still had the same laugh, though neither of them did much laughing then. By the time Sirius had left, he could only see Regulus in the rings around his eyes, in the quiet and solemn looks of cold regard and contemplation he gave himself in the mirror, and in the clenched jaw of his anger.
In the New Hampshire house, Sirius remembers Regulus teaching a class. He had his back turned and was writing something on the board and for a moment, even though Sirius had made it his mission to be as surly as possible that day, he found himself smiling.
They both wrote the same way. Their q’s and a’s were identical and the way the words slanted ever-so-slightly across the board, as if gravity was trying to pull them down. This was something Sirius hadn’t taught him. This was just something they both did. Sirius thought about all the times he had written the letter ‘a’ over the days and weeks and months he and Regulus weren’t speaking. How connected they were without even knowing it. How they came from the same place.
Then Regulus turned to roll his eyes at something James had said and the flicker of Sirius’ smile grew a little bit wider. He would know that expression anywhere. It was the same one he would use to feign annoyance and mask affection.
The house in New Hampshire was when Sirius started seeing himself in the happier parts of Regulus again. No longer in the sleeplessness of bloodshot eyes and downturned scowls but in affectionate eye rolls and smiles from spontaneous countertop dance parties.
Sirius heard Regulus’ voice in the back of his mind, echoing from somewhere in the past.
“Sometimes things have to get worse in order to make them better.”
Sirius remembers thinking to himself that maybe this was it. Maybe they had gone through all the worst parts. All the boxes had been pulled from the cupboard and now Sirius could see himself in happier parts of Regulus again. Maybe now is when things started to get better.
That was in New Hampshire. In the earliest days after Regulus was gone, Sirius struggled with mirrors. Sometimes, in the bathroom, he would catch a glimpse of himself, same nose, same rings around the eyes, same creased brow, and he’d see Regulus staring back at him. In the beginning, there were times he looked too much like Regulus, which maybe made him nonsensical and maybe it wasn’t any more true than it had been when Regulus was alive, but on those days Sirius wouldn’t leave the dark of his room in fear that he’d catch sight of his brother through some reflective surface and sob in the street, or in the car, or in the cinema.
It wasn’t all bad though, slowly, slowly things started to get better. He could tell, the first time he laughed in front of James after Regulus had died. James had turned to him with eyes wide and hopeful and a bittersweet smile and Sirius knew that James was thinking the same thing he was.
It was Regulus’ laugh. And it was his.
Maybe when death had crept in and cut all of the strings tying Sirius and Regulus together, he had missed a few. Maybe they could still be connected after all.
Sirius looked that way today. He could tell from his reflection in the shiny lacquered table top of the café that today was a day where he could see Regulus in his own reflection a little more prominently. But now it isn’t so bad. Now, enough time had passed that he felt a certain comfort in seeing Regulus in himself. Lucky even that he was still here, even when he wasn’t.
The waitress brings him his coffee and he takes a deep breath as the bitter taste fills his mouth. He’s certain other people think he’s a bit off as he sits making faces at the empty seat across from him, but he doesn’t mind.
‘I’m thinking about calling this conversations from the coffee shop,’ Sirius thinks. ‘I’ve been coming here enough times now. This little ritual should have a proper name. What do you think, Regulus? That way there’s still a ‘we.’ That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?’
His breath trembles a little on his next inhale.
‘We’re meeting at the coffee shop,’ Sirius thinks with a smile. ‘We have things to talk about.’ He likes that.
Omg omg i just finished chapter 67 and am still Crying Excessively™️, but I just had to talk about my one (1) rational thought I’ve had since: I truly consider cr a literary masterpiece and as an obnoxious literature student, I have to say: AAAH the way you played with our “POV characters live” expectations in the broadcast scene??!?! With what we expected had happened but also that we slowly realize they didn’t die because of that POV rule?? That’s so brilliant and such an interesting interaction of the text and your notes,, I am going to be thinking about this exclusively for the next 7-10 business days
Sorry for the nerdy rent, you’re amazing, bye
this also makes my brain buzz! like this became a literary device in and of itself, because i knew that the majority of readers would read that scene and ride the wave of emotions into a slow crash of confusion, and it's supposed to be confusing, you're supposed to be unsure and scared, nor sure who to cry over and who is alive and who isn't, not knowing who to trust (me, in this scenario), and just getting a tiny, tiny taste of something the characters have felt before—and not just them, but, namely, the hallows.
the hallows have always been a thinly veiled sort of mirror to the readers, and me to the various gamemakers/riddle/albus, and it really kind of draws on this perception of like. hallows trust riddle, mostly, and many from the order trust albus. sure we see the povs of people who don't, bc where even would the story be without them, but the mass majority do trust albus and riddle, depending on the side they were on, and in that scene you have riddle betraying his own people by 1) murdering brutally in a way they've never seen before, and 2) killing his own people when that's revealed, while you have albus betraying his own people by 1) requiring them to sacrifice so blatantly when given the opportunity to save people, and 2) immediately rendering that obsolete when it's his brother and essentially breaking the trust he's instilled as a leader to prioritize the war/winning the war.
and in that same scene, you have me, blatantly and textually killing people i have promised i would not, as far as you know. the amount of people ive seen who didn't even doubt me for one second is...baffling to me. like, 1) never trust a man—i didn't let you down this time, in this regard, but someday i Will fail—and 2) there was absolutely NO textual evidence to suggest that those people weren't the characters they're presented as, and the ONLY indication given that it wasn't was trust in me. that's insane.
sorry, but im. very fucking blown away by this, and by actually getting to DO it. it was fun <3
tbh dunno how to quite use tumblr yet but hihihi im bea and i love marauders and taylor swift and other fun stuff be my friend!!! please!!! im so very desperate!!!
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
